Posts Tagged ‘bathroom’
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Oh, noes! What’s Charlie gonna do?
I’ve been setting up more than a few of this Friday cliffhangers during this storyline, haven’t I?
Well, once you see what Charlie does on Friday, we’ll catch up with everyone in the present next week. Hopefully, we’ll learn more about why Jimmy is still hanging around. Stay tuned, people! We’re in the home stretch!
Not much for me to talk about today. Well, except that maybe my Netflix experience. Still goin’ strong!
I realize that I didn’t talk about Man on Wire when I said I would last week. Man on Wire was the first film I rented from Netflix and also happened to be the winner of the Best Documentary award at the Oscars on Sunday.
I liked the movie a lot. It was arranged with a very tight narrative with a great blend of reenactments, interviews and original footage.
In case you’re not familiar, the subject of the film is Philippe Petit, a French tightrope walker who walked the span between the twin towers of the World Trade Center shortly after they were completed in 1974.
The movie is more about the planning stages of the walk more than the walk itself. So the filmmakers are able to milk a lot of tension our of the reenactments as the original parties explain their actions as if it were happening in real time. The walk itself feels like some kind of hazy dream, but certainly a one-of-a-kind moment that seemed to impress and capture the imagination of everyone involved – even the authorities, who could do no better than to charge Petit with trespassing
Petit comes off like an eccentric in his interviews or perhaps a hyperactive child. But I admire anyone who feels compelled to create art to serve a higher purpose. He performs his walk not for profit or fame (although those things come later), but to inspire others to dream. Ah, existentialism as only the French can make it!
I kind of wonder if hanging around Petit in real life would be exhausting. But I have to admit I was charmed with his magic trick and balancing act at the Oscar’s when he delivered his acceptance speech.
In the words of Best Week Ever, “please be in our lives every day.”
As for the next movie in our queue, Cami reserved Henry Poole Is Here. I’m not sure why. I thought we were being diplomatic with our choices. I rent one, then she rents one — back and forth and so on. She says she rented it for me! I don’t anything about the film, but I’m happy to watch it all the same. It has Luke Wilson in it, so how bad can it be?
Don’t answer that.
I’ll be back later in the day to pose a question to everyone about contributing transcripts of the comics to the site. Until then, talk amongst yourselves. Who here has seen Man on Wire? What were your thoughts?
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Well, that’s pretty final, don’t you think?
I know it’s kind of a contrivance to have Charlie go nuclear in the overreaction department, but there are two things to consider here:
- Plot efficiency.
- The honest assessment that some girls have a zero-tolerance policy on screwing around.
On the second point I would like to reinforce that there is certainly nothing wrong with having standards. And who knows? Maybe Charlie has been jerked around by womanizers before? As we learned from her introduction story line, she doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
But we’re not going to explore that here.
As I mentioned on Wednesday, next week will take us out of flashbacks and we will learn how Jimmy ended up working at the theater that was ground zero for his greatest heartbreak. One week after that, I should have everything wrapped up.
Thanks, by the way, for indulging me these last few weeks. I know Theater Hopper is traditionally about bringing you the funny, but it’s good to flex a different set of muscles from time to time. Hopefully I’ve been able to compensate with enough dramatic tension to hold your interest.
Thanks, also, for the outpouring of support on the whole transcription effort. I posted a blog entry late Wednesday night and woke up Thursday morning with e-mails from a dozen people write in offering their services. I’ve assigned coverage up to January 2005 and still have more e-mails to sort through. I feel confident that we’ll not only have coverage for the entire archive of comics, but we’ll have them transcribed in short order. I honestly wasn’t expecting that this would be something you guys would be excited about, but I’m glad you proved me wrong!
If you’d like to see which months are still available – along with the items I am offering in compensation for your help – you can read about it here.
Not much for me to talk about movie-wise this weekend. Nothing new in theaters except Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience and Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li – both of which look like a couple of turds on wheels to me.
I’m sure the Jonas Brothers movies will rake in significant box office by attracting the tweener crowds, but I saw some footage of Street Fighter and WOW, was it bad. Wire-Fu was nakedly evident and the fight choreography was stilted and tired. To add insult to injury, the editing was atrocious. Pulling wide on shots that revealed too much of the wire work and claustrophobic, “eat the camera” close-ups that kept you from seeing what was even happening.
It’s probably not getting worked up over. If it doesn’t star Raul Julia and Jean-Claude Van Damme, why bother, AMIRITE?!
I was thinking this would have been the weekend for a more ambitious movie to try and get in front of Watchmen before it lands in theaters next week – some middling Sandra Bullock or Kate Hudson comedy that didn’t stand a chance of making a ton of money in the first place. But I guess the studios look at Watchmen like it’s the 800-pound gorilla. Make way.
