Tomorrow, I think I’ll be reviewing Ex Machina (suggested by one of the Patreon backers), to cleanse my palate from all the Bay, before I get into the next two Transformers movies on Thursday and next Tuesday next week!
Archive for August, 2015
Multiplex Movie Review: Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen
Tuesday, August 11th, 2015
Multiplex Movie Review: Transformers (2007)
Thursday, August 6th, 2015
These comic strip reviews are so short that it’s often hard for me to get into much detail. This first Transformers is one of Bay’s better movies (that I’ve seen), really; the basic outline of the plot is solid although the exact way it’s played out raises some nagging — if not really very important — questions (why Qatar? why Air Force One? why a pair of glasses?).
The tone is as balanced as any of the Bay films I’ve seen: the juvenile “comedy” isn’t quite as terrible as the worst moments in either Bad Boys movie — nor is it ever particularly funny, either. But the staging of so many moments betrays a lack of intelligence at some point in the creative pipeline. One particular good example of what I mean by this is a scene where Optimus Prime and Bumblebee have just saved Sam and Mikaela, and Bumblebee gets harpooned by two choppers.
Rather than save Bumblebee, Optimus just completely vanishes from the movie for three minutes, only to reappear after Bumblebee (and Sam and Mikaela) have gotten re-captured and explain that they couldn’t save Bumblebee “without hurting the humans.”
An hour later, though, Prime whips out a giant fucking sword from his arm while fighting… the tank Decepticon, I think? Who the fuck knows. And those of us with attention spans immediately think: “Where the fuck was that when Optimus Prime was ten feet away from Bumblebee getting roped by those humans?”
It could also have come from dodgy editing or a bit of post-production rejiggering of the scene; I wouldn’t know. But the end result is just one of far too many incredibly contrived, stupid moments that could very easily have worked.
Anyway. I’ll see you tomorrow with another regular update — the last of Jason and Kurt’s conversation here.
Multiplex: The Revenge pre-orders are OPEN
Tuesday, August 4th, 2015
Now that the Kickstarter project has ended and Multiplex: The Revenge is funded (yay!), I can open up the floor for pre-orders to non-backers via BackerKit. I’m using BackerKit instead of handling things through the Multiplex store (as I did with Book Two), because merging everything and keeping track of essentially two separate crowdfunding projects proved to be a huge headache; BackerKit streamlines that process for me tremendously.
NOT all of the Kickstarter rewards are available, and some are slightly different: i.e. you don’t get your name on the Acknowledgments page of the book, and while you can get vector portraits, I can’t promise that you’ll make it into the third book. (There is only so much room!) Some of the higher level rewards (like original comic strips) are not available, either — although if you have your heart set on one of those, just shoot me an e-mail, and we can probably figure something out.
The current stretch goal is to fund a second printing of Multiplex: Enjoy Your Show (Book One), a necessary step before I can doing a fourth printed book. The amount needed is $7500, with roughly $1,238.97 of Kickstarter’s surplus (the amount over the $24,000 funding goal) applicable toward that. Once this goal is reached, I’ll add Book One as a reward goal for ANY Kickstarter or BackerKit backers (“preorder backer,” as they call them).
I’ll put up a few more visible graphics on the site later — there’s no urgency at this time, so I won’t be bugging you guys about it often. These BackerKit pre-orders will be open for several months and only “lock” in the summer shortly before Book Three goes to press.
Multiplex Movie Review: Bad Boys II
Tuesday, August 4th, 2015
See you TOMORROW! It will be a regular update (so: #1045).