Posts Tagged ‘apology’
4 items.
It’s amazing what one little apology can do to stop someone dead in their tracks, isn’t it? Now that Cami got the two little words she wanted from Charlie, have her defenses fallen? Will we learn the reason she’s back in town? Yes, we will! And sooner than later, I might add. Keep a close watch this week kids. We’re entering the third act!
Regrettably, I didn’t get a chance to see any of the movies that I wanted to see this weekend. So I suppose that means Sideways and Million Dollar Baby will have to wait for another day.
I can’t explain it. My Sunday was wide open. I didn’t even have chores to do. The weather was fair. No obstacles. I guess I was just plain lazy. But everyone needs a day where they don’t do anything, right? I just wish I hadn’t sat around watching all those back-to-back episodes of I Love the 90’s: Part Deux and The Surreal Life on VH1. My brain feels like mush.
I’m not sure if it’s all the time I’ve been spending indoors lately or if this is just a defense mechanism to fight of Seasonal Affective Disorder, but I’m getting the itch to redesign the site.
There are a lot of things about the site that I like and that are working well from the front end. On the back end, however, it’s a totally different story. Most of the changes involve me organizing files to they’re easier to locate when I want to make changes. Right now it’s like that ball of Christmas lights from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. It’s a little unwieldy.
Recognizing that what I want to do isn’t a face lift, but reconstructive surgery. I’m tempted to strike the design we have now in favor of something new. And as much as I feel that the site is mine and I can do with it whatever will satisfy me creatively, I have to admit that I’m curious as to what you guys think.
So my idea is this – a little market research. I want to know what you guys think, but I want to organize the feedback in some way. I’m looking for a good third party FREE survey organization that I can use to create a brief Q&A survey for the site. I’m interested in your thoughts on design just as much as I’m interested in our demographics and what monitor resolution you’re viewing the site at.
So if you have any in-roads to such a program or vendor, let me know. I’m interested in getting this off the ground pretty soon. It will help me determine if the sketches I have for the new site design will be worth bringing to digital fruition or not!
Thanks!
[ No Comments ]
I wish I could figure out what you guys found so endlessly fascinating about Hillbilly Jeff. If I could bottle it up and sell it, I would! You guys encouraged me to take what was otherwise a throw away character and devote an entire week to his development. I don’t know that we’ve learned anything more about Jeff, exactly. Well, except that he appears to live in an outhouse. But it was a fun journey all the same, wasn’t it? I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. It was a real treat to read your comments this week and egg me on with your theories about Jeff’s activities and Tom’s dependency on them. Since there’s not much movie-wise to talk about this weekend, it was a nice little break.
Really, there’s nothing on my radar until Spider-Man 3 comes out on May 4. The only high-profile movie between now and then is Nicholas Cage in Next and that holds no interest for me. Can someone please explain to me his increasingly bizarre choices in wigs these days?
I’ve got my comic for Next in the can, but beyond that, I don’t know what movies I’m going to cover next week. I hope I don’t end up burnt out, truthfully. I’m participating in the 24 Hour Comic Challenge this weekend, so it’s very possible I might be completely tapped for ideas when it’s all over!
I ended up deciding on doing a personal story about Cami, myself and Henry’s introduction to the work for my 24 Hour Comic Challenge project. It will be something personal that Henry can look back on someday. I just hope that I can keep the quality consistent enough where he doesn’t look at it and say "You were a semi-professional cartoonist for 5 years? It shows, old man!" before he immolates it with his ray gun. I’m calling it simply "2006" because that really sums it up. 2006 was a turning point year for the two of us. We made a lot of big decisions, a lot of cool things happened to us and we ushered in 2007 with a new baby boy. It doesn’t get much better than that and I want to celebrate it.
There will be some exposition stuff. I’ll talk a little bit about how Cami and I came together as a couple and why we waited 7 years to start trying to concieve. I don’t want to make it sound more dramatic than it is. We were basically selfish. There were things in our lives we wanted to do first and that’s what the first act will probably be about. The second act, of course, will be the pregnancy. The third act, the birth.
