Posts Tagged ‘silence’
3 items.
Once again I have to apologize for updating the site a little later in the morning. It appears that the situation with my satellite internet has transformed from a “Mother Nature screwed me over” thing into a “Tom can’t solve his own technical problem” thing.
For the life of me, I can figure out what’s wrong. I bring up Explorer, it tells me it can’t make a connection. I check my Network Adaptor information, it tells me that the networking cable isn’t hooked up. I look at my networking cable and it is clearly plugged into the wall and computer. I think my computer is trying to trick me.
Regardless, now I have to put in a call to customer service where I’m sure their answer will be something obvious like “Did you check to make sure your cable is connected?” or something equally lame. If any of you have suggestions, please contact me.
Obviously this snafu with my internet connection is throwing a monkey wrench into my plans for replacing the forums and adding a Bonus Materials section. Since I’ll be out of town this weekend, it looks like these two items will have to wait until next week.
Stay tuned for updates!
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In case you’re wondering who that guy is in the last panel, it’s supposed to be Elizabethtown director Cameron Crowe. I drew him once before not last Friday, but the Friday before that. Crowe is such a mild-mannered guy, I thought it would be funny to depict him committing a felony.
If you still don’t know anything about Cameron Crowe, don’t worry. Tom doesn’t seem to know much about his abductor, either.
As you may have surmised, Cami and I saw Elizabethtown this weekend and were not pleased. I was looking for a soapbox to rant about it, then remembered I have this comic. My illustrated avatar doesn’t typically breech the fourth wall so directly in these situations, but I thought it made sense that he talk to "you" in the sense of the audience since his/my displeasure with the movie was so great.
I wanted to like this movie. I really wanted to like this movie. In fact, when we left the theater and Cami was actually ANGRY about the time we just spent watching it, I swung hard in the opposite direction – Playing Devil’s Advocate to the point where Satan himself came to me and said "Dude, seriously. It was a bad movie. Stop speaking up for it in my name. It’s not good for business."
To me, the three acts of the film played like three separate movies. The first act dealing with Drew’s corporate life and his failure. The second detailing the harmless eccentricities of Southern people and the third capturing Drew’s cross-country trek back to Oregon. It seemed like barely any of these arcs related to each other. I feel in love with the third act. If they could have condensed the first two acts and expanded the third, I would have been much more interested in that.
There were so many details about the movie that I think were overlooked. In addition to the ones mentioned in the comic (which are the most glaring), what about the 737 that Drew takes into Kentucky – it’s totally empty! No plane that large would ever be that low on passengers. Not even on a red eye. Not even on a crappy airline. Disbelief NOT suspended!
Kristen Dunst’s character gives up a trip to Hawaii to be with Drew during his crisis even though they don’t know each other. Why even mention that at all? Are we supposed to be impressed that she gave up so much to be with this stranger? Giving up a weekend to hang around this guy would be enough!
Why the hell wouldn’t Drew’s mother fly to Elizabethtown to retrieve her husband? Yes, I understand she was in shock. Yes, I understand that she felt his family didn’t like her. But if she loved him to the degree that she would perform an embarrassing tap dance routine in front of them, she couldn’t have gotten on the plane sooner?
The wake hosted in the hotel ballroom with Drew’s cousin’s band playing "Freebird" seemed incredibly cloying and ridiculous – especially in the light of the huge prop bird catching fire at exactly the right moment and various members of the audience laughing and scampering about in slow motion as the sprinkler system burst. Of course the band continues to play, stomping around in pools of water on the stage and their instruments do not electrify them to a crisp.
At a critical juncture in the movie, Drew attempts to break off his relationship with Kristen Dunst’s character and she says he "keeps trying to break up with her even though they’re not together." Was there some other break-up scene I didn’t see? I think they dropped this one back in there to remind us that Drew is actually VERY despondent and planning to kill himself when he gets home. An idea mention once, dropped, then picked up again to add tension, I guess. Some kind of conflict. It was sloppily executed.
What about Drew’s road trip back with his Father’s cremains. His mother and sister had no problem with him spreading them all over the country? Were they ever consulted? Didn’t see that on the screen! You’d think they have a say.
And of course, the big reunion at the end. So we’re supposed to believe that Dunst’s character pulled some strings in her role as a flight attendant to get fly ahead of Drew and be at the Second Largest Farmer’s Market to meet him just in case she showed up? He job must have some pretty flexible work hours and policies!
I dunno. Maybe all of this is nit-picky, but all of these inconsistencies really got to me after two hours in my seat. I expected so much more from Crowe and he let me down. The whole film is like a string of half-baked ideas. Or rather, the film feels like it must have been 3 hours long to start and was edited down for time. There’s probably a better movie in there somewhere, it just sucks that we’ll have to wait for the DVD to see it. In the meantime, the theatrical version is probably going to turn off anyone who is casually interested.
