Trailer: The Hangover Part II.

John's two cents: The trailers got me in thoughts.

Everything Must Go (2011) - Trailer [HD]

Behold The Trailer For Everything Must Go

<iframe title="YouTube video player" width="853" height="510" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/x7ytSfJREiY" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

John's two cents: I'm really looking foward to this. thoughts

Arnold Schwarznegger's First Project Since Leaving Office Revealed

 Via Ew.com

He’s been a famous body builder. He’s been a killer cyborg from the future. He’s been Governor of California. And now, in this week’s exclusive cover scoop , Arnold Schwarzenegger reveals his plans for the next phase of his extraordinary career: He’s going be a cartoon superhero, known as The Governator. “When I ran for governor back in 2003 and I started hearing people talking about ‘the Governator,’ I thought the word was so cool,” Schwarzenegger, 63, tells EW in his first press interview since leaving office last January. “The word Governator combined two worlds: the world of politics and the movie world. And [this cartoon] brings everything together. It combines the governor, the Terminator, the bodybuilding world, the True Lies…” 

The animated TV show and comic book, being co-developed by no less a superhero authority than Spider-Man co-creator Stan Lee (pictured, right), won’t be out until next year, but this week EW offers an exclusive early look at Arnold’s cartoon alter-ego. “The Governator is going to be a great superhero, but he’ll also be Arnold Schwarzenegger,” Lee says of the semi-fictional character. “We’re using all the personal elements of Arnold’s life. We’re using his wife [Maria Shriver]. We’re using his kids. We’re using the fact that he used to be governor. Only after he leaves the governor’s office, Arnold decides to become a crime fighter and builds a secret high-tech crime-fighting center under his house in Brentwood.”

Along with the Arnold Cave, the Governator will have a fleet of super vehicles at his disposal, a closet full of “Super Suits” that allow him to fly and perform other super stunts, and a team of colorful sidekicks, such as Zeke Muckerberg, the precocious 13-year-old computer whiz who acts as the Governator’s cybersecurity expert. Naturally, there will also be recurring supervillains — including an evil organization called Gangsters Imposters Racketeers Liars & Irredeemable Ex-cons (or G.I.R.L.I.E. Men, for short). For Schwarzenegger, the cartoon is obviously the next best thing to being President. “I love the idea of a control center below my house with a path so that boats and submarines can go right into the ocean,” he tells EW. “In the cartoon, my house is much closer to the beach than where we live, but, you know, it’s a cartoon.”

John's two cents: I may or may not watch the series. Thoughts?

Justice League Movie To Stand On Its Own

Via comingsoon.net:

Details on a Justice League featue film have been rapidly developing ever since the story broke yesterday that such a project was back on Warner Bros. schedule. Now, HeyUGuys.co.uk has a further update from Superman director Zack Snyder, explaining that the ensemble film will not bear a link to either his project or to the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises. 

‘It doesn’t [connect]," Snyder told the site on the red carpet for the London premiere of Sucker Punch, "Like what Chris Nolan is doing and what I’m  doing with 'Superman', what they’ll do with 'Justice League' will be it’s own thing with its own Batman and own Superman. We’ll be over here with our movie and they’ll kinda get to do it twice, which is kind of cool."

One key project that seems to be temporarily left out of the equation is this summers Green Lantern which still could, foreseeably, tie-in to the nascent Justice League film. Likewise, with recent word that WB will reboot the Batman franchise following the release of The Dark Knight Rises, it's still possible that the team picture could build up through cross-released franchise entries, a la Marvel Studios' lead-in to The Avengers.

John's two cents - I'll see it but they should push it back a year or two.

Review: Sucker Punch (***)

Sucker Punch is about a girl named Babydoll (Played by Emily Browning) who after her mother dies, her abusive stepfather puts her in a mental institution. There She Meets Blondie (Vanessa Hudgens), Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), Rocket (Jena Malone), and Amber (Jamie Chung). There they all make a plan to escape from the institution. There is a dance studio where they are forced to dance for the boss Blue Jones (Oscar Issac) and their instructor Dr. Gorski (Carla Gugino.) When Babydoll first dances she meets a Wise Man (Scott Glenn.) The Wise Man tells Babydoll her and her crew would need five things to escape a map, fire, a knife, a key, and a mystery

In my opinion the movie was good but not Zack Snyder’s best. It was like playing a video game without a controller. I also thought of comparisons to Inception, and the recent Harry Potter Film. In the end boys my age would like it because it has got technically everything a teenage boy would love.

Nummy.

By now you probably know that I have a sweet tooth.  Sweet teeth, actually.  Over the weekend I made this layer cake.