I have all of this in my head right now. At some point, I need to sit down and type an outline. Otherwise, I’m going to be totally lost once we start working on hour 18 of the competition. I’ll need a road map and pleanty of references. I told Cami I would probably be calling her a lot on my cell phone to make sure I have dates and stuff right.
It’s my fantasy to turn this into a mini-book that I could sell on the site for cheap. Probably no more than $5 depending on the quality. I might give it the full-color treatment and take it to Comixpress and have it printed up proper. Or I might keep it in black and white and make Xerox copies that I staple together myself. Y’know, INDIE STYLE!
What do you guys think? Is that something that interests you? Is it something you would buy?
That’s all for the week. Thanks again for all the encouragement on the Hillbilly Jeff arc. I don’t know when he’ll be back again, but it may be sooner than you think!
Have a great weekend, everyone!
[ No Comments ]
Sorry for the delay on Friday’s comic. I posted earlier about the business trip I was on in Columbus Tuesday through Thursday. My flight came in late Thursday night and I didn’t have an opportunity to draw anything during the day because I was, y’know, working. And instead of doing the comic in the evening, I opted to spend it with Henry and Cami instead. Can you fault me? Anyway, better late than never.
When Cami and I started to see trailers for I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry in theaters a few months ago, Cami said she was interested. Mostly because her default setting is to give any Adam Sandler movie the benefit of the doubt. I’ve talked about it on the site before, but Cami is a die-hard Adam Sandler fan – which makes no sense if you know her at all. She’s normally a very intelligent and reasonable woman.
Personally, I kind of outgrew Sandler’s antics after I graduated college. Or I guess I became less forgiving of his faults. That’s not a slam against the Sandman or anyone who enjoys his brand of comedy. He’s clearly a very sweet person, charming and affible. I’m actually quite fond of his policy never to give print interviews after once being burned by Entertainment Weekly. But as far as the movies go… they’re just not very good. Mr. Deeds? Awful. Click? Tried too hard to be It’s A Wonderful Life and couldn’t pick a direction.
The Sandler movies that I’ve liked are those where he takes his man-boy persona and redirects it into more emotionally unstable territory. I loved Punch Drunk Love despite it’s obtuseness. I thought Reign Over Me was one of the more interesting movies of the first half of the year. Even Spanglish put a neat twist on things – even if I couldn’t stant Tea Leoni’s character.
Kevin James from The King of Queens is also in Chuck and Larry and I like him a lot, too. He seems really easy going and a lot of fun. As a matter of fact, there are A LOT of actors I like in this movie. Dan Aykroyd, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi… So what’s the problem? Sorry, but the premise is just too hack sitcom-y. Kevin James’s character loses his wife in an accident. So in order to secure pension benefits for their future if something should happen to him on the job, he enters a “domestic partnership” with Sandler, his co-worker and best friend, to defraud the city. Wackiness ensues – mostly at the expense of the notion that the thought of two dudes rolling around together is funny. Are their movies by gay filmmakers that play heterosexuality for laughs? Like, a lesbian and a gay guy have to play it straight (no pun) in order to pull the wool over someone’s eyes?
Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be so critical. After all, I’ve used Victor there in the last panel several times as a comedic foil, constantly reusing his attraction to Tom as a punchline. But I guess I feel like I’m somewhat exempt from that kind of self-analysis because the joke isn’t really on Victor – it’s on Tom because he’s so clueless about it. Everyone else seems to know Victor has a thing for Tom, but Tom thinks Victor just wants to beat him up and throw him out of the theater.
Maybe I should shut up now.
I guess the big question that crops up in my mind about Chuck and Larry is that James’s character doesn’t have any female friends he can go to that will help him out with the pension problem? It’s more realistic. People marry for convienience all the time. Whether it’s to get a green card, tax benefits or whatever. Truthfully, you probably could have made a more emotionally resonant movie with that set up. What if James and his female friend end up falling for each other. Or, what if, at the end of it, James’s character discovers that he’s really gay after all! That would be a twist.
I realize that there’s no point complaining about it. The movie has been made. It just seems kind of cheap to take what feels like a discarded Three’s Company episode and stretch it out into a two-hour movie.
But maybe that’s just me.
