Posts Tagged ‘title’
7 items.
Feb05
Today’s strip was pretty much word-for-word a conversation I shared with my wife Cami a few days ago. Quite sweetly she asked if we could see How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days when it opened on Friday. Equally sweet, she butchered the name of the movie almost as badly as depicted in the comic.
My line of reasoning is as follows: If you don’t care enough to correctly say the title of the movie, then obviously, on some level, you know this will be yet another round of disposable Hollywood crap you will dump from your long term memory the minute you step out of the theater.
I mean, I wasn’t begging anyone to see The Lord of the Necklace.
Please note that our entire exchange was in pure jest. No venom was exchanged. No hurt feelings to nurture.
All the same, we’re not seeing that damn movie. Cami says we are.
We’re not. (Yes we are–Cami)
Anywho, flicks like these usually leave the door wide open for satire. In coming up with the concept of today’s strip, I developed no less than 3 possible jokes.
The first joke had something along the lines of Cami wanting to see How To Lose A Guy… and with me responding that one sure-fire way to lose a guy was to drag him to chick flicks with unnecessarily long titles. This idea failed to catch fire.
The second joke had more to do with the source material. Some of you may not know this, but How To Lose A Guy… is actually based on a comedic self-help book featuring stick figures (no, I am not making this up). The punchline for this joke would have been how casting the actress to play the girl stick-figure was very difficult, but in the end, the role went to Kate Hudson. In the third panel, I would have drawn a painfully skeletal Hudson boasting how she weighs less than a paper clip. In the last panel, a very disgruntled Laura Flynn Boyle would be lamenting the loss of the part due to the accidental ingestion of some lint a few weeks ago while sleeping.
While everyone knows that anorexia jokes are like money in the bank, I had to go with the third treatment as illustrated above because, ultimately, it would earn me brownie points with the missus.
And there you have it.
In a completely unrelated story, Tuesday saw the return of some unusually high traffic to the site. Typically when this happens, it means that someone who is a big shot in the community and has immeasurably more talent in their little pinky than I have in my entire body has linked to me from their front page. I checked my referral logs, and lo and behold, I was getting a boat-load of hits from Carrington over at Movie Punks.
I about fell out of my chair when he detailed in his blog the amount of mail he had been getting concerning the spoiler warning I posted on Monday If there is anyone out there who seriously thought I was ripping him off, please stand up so we can all point and laugh at you. I mean, honestly…
I think Carrington summed it up best when he posed the question how anyone else would tip off their readers to spoilers in their strips. There’s really no other way around it. And it wasn’t like I didn’t fess up in the first two repentance of my blog that this was a trick I pulled from the big C.V. I gave credit where credit was due, by Jove.
I’m not trying to make mountains out of molehills. I just thought it was really funny and wanted to say thanks to Carrington for coming to my defense.
He redefines the term “good people”.
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Apologies that I left you high and dry without the blog I promised you yesterday. I thought I could get it done in the morning before I went to work, but I was thrown a curve ball when Cami woke up with a crazy eye infection. She was a little paranoid about handling Henry because she didn’t want to pass the infection onto him. So I ended up calling in late to work, managing Henry until I could take him to his 6-month check up at 9:00 AM. I pretty much spent the rest of the day catching up.
But better late than never right? I wanted to jump back in here to give you my thoughts on Shoot ‘Em Up, which I saw last Sunday.
I’ve had a few days to digest the movie and I still really like it. The movie is what the title implies – a full-throttle action movie with an hour and a half of gunplay. A shoot ’em up. As cliche as it is to say so, this movie comes barrelling out of the gate and doesn’t let up. It’s pretty much nothing but back to back action sequences.
Clive Owen plays Smith, a mysterious carrot-chomping gunhand. A kind of new-millennium Bugs Bunny in flesh in blood. Lots of blood. In the opening sequence he protects a pregnant women from a gang of gun-toting hoods in black leather. Within five minutes, he crams a carrot into the mouth of one of the aggressors and shoves it through the back of his skull. Later, after helping deliver the baby, he severs the umbilical cord at point blank range.
That level of cartoonish, over-the-top violence is Shoot ‘Em Up’s trademark. Either you recognize that and go along with it or you’ll be frustrated by the number of action movie cliches the movie piles one on top of the other. But if you’re in on the joke, Shoot ‘Em Up is one of the best action movie parodies of all time. Due in no small part to Clive Owen, who plays it completely straight.
The only time the movie falters is when it attempts to add plot or character motivation to the proceedings. This is weird for me because, typically, movies I don’t like generally don’t give enough focus to these integral aspects of movie making. Here’s a film that I think would be better served if they did away with them altogether!
I don’t need to know the grand political conspiracy behind Clive Owen’s motivation to keep the baby safe. I don’t need to know that his character was the son a British gunsmith who moved to America in the 1960’s, was a crack shot, recruited into the Army and trained by Black Ops. Who cares? Half of the stuff he does in the film is physically impossible anyway, so why try to contextualize it with any sense of believability?
