The reviews are in!

I tried out this series the other day:
I love this period in English history. I love all the back room maneuvering, the Byzantine backstabbing and jockeying, and the betrayals and betrothals that took place back then. But I didn't care for this series. My problems with it are as follows:

• All the actors and too clean and shiny. Bathing back in those days was not something people did that often.
  
• All the actors have bright clean perfectly perfect sets of teeth. Which of course is bullshit. Dental hygiene was unheard of back then and most certainly all of the people portrayed would have, when they reached the ages portrayed in this series, had yellow, or more likely, brown stained teeth. And some of then would be missing teeth as well.
• There not enough facial hair. Shaving back then was pretty hit or miss and most of the men in this show look too clean shaven.
  
• There's way too much cleavage, which don't get me wrong, I really liked seeing it but it just wasn't believable to me. Women back then were much more modest and the would not have been running around with their boobs half hanging out.
  

The show is well written and for the most part it's well acted but it's far too steeped in our modern day romantic notions of what we think it must have been like back then for it to be enjoyable to me. I was distracted by all the boobs, the clean shaven dudes, the pretty white teeth, and the lack of grunge.

I'll give the rest of it a pass.

Step Brothers is very funny and although it's also formulaic, it's also very enjoyable. It's a different kind of funny than Talladega Nights and that's a good thing.

As usual Ferrell and Reilly are very funny and so are all of the supporting cast. Mary Steenburgen as Will Ferrell's mom is really great, I love her in most everything I've ever seen her in. As good as those actors are, the movie is stolen by Kathryn Hahn who plays Will Ferrell's put upon and unloved sister in law who enters into an affair with Reilly's character. The scene where she declares her love for him and tells him she wants to roll him up in a tiny ball and keep him in her warm vagina forever is priceless, as is the scene where they get it on during Christmas dinner.

The special features on this one are fun as well. The 'making of' featurette is funny, as are the gag reel and the line-o-rama. I highly recommend this silly comedy.

One of the benefits of living so close to my local library is that I can go there pretty much anytime I want, except on Sundays during the summer because it's closed then. Another benefit is the head of my local library is a comic book geek who is also a friend and having a comic book aficionado at the helm of my library means that our local library is full of great graphic novels like the one pictured above.

I was unfamiliar with the character of The Goon so I had no expectations going in when I checked out this graphic novel. After reading it and soaking it in, I can tell you it's a fantastic story and the art is really great. It takes place during the Depression era so it makes sense that the vast majority of the art is done in a various sepia tones. The author, Eric Powell, gives you just enough dialogue to keep the story going but he relies heavily on wordless panels to get even more of the story across and those wordless panels often say more then a panel with words in it ever could.

I can't recommend this graphic novel more highly. It's really really good. And if you never read a graphic novel or think you might like to try one, then you really can't go wrong with this one.