[ No Comments ]
I had a pretty productive weekend of movie-going. Between seeing District 9 and The Time Traveler’s Wife on Friday, I thought I was rounding things out nicely by seeing The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard on Sunday afternoon.
How wrong I was.
I think I must have been suckered in by the idea that Jeremy Piven was going to deliver something similar to the lovable cad he placed in PCU, but that didn’t really happen. It’s not really Piven’s fault. He slathers on the oily charm and is relatively winning in his performance.
And it’s not as if The Goods isn’t a funny movie. There are some genuinely inspired bits in the movie.
I think the problem is that The Goods is basically 20 good jokes looking for a plot. The conflict is contrived, the potential girlfriend is cliched… There just isn’t any connective tissue to this thing. It basically barrels through it’s running time trying to shock and offend you into laughter enough times that you won’t notice how lazy all of it is.
And it’s a shame, because there is some amazing comedic talent in this movie – Piven, Tony Hale, Will Ferrell, David Koechner, Ed Helms, Ken Jeong, Kathryn Hahn, Rob Riggle, Craig Robinson… the list goes on. I feel like everyone pretty much did their best with what they were given. But much like the lead character, the movie itself is kind of a con.
As for the other films I saw this weekend, I really liked The Time Traveler’s Wife, but I am convinced the Rachel McAdams is on a mission to make everyone in America cry by 2013. Between this movie and The Notebook, if you don’t tear up even a little… you’re soul dead.
In regard to the time travel elements of the story, Owen Gleiberman at Entertainment Weekly compares the movie to a game that the audience learns to play and it takes a little while to get the hang of it. But the story asks some interesting questions about free will and the forces of attraction.
Cami read the book and complained that the left a lot of details out, but admitted it was a long book and not all of it would have worked in the context of a film.
I was unfamiliar with the source material, but found the movie to be highly resonant and enjoyable. Both of us admitted to thinking about the movie days after we had seen it, despite some of the problems it may have had.
Lastly, District 9. What else can I say about this movie but “wow?”
If you’ve been interested in this film at all, you’ve probably read some of the reviews. A lot of people have been reacting very positively. But I would say that it’s in danger of being oversold just a little bit.
That’s not to say that the movie isn’t effective. Quite the contrary. It’s a very solid sci-fi / action movie. But so many critics have been calling it a masterpiece, I think they’ve lost a little perspective.
The first act is phenomenal. Shot in a documentary style, director Neill Blomkamp goes to great lengths to establish a believable alternate reality where extraterrestrial refugees parked their mother ship over Johannesburg, South Africa 20 years ago.
The aliens, rounded up inside a shanty town called District 9, makes obvious allusions to apartheid. When crime runs rampant in the slums, the general populace has had enough and a large corporation begins to round them up so they can move them to a tent city 200 miles out of town.
That’s where the political stuff ends. I won’t spoil what happens next, but a lot of it is action movie boilerplate. Chases, explosions, violence, gore, heroic platitudes. The whole ball of wax.
There’s some very interesting (and disturbing) Cronenberg-level “betrayal of the body” stuff going on in between the first and second act that I had a hard time stomaching. But the effects work is amazing and the CGI is nearly seamless.
I’m trying not to downplay my review. I strongly encourage all of you to see the movie. I just want you to know what you’re getting into so you don’t get your hopes too high.
District 9 is an expert film. Tightly wound and brilliantly told. Once the action kicks up, hold on to your seat – because you’re going for a ride.
But the trailers and the first act sells lofty concepts about man’s inhumanity to man (and aliens) and what ethic boundaries we will overlook in the pursuit of power and money. Just don’t expect these kind of quandaries throughout, and you’ll be fine. In fact, you’ll be better than fine. You’ll really enjoy yourself.
SIDEBAR: Tonight’s episode of The Triple Feature I think will be really good. I know between the three of us, we were all kind of surprised by the quality and diversity of films showing up in August this year. Normally August means back-to-school and that means you’re not treated as well at the multiplex as the studios try to shuffle off inferior product. But so far, I’d say things are shaping up nicely. So we should have a lot to talk about tonight at 9:00 PM CST.
Be there to listen to it live! We’ll see you then!
[ 11 Comments ]
