Archive for March 8th, 2006
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From the way some people were talking about Crash’s Best Picture upset over Brokeback Mountain, looting and rioting were only moments away!
I have a deeper meditation about all of the controversy/non-controversy wrought by this ruling, but since it is late on a Tuesday night, I do not have the mental capacity to share those thoughts at the moment. I’ll be back later with some more well-composed thoughts.
A brief artistic summary of today’s comic might include the declaritive statement that it was fun to draw Tom throwing over tables. That’s something that needs to happen more often. Me likely.
Y’see? There’s that lake of mental capacity I was talking about earlier.
Something that takes ABSOLUTELY no brain power is schilling my cheesy wares. And by that I mean the t-shirts I currently have for sale in the store. TODAY IS YOUR LAST DAY TO PLACE YOUR ORDER. At midnight tonight, I am ending the pre-orders and sending everything off to the printer. Hopefully, I’ll have your shirts in stock a few weeks after that and I can ship them out to you.
I know you guys are probably strapped for cash, but if you enjoyed ANY of these designs, I strongly encourage you to order yours today. A couple of them didn’t sell as strongly as I had hoped and I’m not wholly encouraged to do another run of them in the future. I might try something different instead. So the underlying message here is "Don’t expect these designs to be around forever."
Because they won’t.
Additionally, once I conclude this run of shirts, I’m going to start focusing on a pre-sale of the Theater Hopper: Year One book. I’m collecting bids from printers at the moment and hope to have them in production soon.
Something to keep in mind on those; You get a price break the more you order and in order to make it worthwhile, you have to order a lot. Like 500 to 1,000 (and actually, that’s a very small run in the book world). As such, I’m going to have to do pre-orders until I can meet costs for the entire run and that might mean needing anywhere from 200 to 300 pre-orders in the bag before I can send the whole thing to production.
Just something to keep in mind if you’re on a budget and pinching pennies. I’m going to need everyone’s support in a big way when this goes full steam. But I’m very proud of what I’ve accomplished so far and I think you guys are going to see the value of the extra effort I put into this book.
Back on the subject of shirts, many thanks to those of you who have already placed orders. I appreciate your support!
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I made a promise to come in and talk about the controversy over Crash upsetting Brokeback Mountain for the Best Picture Oscar.
But I gotta be truthful: I’m not as upset about it as I was before.
I haven’t seen Crash, so I can’t vouch for it’s worthiness or unworthiness. But at the time when Jack Nicholson read the name of the winning film from that card, I was shocked. To me, Brokeback seemed like the more culturally relevant film. Just in terms of the awareness it brought to homosexual relationships as fully realized partnerships. Not a gimmick. Not a flamboyant supporting plot device. But just as rich and detailed as any straight love story.
I’ve heard from some people that Brokeback wouldn’t have gotten the same amount of attention if it weren’t about gay cowboys. There might be some truth to that, but I don’t think so. I think audiences are interested in well-crafted stories regardless of the main character’s sexual orientation. To me, the fact that Brokeback was about a gay couple was secondary. It’s about cowardace and not standing up for the most important things in life. It’s about caving to self-imposed and societal expectations and not having the strength to question them. You could swap out two gay characters with two straight ones and it wouldn’t have changed the overall theme of the movie – That love is hard-earned and not for the weak. The characters could be a Muslim and a Jew, a black man and a white woman or your next door neighbors. The whole "gay issue" is a non-point to me.
That said, and presuming that both Brokeback and Crash are equally well-made films (represented by their equal share of earned Oscars in technical categories), at one point I questioned if there was perhaps some kind of bias against Brokeback because Academy voters couldn’t see past the "gay issue."
I think Crash may have also had a "home-field" advantage in and of that it is a movie set and filmed in L.A. and that’s where 80% of the voting block resides. Also considering the location of the shoot was probably a touch point for voters considering that most productions are being farmed out to Canada, Australia and Prague to cut costs. Filming in their own backyard was something the voters wanted to reward perhaps as a means to encourage production to stay in Tinsletown.
But overall, you have to question if perhaps the homosexual aspect of the film was not something voters wanted to appear to endorse. It was tackled at the top of the show that Hollywood was out of touch with mainstream America. A win for Brokeback would have been a strong confirmation of that point to those critics. Why give them more ammunition?
Jeffery Wells of Hollywood Elsewhere made an interesting point about the whole thing. I quote,
"Is anyone besides me seeing the irony here…the irony that howled and flooded the skies above Los Angeles last night? The very thing that Crash laments — prejudice against people of different stripes and persuasions — is what tipped the vote and delivered the Big Prize."
It’s food for thought.
I shared that thought for a while, but I think it’s since worked it’s way out of my system. Friday’s comic will reflect that and, I think, from there we can all move forward.
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