I usually bristle at movies that ask you to switch your mind off and "enjoy the ride." It contributes to the dumbing down of our culture when we don’t ask for more from our media. But I’m completely willing Shoot ‘Em Up slide because any attempt to add shading or complexity only slows it down. It works much better as a parody. In some ways, I’m disappointed it didn’t go further!
At any rate, that’s my reaction to the film. If you have a lazy Sunday, I suggest checking it out. I’d didn’t do great at the box office last weekend, but I have a feeling that this movie is going to be huge on DVD – a cult classic. Check it out on the big screen while you still can.
New comic tomorrow! See you then!
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I can’t tell you how long I agonized over how to write this strip. I think I came up with 5 or 6 different treatments and felt like the “silly name” approach was the least complicated. For example, I read a review for Quantum of Solace that said it had another parkour chase sequence similar to what was in Casino Royale and I was trying to find a way to make a joke out of that. No dice.
So I ended up racking my brain trying to come up with a Bond parody title that wasn’t a direct reference to either Quantum of Solace or any other Bond film like Dr. No or Goldfinger. It was really hard, for some reason. I was bugging Cami about it. I even turned to the people following me on Twitter. At one point Cami said “You’re putting WAY too much thought into this” and she was right. But my mind was on a loop and I couldn’t get out.
This is where it would be extremely advantageous to be part of some kind of comedy-writing team. You could take a completely terrible idea and bounce it off of others until it became completely medicore idea. Hey, it works on MadTV.
I made a joke about Quantum of Solace earlier in the year and really wanted to use the line “it sounds like a math problem again” because, to me, it really sounds like one. But I’ll make due with an Ignar Bergman reference instead.
The title really isn’t a sticking point for me, though. It’s just the most obvious thing to make fun of without having actually seen the movie. First appearances count for a lot, do they not?
For what it’s worth Quantum of Solace was a title that Bond creator Ian Fleming used for a short story that was part of a collection of short stories titled under For Your Eyes Only. Of course, people recognize the title of For Your Eyes Only as that of the 1981 movie starring Roger Moore. The point is that Quantum of Solace wasn’t plucked out of thin air during some marketing meeting, but is actually a throwback to the original Fleming stories as a means to honor the franchise in a similar manner to Casino Royale in 2005.
I think that’s a good thing. Obviously stripping things down worked for them in Casino Royale. I’ve read in reviews that Quantum of Solace literally picks up right were Casino Royale left off. So they’re not taking any chances with the franchise flying off in another direction.
But, at the same time, I kind of miss the tongue-in-cheek randiness of the Roger Moore era. I mean, Octopussy is actually a very terrible title, but it’s also very evocative. Not so grim and serious. I guess I just find it interesting how Bond continues to reflect the tone of society throughout the years. Daniel Craig’s version is much more angry and self-destructive. I’ve read a few articles that explore that as well as the wider phenomenon in modern action movie that don’t project the ideal of physical strength and brutality like they did in the 80’s. But, instead, reflect the inner torment of driven individuals. The next great war will be one of the mind. How does Bond – a relic of the Cold War – fit into that New World Order? Easy. Make him Jason Bourne.
Ooo! Snap! I WENT there!
Anyway, that’s it for me. Just wanted to encourage you guys to check out Monday’s recording of The Triple Feature. We talked about Role Models, JCVD and Kung-Fu Panda (now out on DVD) and I thought we put together a really good show. Lively discussion and hit on some great topics. Had a blast recording it and I really want you guys to check it out. You can subscribe to the podcast through iTunes as well, if you’re interested. But if you haven’t listened before, give it a try!
Later!
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It was important to me to make Tom look as cherubic as possible in the third panel to offset the twisted imagery of him chasing his Mother with a pitchfork and setting all of her underwear on fire.
For the record, this comic is not based on real life. 😉
I will maintain, however, that I think “the crazies” still sounds cute to my ears. Like “bedbugs,” or something. A gentle way of describing something disgusting or worrisome.
The Crazies comes out this weekend and I guess you could say I’m not impressed. Since the film is supposedly set in Ogden Marsh, Iowa, I guess I’m supposed to feel some cultural affinity for it. Unfortunately, there’s no such town by that name anywhere in the state. SORRY TO BURST YOUR BUBBLE, OGDEN MARSH FANS!
While it is true that the movie shot some scenes in Winterset and Lenox, Iowa (REAL towns, mind you), it doesn’t exactly trump the sense of déjà vu I get from this movie. A mysterious toxin in the water supply turns the citizens into violent psychopaths. It’s a subtle spin on the zombie genre and one I’m not really interested in seeing.
Timothy Olyphant is a draw, though. I’ve always found him to be an interesting actor and he’s pretty much earned a free pass from me after his work in Deadwood. But otherwise? The Crazies looks like another genre yawner.
Of course, take my opinion with a HUGE grain of salt because I didn’t even know that The Crazies is a remake of a 1973 George Romero flick. Clearly I am not the target audience. I think, by now, you guys know about my aversion to horror movies.