I used the Best Birthday Cake and Instant Fudge Frosting recipes from Smitten Kitchen, which is a stellar baking/cooking blog.  For the frosting, I did not use a food processor, as she recommends.  This is mostly because I do not own a food processor.  I whipped it and whipped it good, though.

I had taken a few other pictures, but the lighting situation is dire.  The cake was fairly scrumptious, though.  I took it to work on Monday to share with co-workers. 

Sidenote: I used what I call my cake cozy, which I found here. It's one of the best things I've bought over the last six months or so.  A steal at $13.95.  It does not budge and has a built-in slicer/server.  Genius.

Horseshoes for Elephants, and Paying for Water.

(Note: when I wrote the following, er, tirade, 'The Goon' comic creator Eric Powell had a very funny and very articulate video editorial bemoaning the lack of variety in the domestic comic market. Namely, that it's mostly super-hero comics. Powell's comic, The Goon, is a relatively successful non-superhero adventure comic. I'd provide a link to the video on YouTube in question, but it doesn't seem to be there anymore. Maybe the scene of a mainstream publisher comically sodomizing a hapless artist as a metaphor for the industry might've had something to do with it? Anyways, sorry. You'll have to take my word for it...)

Eric Powell's editorial on the lack of variety in the comics field bothered me, and not the content itself, which I'm in agreement with. Rather, it's a matter of perspective, and I'd like to present the following ham-fisted, clumsy, and probably unfair metaphor to illustrate.

Powell is a village blacksmith, who makes riding tackle and shoes for a specific type of mount. You would think, upon entering his shop, that he makes tackle and shoes for horses, being a
blacksmith and all. You would be wrong. Powell makes tackle and shoes for elephants. He is saying that he works in a field that is traditionally serving horse-riders, has always served
horse-riders, and when you think of blacksmiths, you always think of horse-riders. Well, Powell points out, there's room in the field for not just horses, but gazelles, elephants, ostriches, elk,
reindeer, wildebeests, and even chihuahuas pulling sleds. If the traditional horse-rider likes horses, might he or she not also like different types of mounts as well?

Well. The problem is not twenty feet from Powell's livery, there's a massive six-lane superhighway full of fast cars and very fast bikes. These methods of transportation are faster, more fun to drive, and get you from point a to point b better than mounts. Occasionally, a canny bike or car maker might brand their vehicle with the name of a particular horse for marketing reasons. The people who equip those horses usually don't benefit materially from the branding. People who buy a car named after a horse don't usually go out and buy the horse as well, you see. So a lot of people who would like to make a living as blacksmiths usually wind up getting jobs working in auto and motorbike plants. The pay's better, the risks are less, and the prestige is
greater. At the very least, you're going through the same grief as in the smithy business, but you get a living wage, usually.

Now here's where my metaphor gets wonky. In the past decade, a new form of conveyance has appeared. Sky bikes and Spinner cars. (Like in Blade Runner.) They go faster, and in three
dimensions, and they're even more fun to drive than the cars and bikes on the highways. The problem with them, from a builder's point of view, is that most people who fly in these things
have figured out how to get them for free. Worse still, the sky riders' vehicles can emulate the qualities of not just cars and bikes, but horses as well. That is, while a car builder might throw the blacksmith a few bucks, more out of largess than out of honor or obligation, the person flying around in the rocket car that can look like a horse or a car is not only not going to pay the blacksmith and the car builder any money for their efforts, he's (well, it's always a he, isn't it?) going to get quite indignant at the suggestion.

Pay for this wonderful thing I have? Are you mad? Why, for the love of God, should I even do such a crazy thing? These sky bikes (Digital media) are just lying around, not being used? Have you seen the price of a movie ticket recently? I just downloaded the entire run of Neil Gaiman's Sandman collection for free! I don't have the space for all those comics and movies and books and DVD collections of T.V. shows in my apartment! Besides, if I don't ride that sky car, someone else will! (In a bitter display of irony, the type of person who gets free movies, video games, T.V. shows, and, yes, even comic books off the Internet usually has a bottle of brand-name water somewhere on their desk that they paid a couple of bucks for. Oh, sigh...)

I've seen this complaint about the lack of variety in the domestic comic book market for the last twenty years, and while some things are getting better, a lot of things are getting worse.

While artists and writers might start getting royalties from reprints of their work, that doesn't mean jack if their publisher goes under for lack of income. Powell's concern about the lack of
variety in the market at this point in the twenty-first century is like a Japanese businessman complaining about the train being late while a tsunami wave is rushing towards him. (Sorry, Japan. Sorry, Eric Powell.)

