Posts Tagged ‘awkward’
4 items.
For the record, I really don’t feel like there’s nothing to talk about in movie-land at the moment. For example, there about a hundred and one cheap shots I could take at that johnny-come-lately end of the world flick The Core coming out on Friday. But why spend all your joke money in one place? I thought it would be kind of fun to do a short strip on the Oscar let down.
Does anyone else notice how the entire ceremony just vanishes from your memory like a fart in the wind after just a few scant days?
Secondly, I don’t want anyone to think that today’s strip is some how a reflection on my relationship with Jared. Things are fine. We talk to each other quite often. This isn’t Movie Comics, y’know! 🙂
Truth be told, things couldn’t be much better. If you read Penny Arcade at all, you’ll know Jerry and Mike will be making an appearance in Kansas City this weekend at the Planet Comicon convention. Guess who is going to see them? That’s right! US!
Kansas City is about 3 hours away from Des Moines, so we thought it would be a fun way to kill an afternoon to go to the show. We’re leaving early so we can be there when it opens at 10am. The day wraps up at 5, so it would be no trick to go home in the same day and be back before Saturday Night Live.
I’m going to take my camera and hopefully we can get a picture with the two of them. If it turns out their 300 pound bodyguards keep us at bay, I’ll try and snag a photo with Lou Ferrigno instead. If I get any good shots, I’ll be sure to post them on the site.
I’m really pumped about going and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t entertaining the thought that Jerry and Mike might be familiar with what goes on over in our little corner of the Internet. I would introduce myself, tell them I’m a fan and ask them if they’ve ever heard of Theater Hopper.
The conversation could go one of a few ways, I suppose. They could say they’ve seen it and liked, the could say they’ve seen it and thought is sucked, or they could say they’ve never heard of it. If the latter proves true, maybe I could turn them on to our littler operation. Jerry would link to me from his blog and hordes of fans would crash the server just before flooding my inbox with hate mail!
It’s the stuff dreams are made of.
Either way, I’m buying a poster and asking them to sign it. Gotta cash in on eBay after they hit the big time! 🙂
You may have noticed that I took the poll off of the site. I know that it was kind of popular among my regular visitors, but I got tired of trying to come up with new questions. Plus, it never worked completely right and I think it kind of looked ugly, so I pitched it.
I’m thinking about starting up the forums again, but this time going with phpBB instead of IkonBoard. I know there is a poll feature in there, so I’ll probably make a special folder for it. I don’t know if that’s happening any time soon, but it’s part of the evolution of the site.
An item of interest: I watched Ghostbusters tonight on DVD. I put off buying it for the longest time. But when you sit down and watch it, you realize just how great a gift it is to American cinematic comedies.
It’s like, you’ve seen it on TV a million times. It’s been part of the background noise of your life for decades now. But it really is freakin’ hilarious. Every time Bill Murray quips, I pass out in laughter. If I had half his easy-going confidence, his total command of that playful B.S. swagger, that would be the coolest.
The best part of watching the movie for us is that we could see the hotel we stayed at while we were in New York a few weeks ago.
There’s a scene where Murray comes up to Sigourney Weaver at Lincoln Center. They do a wide shot, and our hotel – The Empire Hotel – was in the background. Now when we show people pictures from our trip, we can slide Ghostbusters in the DVD player, skip to that scene and say “See that building in the background? That’s where we stayed.” A lot of the action in the movie takes place around Central Park West which was pretty much the nexus of our visit. It’s cool to see that stuff on celluloid.
If you haven’t watched it in a while, I strongly suggest picking it up. Besides, we all know movies are much better when the swear words aren’t replaced by nonsense words like “bulldip” or “crud”.
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Cami wanted me to make it clear to you that in no way, shape or form does she advocate the viewing of any film featuring Haley Joel Osmet in his current state. That state, of course, being a freaky adolescent.
Cami actually had the same reaction I did when we first saw the trailer for Secondhand Lions. Recoiling in our seats, a twisted sneer across our faces we both said “Ugh!”
Watching a child star work his or her way through puberty is always a really uncomfortable metamorphose to witness. I think the transformation is particularly cruel for young male actors because for so long they have been marketed as cute and are now trying to grow beyond it literally and figuratively.
I thought Haley Joel Osment had figured out a really smart way around it by doing a bunch of voice over work in animated fare like The Jungle Book 2 and video games like Kingdom Hearts. He must have felt comfortable enough to return to the screen in Secondhand Lions seeing as it’s his first live-action film since A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.
My reaction? Put him back in the oven! He’s not done yet!
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Cami and I didn’t see Nacho Libre this weekend mostly because we were busy doing errands and getting things ready for Father’s Day. We had both my folks and Cami’s folks over to the house for a bar-b-que. It was a good time. I hope you and yours had a great weekend celebrating the old man as well.
I don’t really know if I have much to say about Jack Black playing a Mexican in Nacho Libre. Some people recognize it as very poltically incorrect, but not culturally insensitive. Other people find it kind of offensive. Much like Charlie, since I haven’t seen the movie, I can’t put the performance into context. But if you want to see a truly offensive caucasian portrayal of a Mexican, rent Orson Welle’s Touch of Evil with Charlton Heston playing the latino in question. Don’t blame Welles, though. The studio pressured him into casting Heston in the role. Still a good pot-boiler mystery, though. Check it out. Just ignore Heston if you can. Amazing what they thought they could get away with in 1958.
Charlie hasn’t made an appearance in a while and I thought this was kind of a good opportunity to indirectly address the race question in Nacho Libre. Often I dangle the carrot of Charlie’s true ethnenticity, but I intentionally do not reveal it. I’ve had some people say that she’s latina, some people say that she’s Native American or even from the South Pacific. I enjoy the guessing game. It makes me think I created something more clever than I actually did and didn’t just stumble into things like I normally do.
I should mention that I received the June issue of Zoinks Magazine on my doorstep this weekend and it features my interview with the publication. I don’t know if it’s too late to grab one from them or not – although I’m sure you can backorder – but you should really check out Zoinks Magazine online and then get a subscription. I’ve been really impressed as to how they’ve been able to improve the quality of the publication in such a short amount of time!
Anyway, that’s it for me today. Talk to you soon!
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Jun07
GUEST STRIP – JOSH ANDERSON
June 7th, 2012 |- Comics »
- Comics »
- Guest Strip
(5 votes, average: 9.80 out of 10)
Wow! When I announced on Tuesday that I was looking for guest strips to help flesh out the last few weeks of Theater Hopper, I didn’t think I would receive a comic the very same day.
But that’s exactly what Josh Anderson from Worsted for Wear pulled off – and it’s hilarious!
If you’re kind of new to the site and don’t remember David, I encourage you to check out his first appearance from back in 2006.
What follows is a short story arc that takes to task the interesting phenomenon in webcomics at the time where household appliances were gaining sentience and becoming full-fledged cast members. I always thought the idea was kind of dumb, so I wanted to poke at it a little bit. I did that by quickly killing David off four strips later.
I wrote David back into the strip briefly in a story line where Shia LaBeouf used him to attack Tom. It was a case of mistaken identity.
The story line was actually a fabrication on Tom’s part to explain how he had damaged his hand and had to go to the emergency room. That was my funny way of incorporating a real-life injury I had inflicted on myself back in 2009. So David’s appearance was more of a cameo than an actual reappearance. I assure you, he’s still dead.
So, now that we’re all up to speed on David, take a minute to thank Josh for his excellent work and check out his comic Worsted for Wear!
Thanks, Josh!
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