If you have it in your heart, please give Theater Hopper your support over at BuzzComix. If you won’t do it because we’ve been slipping in the polls a little, at least consider voting to take a look at a incentive sketch I’m very proud of. I drew myself as the Predator! You have to see it to believe it!
So it’s been 3 days since the Oscars and the hoopla has all died down. Now that we have some distance from the glitz and the glamour, general consensus seems to be that this was one of the most BORING Oscar telecasts ever.
Don’t get me wrong, like every other geek worth his salt, I’m beaming with pride over The Lord of The Rings: The Return of The King eleven for eleven sweep. But the film purist in me cringes a little. It indicates some degree of laziness among voters. As if it was simply *easier* to hand over the statuettes to LotR for everything it was nominated in. I fear Academy members didn’t truly inspect the nominated films on an individual basis.
The problem is compounded when you consider this is less about honoring The Return of The King and more about honoring the franchise as a whole. It’s as if the Academy were applauding a bold business model instead of delivering accolades to art. I mean, whose to say if The Return of The King was any better than The Two Towers. Weren’t they all essentially ONE movie.
One movie… to rule them all?…
But it’s out of my system now. I’m onto the next thing. Such are the fickle demands of the American short attention span!
I already have my eye on Starsky & Hutch for this Friday. I’m not particularly wild about the concept. I mean, remaking old TV shows into movies died out after The Beverly Hillbillies flopped.
No, my interest is piqued because it’s being directed by Todd Phillips and I’m quite fond of his previous works Road Trip and Old School (more the latter than the former). If this picture flies, he’ll have earned himself a tidy little comedy hat trick. A rare feat for an up-and-coming director.
Besides, I hear it has a killer Will Ferrell cameo in it!
Watch this space on Friday for some Huggy Bear-style pimpin’!
Fart humor? Oh, yeah. I WENT THERE! Edgy, no?
Even when Truman is causing mischief, he’s still utterly adorable, isn’t he? Enjoy this sketch of him in quiet repose.
No rhyme or reason to today’s strip except I felt we had all gone too long without seeing Truman in action and I missed him.
Do I have any opinions about The Fog? Other than it’s an excuse to pull together too-pretty television stars for a pointless remake of a mediocre horror movie, no.
I mean, I don’t know if the remake picks up the pace at all, but the original was ponderously slow. I mean, it’s a fog for crying out loud! Run away! Buy a really strong fan and hide behind it! Not one of John Carpenter’s more inspired ideas, that’s for sure. I suppose he was trying to tap into that slow, building sense of dread like there was in zombie movies of the day. I didn’t work.
Please take this moment to visit the store and consider buying t-shirt, hoodie or baby doll tee. All three, if you so desire. After October 31, I can’t afford you the luxury any longer. Some designs will come back. Some won’t. But it’ll be the last time you’ll get your hands on ANY of them for a while.
Buy a hoodie, kids. It’s getting cold outside! Bundle up!
Also be sure to scroll up a little bit to that space between the comic and the blog and sign up for the Theater Hopper mailing list. I’m going to have some big announcements in the coming weeks and mailing list people will be the first to know! They were the first to know about the store being closed and they were the first to know about my pal Jared’s stop-motion film "A Clay In The Life" before I announce it in this space on the site!
Lastly, for you consideration – I want to present to you two options for being notified of the most current updates to the site.
First, if you have a LiveJournal account, add the Theater Hopper syndication feed to your friends list. Every time a new comic is posted, LiveJournal updates. Same goes with news posts. And you can leave comments! Instant feedback – very handy! I check for messages in there often, so go for it!
The second option is for people who don’t have LiveJournal accounts. It’s called Comic Alert! and it’s a cool little system that utilizes Theater Hopper’s RSS feed to notify you VIA e-mail when the strip updates. It’s really easy to sign up for. So if you’re interested, leave your contact information and add Theater Hopper to your favorites. In fact, to help get you started, here’s a link to Theater Hopper’s listing in the system. Leave a review while you’re at it!