Not much else for me to say today other than I’m glad it’s Wednesday. Thanks for swinging by the site and I’ll see you here on Friday!
If you have an opinion about The Crazies or just want to yell at me for not knowing the Romero connection, fire it up in the comments section below!
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Not to sound like a complete prude, but it does kind of amaze me that Hollywood has released a movie called Kick-Ass. I ran a search for “ass” on the Internet Movie Database and while there are certainly films that have used that word as part of their title, I can’t think of a single movie as high profile as Kick-Ass to promote the colloquialism so prominently.
Even though I never read the original graphic novel on which the movie is based, I’m looking forward to the movie a great deal. The trailers make it look like colorful, sadistic fun. How ironic that the use of Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” for the marketing campaign is so much more effective than “Cherry Bomb” was for The Runaways.
Aaron Johnson plays the film’s hero. I have no idea who he is. He has a fairly extensive resume, so I assume his performance will be pretty good. Although, honestly, I’m surprised the role didn’t go to Jesse Eisenberg. I guess there wasn’t enough sensitive longing in the character.
I’ll be doing comics about Kick-Ass all week, so I don’t want to say everything I have to say about the movie right now. Right now I’m getting ready to leave for C2E2 on Thursday, so I’m also trying to work ahead on the comics a little bit.
Usually I run guest comics when I go to a convention. But I thought, for once, maybe it would be a good idea to have some of my OWN work on display for people who see me at the convention and later check out the site. First impressions and all that. I’m sure you understand.
So, needless to say, it’s going to be a busy week.
If you’re going to be in Chicago this weekend and would like to say “Hi” you can find me here using C2E2’s interactive floor map. I will be at table WC-N in Webcomics Pavilion. I’m sharing the same area as Brat-halla, Shortpacked!, Erika Moen and Lucy Knisley. So if you see any of those artists, you’re in the right neighborhood!
My friends Joe Dunn from Joe Loves Crappy Movies and Gordon McAlpin from Multiplex will be there as well and I’m really looking forward to seeing them. You should be sure to stop by their booths and say “Hi” as well.
That’s it for now. If you’re going to be at C2E2 this weekend, let me know! If you plan on seeing Kick-Ass this weekend, leave some comments and let’s talk about it!
Cheers!
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Most likely because I am an immature jerk (or possibly because I’m still riding high on puns after Monday’s comic), I kind of feel like I could have stopped after the first panel in this comic. I’ll leave it at that. I don’t want to spoil the joke for you.
Long-time readers of the comic know that this isn’t the first time I’ve explored the concept of porn parody titles. I don’t know why the idea entertains me so. I guess because it’s kind of adorably naive on the part of the pornography companies, isn’t it? Their idea is to make a movie that sounds KIND OF like the popular movie you ACTUALLY want to rent… in hopes of what? That you’re not looking closely enough? That you’re illiterate?
Or is the idea that this is as clever and self-referential as pornography gets? I don’t know. I just think it’s weird.
What’s even more weird is that this is the fifth (the FIFTH!) comic I’ve done about Kick-Ass without actually having seen the movie yet. I didn’t get a chance to check it out while I was in Chicago for C2E2 this weekend. So, hopefully, I’ll have the opportunity to see it Friday after everyone has gone to bed. Cami has no interest in seeing the film, so she won’t mind if I sneak out to watch a late showing.
Speaking of C2E2, I know I promised you my recap yesterday. It’s coming! I’m still working on it! I was working on it in between Pearl’s naps yesterday and just kept going and going and going. It’s over 2,000 words at this point, which is kind of crazy. But when you have a good experience like I had, you want to share all the details.
Stay tuned for that recap. It’s coming soon. Hopefully today.
That’s all for now! Ta-ta!
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I realize that the punchline of today’s comic is kind of specific. So if you don’t know what I’m referencing, let me introduce to Rage Guy.
What is learned cannot be unlearned.
When Fast and Furious came out in 2009, I thought it was pretty lazy marketing to simply strip the word “The” from the original title and try to convince audiences, “Hey! Brand new movie!” I didn’t really think they could get less imaginative than that.
Boy, was I wrong.
Fast Five? Seriously?
I guess at this point they’re not even attempting to attract anyone that isn’t already familiar with the franchise. Fair enough. If you weren’t already a fan of the first four movies, there’s nothing about the new one that would probably attract you to it.
I’m just trying to establish context. Free from any other references, if I saw a movie called Fast Five on the marquee, I’m not sure I would be able to reconcile what that title has to do with anything from the movie I paid good money to see.
I feel it’s not beyond reason to presume that they could end up calling the next movie “Fix” or – perhaps more likely – something equally stupid like “F-Six” or “FF6.”
I probably shouldn’t be so hard on these films. As a fan of action movies from the 80’s, the Fast and Furious films are really about as close as we get to that these days.
Keep making cars explode randomly, Vin Diesel! And Godspeed!
Any thoughts about Fast Five, Vin Diesel or internet memes? Leave your comments below!
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