It’s not often that my little movie-centric corner of the internet crosses paths with vapid pop music, but I thought this was a prime opportunity to bring Truman out of the doghouse. I mean, c’mon… Sexyback? SexyBARK?! Genius!!

Even though I’m excited about this comic and find it both adorable AND hilarious, as I was drawing it I kept thinking to myself "Mitch Clem is totally going to disown me as a friend." Incidentally, Mitch is counting down his Top Five Albums of 2006 over at Nothing Nice to Say. There, a little plug makes up for all the bad taste in the world. Right, Mitch?

I think the idea of casting someone like Justin Timberlake in a movie like Alpha Dog is kind of laughable. It’s basically a movie kind of like The Outsiders where rough-and-tumble street kids who are vaugely attractive and sensitive get in over their heads. It’s The Outsiders, but with more felonies.

Justin Timberlake signing up for the production is stunt casting at work. The guy is as scandal-free and as exciting as Pat Boone eating a mayonnaise sandwich. A movie like this is an opportunity to play against type, stencil on a bunch of tough-looking prison tattoos and do a lot of sit-ups. I guess there was some heat around this movie when it premiered back at Sundance at this time last year, but I think the hype window has since been closed shut. I don’t know anyone interested in seeing this.

Monday night’s inaugural broadcast of The Triple Feature was a resounding success. In case you aren’t familiar, Joe Dunn from Joe Loves Crappy Movies, Gordon McAlpin from Multiplex and myself are getting together every Monday night at 9:00 pm CST to talk for an hour about movies, comics and pop culture. On Monday’s show we discussed Children of Men, Indiana Jones 4 and the proliferation of aging action stars and, finally, the movies we’re most excited to see in 2007. If you missed the broadcast, you can download a copy for yourself here. Check it out. It’s only an hour long and I thought the time went by really fast. I feel that Joe, Gordon and myself have great chemistry and I feel it’s very unique that the three of us being having the highest-profile of creators within our particular web comic sub-genre can get together like this and exchange commentary like this for the benefit of our fans.

Be sure to join us next Monday at 9:00 pm CST when the three of us will be discussing the Golden Globes as well as Mike Judge’s follow up to his cult hit Office Space – Idiocracy – and how it was totally mishandled by it’s distributor. We didn’t get an opportunity to take any calls our first time out, so we’re restricting the topic list to make room for more of your live feedback. Be sure to participate!

A couple more pieces of site news. You might have noticed that I added a few social bookmarking links to the bottom of the blog. They’re links to del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Comicne.ws and Digg, respectively. Feel free to use them or ignore them, but I got the idea to add them when I started to see more referral hits from StumbleUpon. I figured if there are people out there interested in helping to spread the word about Theater Hopper, I’ve want to give you the tools to do so!

Also, I left a blog about my use of the mailing list and how I had resolved to send out a message every time the site was updated. I was discouraged when I would see people drop off the list literally minutes after I send these messages and I wondered what I had done to offend them! I got some really good feedback from that post, many people replying and explaining that they check the site daily anyway and the extra updates are kind of a nuisance.

So how about this for a compromise: Instead of sending you three e-mails a week that detail the site updates, I send you ONE e-mail a week at the end of the week that recaps everything? If you haven’t been to the site in a while, it’s a good way to get caught up all at once. If you come to the site every day, it’s a nice little reminder that might prompt you to check out Monday’s comic a second time, but I’m not cluttering up your inbox?

Sound like a deal? Let me know in the comments below!