Miss March, Playboy, Playmate, coma, research

Discussion (18) ¬

  1. Ravnos
    Ravnos

    I don’t know if I would go so far as to say Maxim and Playboy are that much alike. Maxim’s articles are much more crass, as is the overall tone of the mag. Jokes aside, the articles in Playboy are actually fairly good, or at least they were back when I read it. It was actually the only part of the magazine worth paying for. There’s certainly much better pornography out there, so buying Playboy for the three short pictorials per issue filled with incredibly heavily airbrushed/photoshopped women who don’t really show much doesn’t seem like a good value proposition if all you care about is, well, you know.

    • Tom
      Tom

      I used to really like Maxim for the jokes and the captions they would throw into photos. Yeah, they’d have a pictorial of some hot, young starlet. But after a while, it felt gratuitous. At that point, you might as well kick in the extra buck and buy Playboy.

  2. sorcerermickey

    >>”… I didn’t have the nerve to go to a magazine shop and to one.”<<???
    You were in college and didn’t have the nerve to go to a magazine shop (like, say, 7-Eleven)?

    • Tom
      Tom

      Ah, typos. My bestest friend.

  3. kit
    kit

    Rented Speed Racer this pass week cuz no one at the time wanted to see it in theatres with me. And now i am kicking myself for not going by myself!
    since i rented i have watched it three times! Three Times!!! i love this movie so much!
    its really a shame that it didn’t do well cuz i would have kinda have liked to have seen a sequel but o well.
    and as for your cliche playboy story mine is about the same except my friend was a year younger, and his dad also had Penthouse; which just seemed really dirty when i was kid.
    glad to see that watchmen is probably going to fade away. i didn’t like the movie at all. some parts were ok but not enough for me to want to sit around for almost three hours to see them again. i have two buddies who loved the film but they can’t explain why. So im chalking it up to “Lets love the movie just to spite our friend who doesn’t” well shame on them. Shame!

  4. Mr. Allen
    Mr. Allen

    Underboob. Heehee!

    I like that term. I’m going to make more liberal use of that one.

    In all seriousness, I only ever bought one porno mag. It felt like a glorious waste of money when the internet is full of all the free porn in the world. Of course, much like Tom, I found my first one at 8 as well. I lived in a dirty trailer park (quite literally) and found one in the snow. I spent a lot of time outdoors that day.

    Of course, at that age, we didn’t have computers and net access the same way we do today. Once I was a teen though, i couldn’t see spending $7 a mag for porn when a high speed internet connection was $50 a month, and I could look at port, play games, watch movies, etc.

    Well, that, and for Christmas on my 16th birthday, my grandparents gave me a bag of porno mags. You should have seen the look on my mother’s face. I think she was even more embarrassed because it was HER parents. What a great Christmas. Apparently I had been REALLY good that year. =D

    It’s hard to believe that was 10 years ago now… wow does the time fly…

  5. Relaxing Dragon
    Relaxing Dragon

    Miss March is one of those movies where I’ll chuckle at the trailer whenever it plays, and have a Futurama marathon when it’s actually released. That is to say, it’s not on my radar (in fact, things are a bit dry for me until State of Play and Crank 2 hit theaters). But I’m sure I’ll pause on it at some point in the future when it’s replaying late-night on Comedy Central.

    Watchmen may not have shot ahead at the box office, but it’s still not a failure. Domestically it’ll still pass 100, maybe end at 120. With International it’ll get back the rest of it’s costs and then some, and DVD sales will help too (I can’t imagine the Director’s Cut not being released, what with so many looking forward to it, some even waiting for the DVD (though thankfully not on a Grindhouse level)). Considering the tough sell the movie is, I think that’s about as good as it ever could hope to do, and that’s still pretty good (it just happened to be in the shadow of the runaway successes of Iron Man and TDK).

    • Tom
      Tom

      Dragon, I’m not so sure it’s the shadow of Iron Man or Dark Knight that prevented Watchmen from finding its place in the sun. At this point, I kind of blame Warner Bros. for attempting to turn a niche film INTO a blockbuster like those two.

      I think if they had concentrated on the story instead of the visuals and kept the hype to a minimum, a $56 opening weekend in March would have been something to be proud of. Put your focus on the target audience. Make it a cult film. Instead, they tried to make it a movie for everyone. Ultimately, I think that’s why it failed.

  6. Lonnie
    Lonnie

    Is it awful that I kind of wish it cut to the Tom and Jared “doing research” in a library looking at the dewey decimal system instead of them sitting next to each other “doing research” with boners?