Here's a hypothetical: You're a comic artist, and you want to put up the first issue of your first comic for sale. Well, firstly, you have to spend money at a printer. A LOT of money at a printer. Then, you would have to take copies of your comic around to all the comic shops in your area and see if they want to sell them for you. This is going to take a long fucking time. So there's this distributor called Diamond who acts as the middle man and does all that running around for you, so you send a copy off to them to see if they will distribute your comic for you all over North America. If they agree, and the chance that they will is better then showing up at your local minor-league hockey team's tryouts to start on the path to being a professional hockey player, you're in business. If you want to do this comic thing for a living, and not just a hobby that worst case scenario, pays for itself, you have to devote a major part of your working day to not just making the actual comic. Remember, you've also to got to promote your work at conventions, schmooze with industry people, deal with shippers and the printer, and sweet jesus the costs! Not just to your wallet, but the waking hours of your day! And what if your comic just doesn't cut it? Not that it's bad, or you're a terrible administrator, but you do everything you can with the time and resources that you have, and your comic just doesn't sell enough copies to earn you a living. That 's a hell of a risk, but people do that every day.

Sometimes they forge ahead even knowing the pitfalls.

So web distribution seems like an easier solution, doesn't it? Make up your comic, upload it to Apple's Itunes site, or Amazon's e-book page, someone pays two bucks to download it on their Ipad3 or ColorKindle or whatever, you keep 70% of that two bucks, with enough paying readers, you're making money. Better still, you've got the time to do other things. Hell, maybe even another comic series.

Hang on. Remember those guys above I mentioned? The ones with the flying cars? Remember when I said that they figured out how to get their hands on those flying cars for free? "Flying
cars" was my own lame metaphor for "Digital Media". And those guys aren't being spiteful, or mean, or cheap, or greedy. (They're not taking movies and T.V. shows (or bikes and cars) off
the 'net and selling them. Well, unless they're Chinese. Or Russian.) That's just the way they've been doing things for over a decade now. Try explaining to them that what they're doing is
literally starving you to death, and it's like trying to explain Calculus to a chimp. To these guys, the whole of the Internet is a cornucopia of free stuff that's just lying around. Nothing's being
destroyed. No paper or plastic went into making an Mp3 or a Divx video. Every time a photo or comic or book or magazine is converted to a jpeg or a .cbr file, God doesn't kill a kitten. What, for the love of God does this all mean for the aspiring writer or artist or musician in this century? Are they going to have to go back to the Patronage system of the Renaissance? Will they be the 21st century version of the street busker?

Okay. Remember when I pointed out the irony of some kid downloading t.v. shows and movies and video games onto his computer? Hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars of media onto
his hard drive for the relative cost of Internet bandwidth. And on his desk is a bottle of water. Fucking tap water. That he paid for from a store. Water, that is free, that falls from the sky into
a bucket that, if you think of it, you can run through a filter and will likely be safe to drink. (Unless you currently live in Sendai, Japan. Again, sorry, Japan.) Somebody convinced that kid
that shelling out two bucks for that water was a good idea. I don't know how comic artists can currently convince people to drink their brand of tap water, but like it or not. THAT'S the
future of not just the comic industry, but the entire media industry. It's an unknown future, but as always, it's the only one we've got.

I Swam Dirty Water, But You Pushed Me In...

This album is amazing.  And people throw that word around quite a bit these days.  But it's true.  Stellar.  I don't know why I did not jump on the Adele train sooner.  I bought this and 19, her first album (coincidentally, also her respective ages when each album 'dropped') a few weeks ago and have not looked back.  You may remember "Chasing Pavements" as her first big single from a couple of years back.

21 has been in constant rotation.  Every song is a keeper.  The first two are "Rolling in the Deep" and "Rumour Has It," and it took me about fourteen days to get past them because I kept hitting repeat.  Thank goodness that I did because that soul is evident in the rest of the CD.  She oozes talent.  The link above is to Amazon, where you can preview.  Except for the awesome cover of The Cure's "Lovesong," the tracks are all originals. 

Give it a whirl; you won't be sorry.  Oh, and she's British.  It doesn't get much better.

Blink!

Saving money + being green = a stellar idea.

Today's post is brought to you by the letters L & V, as in LearnVest.

Derailed.

My resolution train is seriously off its tracks.  *sigh*  Linda & Harriett has a new outlet and craft bin.  My order has been placed.  Enjoy, but hurry!  Things are going fast.