I think that there is probably a larger version of Elizabethtown waiting in the wings. Crowe did the exact same thing with his release of Almost Famous: Untitled. And while that release is vastly superior to the theatrical release, at least the version that landed in theaters had a narrative thread. Elizabethtown doesn’t even have that.
What a waste.
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Good day, all. Welcome to another exciting Monday!
Sorry if I’m drawing out this Eastern Promises-inspired S&M nightmare a little too long. But I love jokes that have that awkward pauses in the middle of them and when I thought about Tom’s prediciment in Friday’s strip, I couldn’t resist. It’s kind of a low pitch, but I take pleasure from rounding out the narrative. I promise we’ll move on to greener pastures soon.
I just wanted to take a moment to touch on the contest from last Friday where I announced that I would be giving away three copies of The Sarah Silverman Program: Seasone One on DVD. I made it a trivia contest of sorts – challenging readers to uncover the reference in the title of Friday’s comic (“PALOMINO”) within the context of the comic and e-mail me their guesses. From those that guessed correctly, three winners would be randomly selected.
Okay, first thing I want to say that this contest gathered more entries than another other contest I’ve run so far. I don’t know how much of that is due to it being the prize itself, the knowledge-flexing nature of the contest or what. But I think part of it has to do with notifying my readers about it in a weekly recap through Theater Hopper’s mailing list. I noticed a spike shortly after I sent the message.
If you guys are interested in signing up for the mailing list, you can do so here. You’ll get one e-mail from me a week – THAT’S IT. And I will be recapping the comics, and any contests or reviews that we run.
More on that later. But for right now, I want to get back to the Sarah Silverman contest.
So like I said, this has been our most successful contest so far. Of all the enteries, half of you caught the reference and the other did not. In some respects I was surprised at how many people knew what I was talking about. It’s somewhat obscure unless you’re a fan of late night comedy.
Oh, alright. I won’t torture you anymore. Here’s the answer to Friday’s contest giveaway trivia question:
It’s the opening sketch from the November 11, 2006 Saturday Night Live with Kristin Wiig as newly elected Speaker of The House Nancy Pelosi. In it, she congratulates voters for ignoring warnings from the adminstration of Democrats “San Francisco values” and for turning out to the polls in record numbers to send the message that “‘stay the course in Iraq’ is not a plan; that our health care system should serve ordinary citizens, not pharmaceutical companies; that so-called rough sex can be a necessary and fulfilling adjunct to a better sex life – partiularly when it involves fantasy role-play scenarios, such as kidnapping or forced interrogation, provided, of course, that both participants are willing and disease-free, and have agreed on what we call a “safe word” – for example: ‘Palomino’…”
I don’t know why, but the sketch stuck with me and, well, that’s the reference!
As entertaining as I found the sketch, I found some of the answers equally entertaining. Some of you took the meaning of the comic title literally and thought I was refering to horses. Some people extrapolated that conclusion and referenced Hidalgo – a movie about an international horse race that Viggo Mortensen starred in back in 2004. Some people took that idea, flipped it and got more personal with it. Suggesting that since Mortensen rode a Palomino stallion in Hidalgo and because he’s naked in Eastern Promises that he must be “hung like a horse” and that was the reference. Yikes!
Some people were very matter-of-fact about what they thought the reference was. Since Tom was asking about the safe word in the punchline of Friday’s comic, they assumed “Palomino” was that word. In a general sense, they’re right. But for the purposes of the contest, I needed them to be more specific.
Probably the most out-there guess I recieved was when someone talked about a strip club in Las Vegas called the Palomino and surmized that might be a place Victor would frequent. I thought it was crackers until two or three more people submitted entries with the same guess. I gotta get out more.
At any rate, it was a fun contest and the winners have been notified. My thanks to everyone who entereted.
For those of you who didn’t win, don’t worry. We’ll have a new contest up and running on Wednesday and this one will only be made available to those of you who are currently on the mailing list.
It’s going to be pretty straight forward. I send a message to everyone on the mailing list with a clue. If you want to be enterted, mail the clue back to me and you’ll be chosen at random! I’ll be delivering more specifics about WHICH DVD I’m giving away on Wednesday. But you probably want to sign up for the mailing list now to hedge your bets!
Remember, only one recap message from me a week and occassionally there will be mailing-list only contests that will not be made available on the main site!
The Triple Feature talkcast – Monday, 9PM CST, TalkShoe.com
Before I forget, I want to remind everyone to check out The Triple Feature talkcast tonight at 9:00 PM CST over at TalkShoe. This evening, Gordon, Joe and I will be discussing the films of Wes Anderson in honor of his latest release, The Darjeeling Limited. I don’t think we’ve ever concentrated an episode around one filmmaker, so it should be a lot of fun. Whether you have opinions about Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tennebaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou or are eagerly anticipating The Darjeeling Limited, be sure to listen in tonight LIVE as we broadcast at 9:00 PM CST and talk about all of them! See you then!
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