    • Tom
      Tom

      Lonnie, that’s actually a really good punchline! But how does one illustrate a couple of guys thumbing through index cards at the library and use that to communicate “research?” Hmm… I’ll have to think about that.

      Danielle, I didn’t put any particular thought into which Playboy covers I chose other than what was readily available and inoffensive. I knew I wanted to at least use something that was a few years old, though – as to imply that maybe they were breaking in to their Dad’s stash, or something.

  7. Kieran

    Oh man, how I’ve missed punchlines like these XD

  8. FilmBuffRich

    I’m just enough of an old fart that when I saw the first ad for MISS MARCH I thought, “Wow, they made a movie out of the J Giles Band song ‘Centerfold’!”

  9. Danielle
    Danielle

    Long time reader, first time commenter – I just had to say “well done” on the Sherilyn Fenn cover 🙂 She’ll forever by Audrey Horne and Helena to me.

  10. Relaxing Dragon
    Relaxing Dragon

    Well I’m not saying it being in the shadow prevented it from going bigger, merely that it will be closely compared to them (in terms of recent comic book movies), and been seen as a failure compared to them. When it’s not.

    With Synder, he’s a very visual director, so I doubt the movie could’ve been toned down in that department. And I just don’t get the hype thing, probably since all I ever see about a movie before it’s released is the trailer and the occasional comment on some message boards (ignoring the boards on imdb, which I consider No Man’s Land). Being the adaptation of what is widely considered the best graphic novel ever made, it was bound to be hyped up into something solely from the comic crowd arguing over whether it’ll be good or not (a never-ending argument, it seems). And no studio (at least one the size of Warner Bros.) sets out to make a cult movie, it just isn’t business friendly. They had a movie based on the aforementioned book, and they tried to get as much as they could out of it. And they did it by trying to make it for everyone (at least, made it look like it was for everyone). And like I said, it didn’t set any records (beyond largest screen opening for an R rated film), but it wasn’t a failure.

    And yet, I keep seeing it touted as a failure. It’s like it’s turning into (financially speaking) Waterworld (another movie that, despite what people keep saying, didn’t actually flop).

  11. vaguelee
    vaguelee

    It’s nice to see debate about watchmen being more mature than “OMG look at all the penis!!”

    However I am getting tired of people A: Not respecting opinion in the matter and B: Pretending to be insiders by judging things like grosses and numbers.

    We’re fans. Not professionals. Our opinions will differ. And whether we agree or not no matter how much complainging on the net we do, it will most likely not even blip on the radar of the fat cats who actuallly make these decisions.

    K.I.S.S. review: I liked the movie. It had faults and could have been better executed but I reacted the way I did in the source story. ” OMG they realy went there!” And the superhero deconstruction and right of the individual and right for the masses debate was intact.

    • Tom
      Tom

      vaguelee, I see where you’re coming from. No, we’re not professionals. But, also, the numbers don’t lie. And while the data can be manipulated to a degree, if you look at past trends and compare them to what Watchmen was able to accomplish… well, it was a bit underwhelming.

      If people enjoy Watchmen, I don’t begrudge them. I’m not trying to convince them it’s a bad movie. But I am at least trying to make them a little more suspicious of marketing and the lengths studios will go to package and promote a movie for the masses when said actions ultimately end up hurting the film.

      Like I said before – if the emphasis were placed on the story and not the visuals, Watchmen would have been a sleeper hit. Instead, they weighed it down with hype. When it didn’t leave a very big ripple, people start looking at it sideways.

      Postscript: I also understand what you’re saying about our complaining not having an effect on the fat cats who actually make the decisions… but I don’t think that’s true. The internet is the world’s largest water cooler. People trade gossip and opinions at light speed out here. An opinion about a movie can been made even before it hits screens. So while our complaining might not change a film in production, it can certainly alter the way a film is marketed to it’s audience.

      If the studios aren’t taking the temperature of the internet at least once a day, they’re fools to ignore it. Where else can you get a steady stream of consumer opinion and feedback? In the old days, they’d do a test screening or two and that was it! The rest of it was flying blind!

  12. vaguelee
    vaguelee

    Tom, good points. i was kind of on backlash mode after some heated debates at the theater were I work and said the argument I thought of when I sat down here. I do agree with what I said but I am glad to have a place here to get these things out to people who think. Keep up the good work

  13. KP
    KP

    Weird. I thought my family was the only one that went to Springfield for Spring Break…

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