Posts Tagged ‘outrage’
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Usually when I’m trying to come up with ideas for the strip, I’m stuck between two worlds. I mentioned in Wednesday’s blog that on days where I don’t feel up to putting a lot of detail into the art, I at least try to compensate by presenting a topical issue or by being wordy.
Alternately, when I feel like the joke may be particularly weak, I’ll usually conjure up a little extra elbow grease to try and create something a little more visually arresting. I hope today’s strip does the trick. Forced perspective is a devious devil to charm…
As most of you know, January is a dumping ground for all the bad movies studios want to unload after blowing their wads with Oscar contenders in December. There is no grander example of shameful studio spending than the film which is the topic of today’s strip – Kangaroo Jack.
If you haven’t seen the incredibly annoying trailers, the premise is as follows. When he was a kid, Jerry O’Connell was saved from drowning by a clumsy but well-meaning fat kid. When they grow up, the fat kid comes calling to collect a favor. Somehow it involves the mafia and a big envelope of money that needs to be delivered to Australia. The money ends up lost when the fat kid throws his hooded sweatshirt around a kangaroo to pose for a picture and said kangaroo takes off – with the money inside the sweatshirt! Wacky hi-jinks ensue tracking down the beast and I’m sure at some point crocodile dung will be involved. Estella Warren tries to pretty up the place by standing quietly in the background.
I really don’t have any commentary beyond that. I think the insipid description does enough to harm the credibility of the movie all by itself. I’m just going to leave it at that.
I’m still catching flack for Wednesday’s “May/December” rant. Phil from Kenisia pointed out another generation gap in romantic casting when he pulled the Arthurian tale First Knight out of his bag of tricks. “Sean Connery and Richard Gere both trying it on with Julia Ormond in ‘First Knight’,” wrote Phil. “Connery’s old enough to be her grandad, and Gere her dad, so you’ve got a whole incestuous can of worms right there.”
He’s got me there.
While still not trumping Pete’s notice of Connery and Cathrine Zeta Jones in Entrapment (there is a 40 year difference there instead of the 35 year difference with Ormand), Phil scores points for drawing Gere into the mix. Ol’ Gerbil-Butt has a good 16 years over her. Still, not a shocking as Connery, but better than my Jason Lee/Julia Stiles comparison. Kudos to Phil.
All this talk about “May/December” romances has led me to one conclusion: Sean Connery is the man. He must still have that James Bond mojo working. Why else would a man aged 73 still be doing so well with the ladies? I’m secretly beginning to believe he really is a Highlander…
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Well, another Oscar ceremony has come and gone, and what’s to make of it? I wish I knew.
I know that the telecast was not as painful a viewing experience as I had braced myself for. I spent a lot of time before the show making sure my eye-sockets were in peak physical condition because I was planning on doing a lot of eye-rolling at bloated, self-important celebrities who derided the current war with Iraq.
But much to my chagrin, there was very little political boasting and what little there was, I couldn’t disagree with. By the end, I was practically begging someone to say something half-baked. Thank goodness for Michael Moore. If you didn’t see it, his anti-war rant and personal attacks against Bush after winning Best Documentary for Bowling for Columbine were not very well received by the audience. I would expect nothing less.
Truthfully, I felt the show, for the most part, was a tepid affair. Things were pretty much going to plan until about the last fifth of the show unraveled. Adrain Brody winning Best Actor and Roman Polanski winning Best Director both for their work in The Pianist floored me. It’s not often that I emit audible gasps, let a lone multiple gasps, but such was the case tonight.
Perhaps I was more blind-sided from their respective victories because I’ve not yet made it out to the theater to see The Pianist. This must be remedied quickly.
Cami and I have had several discussions about our reluctance to see the movie. We’ve conjured several excuses. Think of all the dozens of films you’ve seen about World War II or the Holocaust. These aren’t pleasant periods in history to visit. Given the current climate where we are experiencing these horrors in real-time, why would we subject ourselves to it as a form of “entertainment”.
Another issue in particular that bothers us is Polanski’s sorted history as a nearly-convicted rapist. The story is to convoluted to go into here, but you should investigate it if you’re not familiar with it.
Sometimes it is difficult to separate art from the artist. Considering the results are often such personal reflections of the creator, if you condemn a man for his actions, how can you not condemn his final product of expression?