Inappropriate Behavior

I'm just putting the above inappropriate promotional bit up to remind everyone that my long-suffering pal, Steve LeCouilliard, is offering a pre-ordering option on his Xeric-award winning comic, Much the Miller's Son! Go here for details. Won't you feel the silly goose if you miss out? I believe he's signing these and giving away a little sketch in each book to sweeten that pot. How capital! (I'm placing my order next week! Though I suspect Steve'll send me an I.E.D instead of a sketch 'cause of my rather rude ad above...)

Oh, and before you kill yourself because you can't get a copy of Book 2 of Much the Miller's Son, go here, to this page on Amazon! (or, I guess, you could go here, to Steve's Paypal page to get a copy...)

Right, now to business...

The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (B) A documentary about the epic struggle between the sinister Billy Mitchell and the good-natured Steve Wiebe in having the top score in 'Donkey Kong'. There's a rather clueless statement made by one of the enthusiasts of the 'Classic Arcade High-Score' clan, and here it is:

Walter Day: I wanted to be a hero. I wanted to be the center of attention. I wanted the glory, I wanted the fame. I wanted the pretty girls to come up and say, "Hi, I see that you're good at Centipede."

Oh, IMDB has given me another one:
Billy Mitchell: No matter what I say, it draws controversy. It's sort of like the abortion issue.

The big question is, if the filmmakers had said to anyone, fellas, relax, it's just a game, would the participants have gone mad with fury and turned this goofy movie into a tragedy? You come away with the impression that Mitchell and Wiebe are kinda damaged souls, willing to devote their lives to being really good at a particular thing, irregardless of how important that thing is in most people's lives.

If you didn't know any better, you'd swear it was a mock-documentary, like Best of Show or Spinal Tap. If you feel that the filmmakers are exploiting the obliviousness and single-mindedness of Mitchell and Wiebe for a cheap laugh, might I point out that we currently live in a time where the rule of 'bad publicity is better than no publicity', a rule the cretinous Charlie Sheen seems quite happy to exploit...


Megamind (C) It's a lazier version of 'Despicable Me', if such a thing can be believed. Can we have a moratorium on cueing up classic songs for comedic value in kid's movies? (Megamind ends with the leads dancing around to Michael Jackson's 'Bad'. Despicable Me ends with the leads dancing around to the Bee Gee's 'You Should be Dancing'.)


Look Around You (A) Brilliantly deadpan comic take on school science programs. It's a tribute to the British style of comedy that a lot of the humor comes from the willingness of the creators to make the pacing slow enough to resemble the glacial pace of those classic sciencs shows of long ago. It's a comedy that works if you bring something to it. The closest thing on this side of the Atlantic that I've seen that comes close is Mr. Show's brilliant 'Marylin Monster's Pizza Palace'. (David Cross plays a Marilyn-Manson type rocker-turned entrepreneur narrating a staff training video for his pizza franchise... Oh, here it is, on Youtube! Thank you, Youtube!)

To The Victor...

I feel like the trip to Atlanta was a whopping success.  Although my resolution had to be put on the back burner, as it were, much fun was had by all.  I also spent monies at Ikea and Young Blood Gallery.  Here is what I bought:

The frog print is by Ryan Berkley via Young Blood Gallery (also available on Etsy), and the frame is from Ikea.  I just love how it came together.  I also love the caption that came with the print:

This unassuming frog is a high school math teacher. He also coaches the mathlete team who have gone undefeated under his leadership. The students like him for his laid back attitude and his "Fractal Fridays" slideshows.

This artist has tons of options for different animals in spiffy outfits.  Kermit meets Mr. Rogers was the vibe I got from this one and had to have it.  The prints come in different sizes, and some are even made into magnets.  (Shhh...I may have bought one of a doe that says "Best Eyes," yearbook style.)

Nothin' Goin' On But the Rent

Do you remember how I'm recently obsessed with LearnVest?  Well, via LV I found this:

I think it's graphically appealing, but more than that, it shows which places in the country are smarter for renting versus buying.  It's just some cool food for thought.

(via Trulia)

Just Peachy

I spent a nice, long weekend in Atlanta with my pals Samantha and Jonathan, a fun married couple.  We went to Paper Source, Yeah! Burger, CB2, Lotta Frutta, Youngblood Gallery, Highland Row Antiques, The Beehive, Richard's Variety Store, and IKEA. 

I had a blast.  Here are some pictures.  :)

I want two of these stools.  Bad.

Cool succulents at CB2.

Random antique-y goodness.

The Beehive is really neat.  It's like an in-person Etsy.  That's how Samantha described it--spot-on.

You know I always have my eyes peeled for specs.

Here Samantha is chilling with her imaginary wine in a 67-cent glass.

We had an excellent time together.  Thanks again, Samantha and Jonathan!