7/04/2005

Posted By Owen at 8:18 PM

Hi everyone. I've been meaning to write for a good while now but I've been waylaid by various nefarious circumstances.
The big news is that I have a second comic up at www.elisalandis.com . It's pretty bare bones right now, but we're working on it. It starts a little shaky but it starts getting good soon. It's more along the lines of straight superhero style comics but I think there is a lot to like if you give it a chance.

I've been catching up on a lot of T.V lately, which is fun. My favorite shows being Chapelle's Show and HBO's Entourage. Both are brilliant. Dave Chapelle totally deserves that 50 million paycheck.
I also just finished season 5 of the trailer park boys, that was very funny as well. Robb Wells, the actor who plays Ricky, is a total genius. The whole cast is pretty much various levels of great though.
I also find Robot Chicken is a good think to play when people are over having a drink or two.

Moviewise, Batman Begins was great of course, it's just that I've seen so many permutations of the batman mythology over the years that it's hard for anything to seem fresh to me, Bale was perfect and I liked the Ducard/ Ras al Ghul connection. Speaking of Batman, that newish kids cartoon "the Batman" has some clever villain designs. It must have been hard for art director Jeff Matsuda to veer completely away from the iconic Bruce Timm designs but the freshness shows. The show is dumbed down a little too much but most of the design is tight.

War of the Worlds was also good, just not as good as the 1979 Jeff Wayne rock opera. Follow Rondel's advice and get a hold of it. The new WOTW would have been great except for the stupid ending that was tonally inconsistent with the rest of the film, but you've heard all about that already, I'm sure.

I'll write again soon, I haven't even mentioned music yet, or books for that matter.

Oh, one more big piece of news. A new character page is well underway.
We probably get called on that more than anything, so expect one relatively soon.

Thanks gang.

--Owen

* 9 comments

9 Comments:

War of the Worlds was a humonguous disappointment. Actually, it really wasn't; it just had been so long since I had seen a Spielberg movie, I had kinda forgotten why I hated him. WotW reminded me completely.

The damn thing is filled with long, boring, overly dramatic scenes (like Tom Cruise singing to his daughter for like 10 minutes) that are meant to make the public cry. Spielberg just wants everyone to bawl their eyes out all the time and 99% of the time it doesn't work at all with me.

I also hated how they twisted the ending to make it as though it was God's will that protected Earth (rather than the aliens' really bad planning skills). Did he really have to put the word "God" in that voiceover? That really pissed me off (and how do aliens fit in with a creationist myth? That's seriously retarded)

Then there are all the stupid things, like when they spend 10 minutes showing you that nothing that is remotely electric is working in the whole goddamn city, then the first alien comes out and SOMEONE IS TAPING IT ON THEIR CAMCORDER. WTF? And why is it no one is able to get their car working, when Tom Cruise can find the problem as an afterthought and it appears any mechanic can fix it in 10 minutes? And what was so important about the basement Cruise & daughter are hiding in that the alien would probe it seemingly continuously? It's like, there are suspicious events in the basement, so the aliens send in additional probes and even a search party (instead of just blowing it all up like they do with everything else), except when they do those additional probings/search parties they don't actually try to search thoroughly. The only point is that Spielberg is trying to create tension and it's so contrived and artificial it becomes actually painful.

And the characters - if I had a claustrophobic,vegetarian daughter with back problems, allergies to peanuts and a propensity to hysteria, I'd just kill her myself and do the world a favor.

Ah well, big special effects, Tom Cruise, lotsa explosions, it'll probably be a huge blockbuster, and all the retards will think it's the best movie since Pirates of the Carribeans. I'll just roll my eyes and swallow my bile.

-----

Is there going to be a forum for Landis? And... think you could find the time to post in the Sore Thumbs forums from time to time? It's pretty dead in there...

By Effovex, at 10:43 PM

Oh damn that movie. I would listen to it on the radio insatead of seeing it. Also, If I want toi cry my freakin' eyes out, romance movie.

By Anonymous, at 9:01 PM

A remake of a classic being a total disappointment? Gee, what are the odds of that? Don't get me started on Tom Cruise, but suffice it to say that he hit his shark jump back during Mission Impossible 2. Besides which, the guy is a pretentious, self-absorbed ass with an inferiority complex. (He is five foot four.)

Now 'Batman Begins' was a good remake of a classic series. Not as good as the first two, but who can compete with Tim Burton? Though they did get the guy who designed the Batmobile for those two films to recreate it for this one...

Infamous 370

By Anonymous, at 7:19 AM

Great comic! I read the most recent one and liked it so much that I ended up reading the whole series so far in one night! Keep up the great work.

By Anonymous, at 8:43 PM

I've got to add in that Tom Cruise did make one other movie after MI2 that was pretty good. The Last Samurai. Being a huge Japanese history buff I was really ready to be disappointed when I went to see it but it was pretty good historically speaking. The action was pretty good and Tom Cruise didn't schlok it up too bad. Well, I've added my two cents.

By Anonymous, at 12:15 AM

"I also hated how they twisted the ending to make it as though it was God's will that protected Earth (rather than the aliens' really bad planning skills). Did he really have to put the word "God" in that voiceover? That really pissed me off (and how do aliens fit in with a creationist myth? That's seriously retarded)
Then there are all the stupid things, like when they spend 10 minutes showing you that nothing that is remotely electric is working in the whole goddamn city, then the first alien comes out and SOMEONE IS TAPING IT ON THEIR CAMCORDER. WTF? And why is it no one is able to get their car working, when Tom Cruise can find the problem as an afterthought and it appears any mechanic can fix it in 10 minutes?"

Regarding the word "God" in the voiceover, the voiceovers are quotes straight from the original radio show, and therefore moderately dumb to complain about.

Regarding the camcorder and the car, this was discussed at length in my mostly-Lockheed-employee friends group, and what it boiled down to was Spielberg was right, sort of. Where he's wrong is not in having those things work, but in that an EMP apparently only affects circuits that are active at the time, so any car that wasn't on should've been fine. His phone? Was on. Watch? Was on. That camcorder? If it wasn't on in the EMP, should work fine. Spielberg was sort of selectively lying to you, but not as blatantly as you're complaining about.

By Anonymous, at 7:09 AM

It's extremely silly to complain about the use of the word "God," as the line is also from the book. It admittedly made less sense in the movie since its only other reference to religion was a collapsing church at the start, but it is still acceptable as a homage to the source.

It would probably have been better if a minor Christian character had been given a cameo somewhere in the plot, and if that character's voice had been used for the voiceovers.

By Anonymous, at 4:50 AM

effovex is right about one thing though - they twisted the aliens method of arrival to fit a scientologist myth, which does make the 'god' rather iuncongrous - in fact, the sections from the book made no sense without the rest of the book, and made little sense as an intro - pure gimmickery, really. And he's definately right about te car; why would ONLY Cruise think 'hey, fix the solenoids'

By Anroca, at 8:48 AM

War of the Worlds aside, i think it's funny that now we're his 'gang', like in scooby doo, maybe thats why we're trying to solve mysteries about why the movie was shit/or otherwise.
so really, we're only talking about it out of a sense of obligation due to him talking to our subconscious mind which was raised on scooby doo. (or at least part of mine)

By Steve the Table, at 11:37 PM