That seems black and white, but I don’t feel like supporting the work of a rapist, do you?
But on the other hand, several great artists – those we would call the grand masters – were more often than not, especially horrible people during their living years. How many artists can you think of who abused their wives, were drug addicts or alcoholics. The list is nearly infinite. But if their work was sound and still capable to inspire, we look past these transgressions and even go so far to put the artists on a pedestal. Why do we need to wait for Polanski to be dead and his crimes erased from our collective memory before we can appreciate his work?
Despite the moral quandary we find ourselves in, I cannot resign myself from the fact that I will always support the arts more than the artists. And if a community of his peers felt his film was worthy enough to recognize, then I owe it myself to learn more about it. When that will be, I cannot say.
/switching gears/
Another shocker of the evening was Eminem winning Best Original Song for “Lose Yourself” from 8 Mile. I thought there was no greater long-shot in the category – especially when you consider the rapper’s notorious history and his unwillingness to perform the song at the ceremony. It was even more shocking to see the Academy actually honor the song that WAS the best, rather than some emotional clap-trap that rang false. I would have looked to U2’s “The Hands That Built America” for that one.
Beyond that, what’s left to say? I know that I wasn’t pleased to see Chicago walk away with Best Picture. It was never anything more than glossy, yet well-executed fluff to me. I think I’ll have to lobotomize that part of my brain that can’t stop replaying “All That Jazz” over and over again.
I was disappointed that Martin Scorsese didn’t walk away with something for Gangs of New York. From the looks of things, it was shut out completely. I could be wrong on that, though. I think the boat has sailed for old Marty. I’m the reasoning behind most Academy voters is, “If he didn’t win for Goodfellas, why should he win for this?” The best he can hope for at this point is Lifetime Achievement.
I was especially pleased to see Conrad Hall be awarded for Best Cinematography for Road to Perdition as well as Chris Cooper winning Best Supporting Actor for Adaptation. Both were richly deserved.
And lastly, I was especially pleased to see that Spirited Away won Best Animated Picture. This is something I can use as leverage to introduce Cami to the wonderful world of anime! Actually, I would have been please just as long as they didn’t give the damn thing to Ice Age or Treasure Planet. Blech!
That’s a lot for now. I’m certain there will be more to reflect on later. If you have any thoughts about last night’s show, feel free to share your thoughts.
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It’s been one heck of a week, kids.
As you may have noticed, Theater Hopper was down earlier in the week. This was somewhat related to our recent move to a new server. The story is on that’s pretty complicated and one I’ve been wading in up to my eyeballs, so I don’t know how keen I am on retelling it. But we haven’t talked in a while, so I’ll give it a shot.
Basically what happened was that the server move was successful, but we carried over some unwanted guests into our new environment. Dreamhost – Theater Hopper’s new host – caught them and shut us down. What kind of unwanted guests, you might ask? Hackers. They somehow compromised our old server and were using it as a proxy of some sort. Probably for warez sites. We’re not sure. What we *do* know is that some jackass thought it would be fun to leach our bandwidth, slow our server down and cause a whole lot of problems for people who only want to entertain.
At the time Dreamhost shut us down, they fingered us as guilty before even discussing it with us. That left me a little cheesed off. We’re as much a victim as anyone else here. If they had communicated what they had found, we could have partnered with them to resolve the situation faster. But that’s not how things unfolded. Instead, we had to sit on our hands for two days waiting for them to get back to us. It was a bit of a let down for me because I had heard such great things about Dreamhost. This certainly put us off on the wrong foot.
But things are up and running again and we have a new comic for you today.
I should stop to give sincere thanks to Brian for helping to facilitate the switch and talking to Dreamhost in a language they understand. Left to my own devices, I’m pretty sure Dreamhost would have gotten me kicked off the internet altogether. Also thanks to Dave for reconnecting the database that manages the comics and the blogs after the server move. I’d be dead in the water without these guys.
I’ve gotten a few e-mails asking me if I’ve noticed the similarities between my talking DVD player and Penny Arcade’s DIV. My response is "Yes. I’ve noticed them." But I would like to point out the important difference that my character wears shoes and gloves while DIV is essentially walking around naked. Okay. So my talking DVD player isn’t wearing pants, either. But gloves and shoes are better than nothing!