I kind of wish I could have wrapped up this story line sooner so I could get hip-dip in the hype surrounding Watchmen because – like it or not – after two weeks, I think it will be over. I don’t think Watchmen has legs. Advance reviews have been too polarizing and it doesn’t sound like fanboys are going to be happy with it beyond a pure visual interpretation. At this point, the burden of proof is on Watchmen to impress me. I’m not turning over on this one as readily as I did Iron Man. I am cautiously optimistic.
What about the rest of you? Are you ready to submit to Watchmen? Have you read any of the reviews online? Have they influenced you at all or is Watchmen critic-proof? What’s your impression? Leave your comments below.
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At this point I’m trying to build Jimmy back up into the selfless person we all know him to be, so I figured his reasons for working at the theater where he was so brutally dumped needed a dash of sympathetic irony.
I really wanted to go more in depth with Jimmy’s realization of what he lost and his expression of how much Charlie meant to him. But at the same time, emotional hand-wringing is like standing still from a pacing standpoint.
So the idea is that Jimmy is paying for his sins at the scene of his greatest failure. It’s also the scene of his “rebirth” into the nice guy we’ve come to know him as.
I don’t know if there’s much more I can say about it than that.
Be sure to listen to The Triple Feature this evening. We record live at 9:00 PM CST over at Talkshoe.com. With any luck, our good friend Joe Dunn will be back in the saddle this week after missing out on our Oscar recap last week.
Odds are good we’ll be talking about Watchmen, since that’s about the only thing going on in movies this week. So if you’re looking forward to seeing it, spend an hour with us as we pontificate its importance.
One other thing – and I know it doesn’t have much to do with movies – but does anyone plan on watching Late Night with Jimmy Fallon when he takes over for Conan O’Brien tonight?
I’m not a big fan of Fallon’s, but I’m interested to see if he can emerge from this as his own man. So much of his shtick to me seemed stolen from Adam Sandler — what with his bits on Weekend Update with his guitar during his early days at Saturday Night Live. He seemed to mature a little when he was promoted to reading “the fake news” on Weekend Update a few years later, but he was pretty much Tina Fey’s puppet.
He did the movie thing. No one bought into it and he’s become almost a curious footnote in comedy known more for cracking up during sketches on SNL than actually being funny himself.
But I’ve been reading a lot of the press surrounding the show and it seems like he’s very enthusiastic about the show. Some of the stuff they say they plan on doing sounds a little unconventional in the late night format, but they really seem to have their sights set on the next generation of fans.
Conan O’Brien will always be *my* late night guy. I remember staying up to watch his first show and even though I was only 15 years-old, I could tell how awkward and nervous he was. A bunch of his jokes bombed in that first week. But the shows got funnier and he honed his own self-deprecating brand of wackiness and now he’s moving on to The Tonight Show. He graduated.
I guess the point I’m making is that if someone like Conan O’Brien can make it – a performer NO ONE thought would be around after a year – is it possible Jimmy Fallon can do something positive for himself in late night?
So what do you think? Will you be watching tonight? Do you have any bias against Fallon? Do you feel like you should watch – like it’s a tiny historic moment? Leave your thoughts below!
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Before today’s blog, I wanted to quickly remind everyone about the fund raising campaign for Theater Hopper: Year Three over at Kickstarter.
There wasn’t a whole lot of traction on pledges last week and that may have been due in part to the fact that I wasn’t promoting the campaign as hard as I could. We had a really great week two weeks prior and maybe it left me feeling a little too comfortable.
So instead of burying a blog post about the campaign below the main blog, I wanted to take the proactive approach and remind you of it right away.
Please visit the campaign page at Kickstarter and if you have any money to pledge, please consider doing so today. I know here in America it’s going to be a short week because of the Thanksgiving holiday. So if you’re thinking about pledging, sooner is probably better than later.
Right now we’re 35% funded with 38 days to go. Let’s see if we can get that a little closer to 50% before all the turkey and tryptophan settles in and makes us sluggish!
Now, onto the blog!
Today’s comic is sad, but also a little bit true. I mean, who wouldn’t want awesome abs – especially it impressed your wife?
The only piece of fiction in this comic is that Cami knows/cares anything about Taylor Lautner. Even if she did, what are you going to do? I can’t compete with the metabolism of a 17 year-old. Hell, I don’t think I could compete with Taylor Lautner even IF I was 17 years-old.
As it has been widely reported, New Moon broke all kinds of box office records this weekend, taking in over $140 million and coming in third behind The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3 for the biggest 3-day weekend opening ever.
There was some outrage in the blogosphere early Saturday when it was reported New Moon shattered The Dark Knight’s opening night tally with $72.7 million, besting The Caped Crusader’s $67.2 million – and it did it on 342 fewer theaters than The Dark Knight.
