Suffering By Comparison

Many years ago (1993, to be precise) I saw a movie called Tombstone, starring Kurt Russell and Val Kilmer, based around the notorious gunfight at the OK Corral (the subject of about a billion Westerns, back in their heyday). The following year, another movie came out with a similar setting, Wyatt Earp, starring Kevin Costner and Dennis Quaid... And today, I had the misfortune of watching it for the first time.

Actually, that's unfair. It's not a bad movie but, while the former went for a contemporary take on the Hollywood Western, this film almost seems to think it's a biopic. On TV (with ad breaks) its running time is over three hours, and yet it strives to fit everything in (and I mean everything) by picking certain events, and spending huge amounts of time playing them out in as much detail as possible without dealing with every single moment of Wyatt Earp's life. Setup for the infamous confrontation commences about halfway through, but it still manages to avoid getting exciting.

Part of it, I suspect, is that Kevin Costner has never managed to be as engaging a lead as Kurt Russell, or Val Kilmer... or, making matters worse, his co-star Dennis Quaid. The biggest problem, for me, was that it just tried to cram so much in, there was no real time for character development. One minute, Wyatt's a precocious teenager proposing to his sweetheart, next he's grief-stricken and in the gutter, mugging people to get by, next he's been deputised. Event after event after event, with little to show how or why the man found himself in those situations.

Dennis Quaid's turn as Doc Holliday is very different to Val Kilmer's clownish interpretation... I'm really not sure which I prefer. On the one hand, Quaid's more sombre take is rather more commanding (not a good thing when playing opposite Costner), but Kilmer's was more entertaining. Each fits their movie, I guess...

If it came down to moustaches, Tombstone wins by a mile. Of facial hair.

I've been experiencing a bit of a slump lately... Last week got off to a good start, but then basically collapsed into ennui... But then, today, I managed to bash out two fairly quick drawings... And they turned out really well. Both are intended to eventually become part of a T-shirt design... but, based on the way that little sideline is going, it'll probably just sit around doing nothing, even if I complete all the pictures.

It's nice to find that my sketching is becoming surer - less erasing - but it seems my inking isn't getting much better. That said, that's as much to do with the quality of paper I'm using as it is the steadiness of my hands... Plus, a 0.1mm pen I bought recently doesn't seem significantly finer than my usual 0.7mm...

That might be something to do with my hands, particularly my habit of putting too much weight on a pen... It does look as though I may have damaged the nib...