I tried to make my talking appliance look different from the his more well-known counterpart. But there are only so many ways to anthropomorphize small, grey rectangles of technology.
At any rate, keep your eye on this arc as we’ll probably see a cameo from DIV in the upcoming strips. Maybe a couple other pieces of talking technology as well.
As long as we’re on the subject, you should check out the incentive sketch I drew of the talking DVD player. It was the very first drawing I put together of him, plus some notes for personality traits. The whole idea is that he came to life after being disgusted by Tom’s terrible tastes in movies. So it stood to reason that he should be very tweedy and intellectual. That’s why I’m questioning whether or not he should wear spats. Cuz, y’know… spats make you look REALLY smart!
Something else I wanted to draw your attention to are the FREE COMICS you can download through my page at Clickwheel. If you have a video iPod – or heck, even if you don’t! – check out my most recent updates. I’m adding all of my incentive sketches to the site as miniature anthologies separated by month. This is the first time I’ve made these sketches available outside of the site. If you’re interested, they’re out there!
I’m going to try and keep adding sketches until I’m all caught up. After that, I’ll add more comics.
Thanks to everyone for their patience this week. One thing is for sure, I never really knew how cut off I felt until I was forced into that situation. Not having access to the site for this period of time has made me really thankful for what I have. Thanks to you guys for making that possible!
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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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This joke for The Ugly Truth is one I had in mind a couple weeks ago, BEFORE I turned my hand into hamburger with a router. So dusting it off this week makes it stale in my mind.
I know that’s not the case, though. Movies do exist in theaters for longer than one week. It’s hard to snap out of that mentality when I go to the work of making the comic timely.
Before we go any further, it would probably be advantageous if everyone were on the same page. So, embedded here is the clip in question. It is OBVIOUSLY not safe for work and probably not something you want to play around young children, either. You’ve been warned:
Now I had seen this clip maybe a month before The Ugly Truth was in theaters and I remember thinking at the time how hypocritical it was when considering Heigl’s comments back in 2007 to Vanity Fair that Knocked Up – the movie that pretty much opened the door to a successful career in film – was sexist.
Since the movie has come out, Heigl has been taking a lot of hits for those statements in contrast to the above scene. Sarah Ball from Newsweek published a particularly harsh article. Ken Levine, an Emmy-winning writer for Fraiser and Cheers also published a fairly articulate hate-piece on her.
Now Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen have gotten in on the act during an interview with Howard Stern last week.
Fans of Heigl cite a double-standard. That’s it’s okay for someone like Seth Rogen to run off at the mouth, but if someone like Heigl speaks her mind, she’s put back “in her place.”
I see both sides of the argument. But fundamentally I think Heigl’s problem is that she gives off an air of superiority that she hasn’t earned and it makes her unlikable. The sad thing is, I WANT to like Heigl. She’s funny, attractive and I appreciate anyone willing to speak their mind.
But career-wise, winning and Emmy and starring in a couple of romantic comedies aren’t much to hang your hat from. Her reputation and her performances don’t match up. She’s trying to be Sandra Bullock but comes off like Sandra Bernhard.
I don’t know how much of it is bad casting and how much of it is her choice. But I think before I would find Heigl more appealing if she were able to find (or develop) a character that plays toward her outspoken nature.
What do you think? Is there a sexist double-standard being applied to the outspoken Heigl? How aware are you of the statements she’s made to the press? Should it affect how we interpret her performances? Why do you think Heigl attracts these kind of strong feelings toward her? Leave your comments below!
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First things first, guys. I have a bit of site business to attend to.
Whether or not you’ve been following me on Twitter or Facebook and the myriad of updates I’ve posted pertaining to the matter, there has been a long-standing drama unfolding over the last few months. Specifically, I’m talking about the development of… A NEW T-SHIRT DESIGN!
Check it!
The design of this shirt has been going on for so long, I don’t even remember when I first came up with the idea for it. I want to say last Christmas. That may or may not be true.