Some of the outraged comments I read online were particularly hilarious. And although part of me kind of wants to be outraged along with them, to do completely ignores two factors:
1.) The increasing escalation of box office reporting and one-upsmanship. If it wasn’t New Moon that overtook The Dark Knight’s record, it would have been some other movie. If not by popularity, but by sheer inflation alone.
2.) New Moon found success by virtue of an audience that was made up nearly 80% by women. When you consider Sandra Bullock’s The Blind Side drew a respectable $34.5 million (the best opening of Bullock’s career, by the way) with an audience made up of nearly 60% women, it is (as Entertainment Weekly put it) “of the most lopsidedly female-driven weekends in Hollywood history.” Any way you slice it, that’s impressive. So, good on ya, ladies!
At this point it would be very easy to delve into the debate that popularity does not equal quality. But at this point I’ve taken a very live and let live attitude about things.
Do I understand the Twilight phenomenon? Do I want to see New Moon? Do I even want to see The Blind Side. The answer to all of those questions is “No.” It’s not my world. I don’t understand it.
I don’t mean to put that out there as an excuse for perpetual willful ignorance. If, for example, Cami wanted to see either movie – if it was important to her – I would go. My point is, these films are not important to me. Just as Transformers 2 wasn’t important to her.
Now perhaps as a “critic,” it’s my job to go out and watch these films so I can tell you guys what I thought and if you should go see them or not. But Theater Hopper has never been about film criticism in a traditional sense. My opinions are not based in any kind of formal education and neither are they driven by a motivation to fit within a social or artistic context.
Simply, they are what they are. I present them to you as a friend might present his or hers to you. No one is holding me to some kind of invisible journalistic standard that demands objectivity and fairness. So if I make the decision that I’m not going to see a movie for whatever reason, I believe I have that latitude- so long as I can at least attempt to explain what lead me to that conclusion.
Besides, considering New Moon’s 29% rotten rating at Rotten Tomatoes, I think it’s safe to say that the film is essentially critic-proof. What kind of influence could I hope to express?
I’m sure we’ll be talking about New Moon’s success and more on The Triple Feature tonight at 9:00 PM CST on TalkShoe. Be sure to join us live if you want to participate in the conversation.
In the meantime, you can always leave your comments here. What were your thoughts about New Moon? Did it live up to your expectations or did it leave something to be desired?
And speaking of desire, what about Taylor Lautner’s abs? Amirite, ladies? Leave your comments below!
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Feb26
TALENT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN PAY GRADES
February 26th, 2010 |
(41 votes, average: 7.88 out of 10)
This comic is many thinks. It is scatological, it re-enforces gender stereotypes and it throws stones at giants.
I mean no disrespect to Kevin Smith. I just couldn’t avoid a good poop joke. I’m sure he understands. After all, he included The Golgothan in Dogma.
I also wasn’t particularly crazy about falling into the trope of the put-upon wife who tolerates the slovenly antics of the layabout husband. But like I said… poop joke.
I DO IT FOR THE COMEDY, PEOPLE!
As for the movie itself, I think it’s kind of weird that Kevin Smith is being billed as the director of Cop Out when he didn’t write it. Like I said in the strip, he’s not exactly known for his dynamic camera work and I think he’d be the first to admit it. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty SURE he’s admitted it on the commentary tracks of several of his movies.
Doesn’t mean the dude can’t grow as an artist. I just don’t think it’s where his strength lies. Personally, I’d love to read a kick-ass script and have him hand it off to… I dunno… Wes Anderson, or something. See what happens.
Actually, I think I would probably rather watch him act in a movie than direct at this point. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought Smith was pretty good in Catch and Release. I’m being serious!
I don’t know what to think of Cop Out. If Smith’s name weren’t attached, I would have absolutely no interest. As someone pointed out to me, Cop Out looks like the kind of movie Tracy Morgan’s character from 30 Rock would do for a quick paycheck. Not a compliment.
Bruce Willis? I have no idea what Bruce Willis is supposed to be doing in this thing other than throw a wink and a nod to his hard-boiled action hero roles from his past. “John McClane is in this?! I gotta see it!” Well, not exactly and… no you don’t.
What do you guys think of Cop Out? It could be fun, but I’m on the fence. I guess, to me, it looks like a fun rental. I’m wondering if anyone out there has been anticipating this movie at all. How much does Kevin Smith’s involvement motivate you to see the film? Do you think he lent more to the production than lens work? Maybe he helped the actors with a few funny ad libs? The mind boggles, so leave your comments below!
In the meantime, I have a fun idea. Let’s all send a link to this comic to Kevin Smith’s Twitter account and see what happens!!
Cheers, y’all.
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