Thanks, all!
I’ll admit that the idea for Ocean’s 1 through 10 as verbal confusion probably isn’t a new one and that most of you probably look at this joke like “Yeah, and?…”
But you know in the back of your mind that somewhere out there some dim-witted fella is sitting in a shack somewhere HONESTLY trying to figure out why he can’t remember seeing Ocean’s 1 through 10.
Whatever. I’m enjoying the concept of today’s comic – that Jimmy longs so hard to fit in, he tries to engage Tom with some sarcasm. But it’s just too forced. I like that Tom is kind of playing along without flat out calling him an idiot.
Jimmy isn’t really an idiot, of course. It’s just that wit isn’t his stock and trade. Being nice is what he’s best at and that’s pretty much it.
Ocean’s 13 comes out this weekend and Cami and I are excited to see it. Ocean’s 11 was a film we admire for it’s relaxed, high-polish cool. Even though most critics lambasted Ocean’s 12 as being bloated and overdone, we still enjoyed it’s Euro-trash sensibilities.
Admittedly, I was a little surprised that they brought the action back to Vegas. In this installment, Ocean’s gang isn’t out for money, but out for revenge when their financier played by Elliott Gould is muscled out of a new casino by the oily Al Pacino. So while I questioned the location as an attempt to undo what went wrong with Ocean’s 12, the revenge concept captures my attention more than if it were a straight up heist film.
I guess they managed to wrangle up David Levin and Brian Koppelman to do the screenplay. Their names might not be familiar, but they were the two writers who did Rounders – another movie about gambling with Matt Damon in it. If you haven’t seen it, check it out. Ed Norton delivers a great performance it in as well.
At any rate, seeing those two attached to Ocean’s 13 also excites me simply because Rounders did such a good job with the double crosses and the sharp dialogue. If you consider the law of diminishing returns on most sequels, it’ll probably be an appropriate shot in the arm to have these two on duty.
I don’t know if you had a chance to listen to Monday’s broadcast of The Triple Feature, but if you didn’t you missed a doozy. I think we had a great show on Monday and we really covered a lot of ground. The show went long by about 20 minutes, but not one of them was wasted. If you want to get our opinions about Knocked Up, Once, Mr. Brooks and Day Watch, go to our profile page at TalkShoe.com and download the most recent episode. Your ears will thank you for it.
Just want to give everyone the head’s up now that next Monday will be our 25th episode and we plan on celebrating by discussing the best movies of the year so far and the movies we’re most looking forward to before closing out 2007. We figured it’s just about the half-way point, so now would be a good time to do it.
We really want a lot of people to call in and give us their opinions about what movies they think have been the best so far this year. So if you want to participate, all you have to do is sign up for a TalkShoe account – don’t worry, it’s free – call 724-444-7444 about 15 minutes before showtime. It’ll ask you for the show’s Talkcast ID which is 7738 and your password – which will probably be your phone number when you create your account.
You don’t need a complicated set up on your computer to listen to the show. You can call in with a cell phone or land line if you want. But if you want to let us know that you’re interested in talking to us live, you’ll need to utilize the TalkShoe application to notify us.
If anyone is scared about how to set things up, there are tons of resources on the Talkshoe site. Or you could e-mail me at theaterhopper@hotmail.com and I’ll help walk you through it. What’s important is that we want everyone to be there. We want to spread the word and make it a big party!
In honor of the occassion, we’ve launched a MySpace page for The Triple Feature that you can access here. Friend us and we’ll send you a reminder the day of the show.
Sound cool? Cool!
That’s it for me. Have a great Wednesday!
When my good buddy Joe Dunn jumped on our mutual friend Mitch Clem’s neckbeard bandwagon with his latest comic, I really wanted to do my own neckbeard comic as well. Alas, I couldn’t make it fit within context and had to go another direction.
I was stuck for a while until I remember Run Fatboy Run was in theaters this weekend. The rest… came quite naturally.
