Multiplex - a comic strip about life at the movies
DELETED SCENES

Archive for August, 2010

 

HiJINKS! A Vagrant! or, The Greatest Webcomic in the History of the Internet Evar

When Stand By Me came out, people insisted on calling me Gordie all the time. It was fucking torture. I’m not sure if it bothered me more or less that it was such a great movie.

(It’s not Gordo, Gordy, Gordie, G. Gordon Liddy or Gordon Lightfoot. It’s just Gordon, please. G is alright, though. And I don’t even mind Flash, depending on who’s calling me  that.)

Welcome to Multiplex: Deleted Scenes!

Multiplex: Deleted Scenes is a new blog I’ll be officially launching soon. (Up to this point, I’ve just been testing out the design, so the archive only has old reviews, comics and sketches you may already have seen elsewhere.)

I hope to post more comics (both Multiplex-related and not), drawings/sketches and movie reviews a couple times a week. It’s called “Deleted Scenes” for a reason: any strips with the Multiplex cast here will be non-continuity or out-of-continuity. A few might find their way into one of the Chapter eBooks at a later date — but I hope to also have some fun breaking all of the “rules of Multiplex” I’ve established over the past five years. Stuff kind of like the Kurt Comix I did a while back, perhaps.

And, of course, some of the stuff will have nothing to do with Multiplex at all, except for the fact that I made them.

I’ll be including Multiplex: Deleted Scenes updates in my Twitter (@gmcalpin) — but not @Multiplex10 — and you can subscribe to three flavors of Multiplex RSS feeds now:

(1) Multiplex Updates only,
(2) Multiplex: Deleted Scenes only, or
(3) A combined feed with both the regular Multiplex updates and Deleted Scenes.

Most of the movie reviews here will be sort of a Multiplex Movie Club sort of thing. I’ll assign you guys a movie to rent (or stream online, if we’re lucky), and then in a week or two, I’ll review it and we’ll have a friendly discussion about it. Ideally, these are going to all be good or great movies, too, because I’m kind of sick of all the negativity at movie sites.

Since my own choices will probably be a little more obscure and possibly hard to find, I wanted to start out with something that would get a whole lot of you involved.

What movie would you like to talk about first? Bear in mind, it should probably not be something everybody has already seen, like Star Wars. Let’s try for something I haven’t seen yet.

Review: The Incredibles & The Iron Giant

The Iron Giant

Directed by Brad Bird.
Starring Jennifer Aniston, Harry Connick Jr., Vin Diesel, Christopher McDonald, John Mahoney and Eli Marienthal.

The Incredibles

Directed by Brad Bird.
Starring Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, Sarah Vowell, Spencer Fox, Samuel L. Jackson, Jason Lee, Elizabeth Peña and Brad Bird.

Brad Bird’s first feature film, The Iron Giant, was a tiny masterpiece that, despite almost universal critical acclaim, slipped in and out of theaters with almost no audience whatsoever. (The film made back only half of its $50 million budget.) Loosely based on Ted Hughes’ 1968 children’s book, The Iron Man, the less-suable-by-Marvel-Comics Iron Giant is the story of Hogarth Hughes (Eli Marienthal) and his giant, monosyllabic robot (a perfectly typecast Vin Diesel) from outer space, set during the Russophobic 1950s. Sent to investigate what is initially believed to be a meteorite landing, Kent Mansley (Happy Gilmore‘s Christopher McDonald) quickly learns that something else is wandering out in the woods near the Hughes’ home. Once Mansley finds his proof, General Rogard (Frasier‘s John Mahoney) comes in to destroy the giant at all costs. At turns hilarious, poignant and thrilling, The Iron Giant gets a bit heavy-handed with its anti-gun message, but not so much so that those of us without racks on our pick-ups would be turned off.
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Green Lantern

Good ol’ Hal Jordan. How I hate him — he’s just so damned boring. DC dicked him up, killed him off, and couldn’t leave him dead when they had two far more interesting replacements waiting in the wings: Guy Gardner and John Stewart.

And yet, I love the Green Lantern comic right now, because Doug Mahnke and Christian Alamy are freakin’ brilliant.

(Originally posted on the Multiplex Facebook page a while back.)