There’s a world out there where people get shot more than they get paper cuts. It’s a world where alliances change, people might be out to kill you, but nothing’s ever all that big a deal. It’s just a Tuesday, and the black ops have busted into your home to end your life. Red might just be the best romantic comedy of the year featuring Helen Mirren on a piece of heavy artillery. Frank (Bruce Willis) is a former CIA agent who’s attacked in his home just when he’s close to asking out Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker), a woman he calls the Federal Pension Program help line to speak with on a regular basis. The retired don’t know about Facebook yet. He draws her into a world of former spooks who are also being targeted, including a suave gentleman (played by Morgan Freeman), a paranoid stuffed pig enthusiast (John Malkovich) and a gorgeous lady with a penchant for wet work (Helen Mirren).

A down on his luck private eye is tasked by the US government to find a very special book… the other Constitution written in secret by the nation’s forefathers and bound in space alien skin. The White House had possession of it until Richard Nixon traded it away, and the US has been sliding into a morally bankrupt abyss ever since.

Warren Ellis warned us. In a blog post dated December 8, 2009, Ellis talked about how the book and the movie were destined to be distant cousins. And as we found out in a recent visit to the film’s set, that’s not exactly a bad thing.

Simple, gritty and ready — just like the film’s title character — to kill a mothertrucker or two.

Variety is reporting tonight that the newly raised production banner Vigilante Entertainment is putting a popular Warren Ellis penned comic series into development. Black Summer, the story of a superhero team known as the Seven Guns, a group of scientist-adventurers who modified their own bodies for street-fighting in order to take back their West Coast city from a corrupt police force, criminal local government and rapacious private security forces, is set for adaptation by Knowing screenwriter Ryne Pearson. This is the second project in development this year for the legendary Ellis, who has a long line of comic credits to his name, the other being his graphic novel Red, which is currently in development at Summit Entertainment with Bruce Willis and Morgan Freeman attached to direct. Having never read Black Summer, I can only say that I dig the concept. I will leave the rest up to those of you in the comment section who have, in fact, read the series.

For the record, I resisted the urge to make a pun about Warren Ellis pulling the script for Excalibur out of a stone. Although it’s a possibility.