Did you have an overweight friend in grade school? Were *you* the overweight friend? Why is it that the only weapon at their disposal is the threat of sitting on someone? Wouldn’t they have to catch you first? Oh, well.
In case you’re not familiar with the plot of Run Fatboy Run, Simon Pegg from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz plays a guy who left his fiance (Thandie Newton – once again cast as “the girl”) at the alter tries to win her back by training for and finishing a marathon. It sounds kind of like a premise for a sitcom to me. Which perhaps makes it appropriate that Friends alumnus David Schwimmer is directing. What? I know. Sounds weird to me, too.
I have hope for the screenplay, however, as it was written by both Pegg and Michael Ian Black, who you might remember from MTV’s The State or VH1’s infinite I Love The (Insert Decade Here) series.
I’m kind of thinking I need to get out of the house this weekend and see a movie. It’s been a stressful week for me. I started a new job and I’ve been sick as a dog with some kind of super-cold. I’ve been equal parts stressed out and exhausted. I need a little reward.
I don’t know if Run Fatboy Run is the kind of movie Cami would be interested in seeing. We haven’t discussed it since this is only something I’ve started to consider since I sat down to write this. But even if she takes a pass, I think I’m going to try and slip out of the house once Henry is asleep and try to go see it.
While I try to sort that out, I have something else I wanted to share with you guys.
Remember Boxcar Comics, the web comic collective I belong to? I haven’t mentioned it very often because, well, we didn’t do very much.
But now that’s changing! We have a freshly redesigned web site and we’ve committed ourselves to producing new content for our collective readers. The first offering of which is this:
That’s right! A jam comic! Pretty cool, huh?
Click on the image above to be transported to Boxcar’s first jam comic offering. I was really proud of how the whole thing turned out. Everyone really stepped up to the plate with their art and their jokes. In fact, I was completely intimidated because I had the last spot and I was seeing everyone’s work as we were progressing. All I kept thinking to myself was “There’s no way I’m going to be able to match this stuff.”
I think, in the end, I landed on my feet. But I’ll let you be the judge of that. Check it out!
Until then, have a great weekend everybody! I’ll see you here on Monday!
Today’s comic is as much about comic Tom slapping Jared for a terrible joke as it is about real-life Tom slapping himself for not coming up with a better one.
I don’t mean to be overtly critical of myself. I’m just explaining the genesis of today’s comic. Sitting around, staring into space and trying to come up with a joke about Shutter Island is no small task.
The marketing for the film has done a very good job of obscuring exactly what about Shutter Island makes it so terrifying. From what I can gather, it’s about the criminally insane, twisted experiments and some kind of psychological time bomb Leonard DiCaprio has roiling under the surface as he tries to solve a missing person case. But beyond that, I can’t connect the dots.
Added to this, Martin Scorsese directed it. Certainly the man is not above making mistakes (Kundun, anyone?) but the man gets a pass on his name alone. Scorsese lives and breathes film and it is evident in his work. It’s a rare treat to watch a film maker whose love of movie transcends money or art. Watching Scorsese’s films, you get the distinct feeling that he tells these stories because he has to. For that alone, I’ll watch anything he directs.
So how do you make fun of a movie you know nothing about directed by an auteur you greatly admire? Like I said, no small task. When the chips are down, just have your characters slap each other silly!
What do you guys make of Shutter Island? Are you excited to see it? Does it concern you at all that the film is being released in the dead-zone traditionally known as February? Would it encourage you to learn that Scorsese picked this weekend on purpose after DiCaprio’s availability pushed the film past awards season?
It was 19 years ago this weekend that Silence of The Lambs was released. If you recall, it did pretty well at the Oscars. It was the last film to earn all 5 major awards – Best Actor, Actress, Director, Screenplay and Film.
I’m skeptical that Shutter Island can repeat the same feat, but I’m excited to watch Scorsese slip on his horror boots again. If it’s anything like his last foray into the genre – 1991’s Cape Fear – then we’re in good hands.
Leave your thoughts about Shutter Island in the comments below!