What IS true is that I need to give a big shout-out to Joel Watson from Hijinks Ensue and Gordon McAlpin from Multiplex for helping me refine the idea. This shirt would not look at all good without their influence. If you guys know Joel at all, he is like a t-shirt making machine. He’s knows his stuff and he provided me with a lot of great art tips as well. So thanks, guys! I’ll be pestering you again real soon!
Anyway, I’m running a pre-sale on this shirt now through Friday to help me raise the funds to print up the first batch. The goal is to take this new design to Wizard World Chicago – which I will be attending – August 11 – 14.
Shirts are $12.00 and I would really appreciate it if you bought one now rather than later. Plus, don’t you want to be the first on your block to have one? Thanks, guys. You’re the coolest!
Now, onto the comic!
Despite taking all kinds of box office records and breaking them over it’s knee like dry kindling, I’m not doing a comic about Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows Part 2. I just… don’t care. Sorry, Gryffindor. I stuck it out through six moves, but totally gave up after The Half-Blood Prince. While I applaud the continuity that director David Yates brought to the series (it was sorely lacking), there’s just something about his murky style that flattened the franchise for me and made the last few movies completely unmemorable.
And for the record, no, I never read the books (please consult recent t-shirt design above). I don’t have the knowledge of the characters and events that help fill in the gaps within the movies. So, sorry. Just not my bag, baby.
I have a Harry Potter in mind for another comic, but I’m worried it won’t be timely for next week. So we’ll see what can be done about a bonus comic this week. After all, I have to keep that pre-sale up in the air, don’t I?
As for today’s comic, lots of people were steamed about Netflix’s price increase last week. I was actually sent more than one e-mail asking me to sign a petition against the company or to add my name to the disgruntled customers who are walking out on them.
I don’t begrudge these individuals their right to be mad about this situation. Certainly I am just as easily offended in other matters. But this time around?… I’m coo’ with it.
Look, even before I read the reports about how the studios were putting the squeeze on Netflix for licensing right (an estimated $2 Billion with a “B” projected for next fiscal year), I was already pretty much on Netflix’s side anyway.
Netflix is a monster of the first order. It clogs up the USPS and it sucks down bandwidth from servers like mad. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to adjust their pricing to compensate.
Yeah, nearly doubling their prices is pretty severe – and I was one of the DVD + streaming combo customers affected – but when you look at the big picture, a movie like this is necessary to keep the company afloat.
Frankly, I hope this pushes Netflix further into the realm of streaming. That’s where it’s all going anyway. Typically I’m the kind of guy that says companies should provide content in every conceivable format people expect to find it. But Netflix opened the bottle when it made streaming available. They can’t stuff it back in now and go back to mailing out discs. Not gonna happen.
So, yeah. I’m not signing any petitions. But I did drop my service package from streaming + 1 DVD to strictly streaming. And I’m okay with that.
Don’t work, folks. It’s ALLLLLL going to be okay.
SIDEBAR: Today’s comic was inspired by a Twitter conversation I had with Dustin Rowles over at Pajiba. He originally made the comment about download movies directly to one’s brain. Immediately, my thoughts turned to Johnny Mnemonic – a “cyberpunk” movie about a mnemonic courier played by (who else) Keanu Reeves with an 80 gig hard drive implanted in his head.
Man, remember the days when 80 gigs was considered to be a lot of storage? Like, an inconceivable amount of storage? Oh, 1995. You were adorable.
Fair warning, Johnny Mnemonic is horrible. Probably the worst of the mid-90’s “internet” movies that got the technology all wrong. Granted, at least Johnny Mnemonic is set in the future so they have a little wiggle room when it comes to depicting an internet built completely in Virtual Reality. It’s not like Sandra Bullock in The Net, y’know. But still… pretty bad.
Wanna taste? Here you go…
Johnny Mnemonic gets a pass from me thanks to a cameo from Henry Rollins – one of his first movie roles, I believe. And he’s as hammy and over-the-top as you would expect him to be. But I love it anyway.
I remember making a bunch of my friends watch Johnny Mnemonic when we were in high school. Not just a bunch of guys, but guys and girls together watching this awful, awful movie. BEGGING for it to be over. I’m shocked I wasn’t thrown out of the group when it was over. I’m pretty sure they all hated me at that moment.
Anyway, lots of fun for all.
Don’t forget to pre-order the new shirt and be on the lookout for another comic this week. Fingers crossed!
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