Free Comic Book Day: May 4, 2013

One of the greatest days of the year is coming up, this coming Saturday, May 4, you can literally walk into comic book stores and they will give you comic books for free!!!



All of the major publishers as well as a ton of the smaller publishers have books available to pick up.  This is both a great way for people that already read comic books to try something new without making a financial investment but also for people that don't read comic books to hop aboard the train and give a variety of comic books a try to see what interests them.  As Anthony and I have always said, there's a comic book out there for everybody, you just have to find it.  No matter what your interests there's a comic book for you.  Most stores will do special sales or promotions for Free Comic Book Day and there's a chance of a local creator doing a signing at your shop depending upon where you live.

There's a lot of interesting offerings this year, you can see a complete list here but I'll highlight some of the bigger titles here.

Coming from Marvel is a special preview issue of Marvel's upcoming event, Infinity, which will be written by Jonathan Hickman with art by Jim Cheung.  This story will surely focus ar, ound Thanos' quest for the Infinity Gauntlet, which if the end of Avengers is any indication might be an upcoming story in the Marvel films as well.  This special issue will not only show you the opening shots that lead to this special event, but will also feature Thanos' first solo story as well as a preview of a major Marvel release that hasn't been announced yet.



DC Comics will be doing their best to raise interest in their upcoming Man of Steel film by offering up their Superman: Last Son of Krypton Special Edition book written by Geoff Johns and Richard Donner with art by Adam Kubert.  This book features the first chapter of the Superman: Last Son of Krypton graphic novel as well as a preview of the new The Man of Steel monthly series coming out soon by Scott Snyder and Jim Lee.



Also for fans of the Walking Dead TV show, there's a special issue containing a new story about the character Tyrese done by the normal Walking Dead team of Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard.  This book also reprints short stories about Michonne, The Governor, and Morgan.



There's also books involving The Smurfs, the TV show Grimm, Judge Dredd, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Mass Effect, Star Wars, Sonic the Hedgehog, The Tick, Stan Lee's Shakra the Invincible,  Avatar: The Last Airbender, Hulk Agents of Smash, Sesame Street, Spongebob, and Bongo's Free For All featuring The Simpsons.

So find your nearest participating dealer on the Free Comic Book Day site, go there Saturday, May 4 and pick up some free books.  And while you are there, purchase something that you find interesting and support these small, locally owned businesses.  Most shops have a huge variety of things to choose from between action figures, board and card games, trade paperbacks, manga, t-shirts, and just about any other geek related merch you would be interested in. 

Top Box Office: April 26-28, 2013 Studio Estimates

Unsurprisingly the new Michael Bay movie, Pain and Gain, starring The Rock and Marky Mark went on to lead the Box Office this weekend.  The surprising part may be that it only made $20 million this weekend, as this is Bay's lowest opening weekend since The Island in 2005.  The only new release, the romantic comedy, The Big Wedding ended up getting fourth place and opening up very soft considering the cast involved with the movie.

Going out on a limb and going to predict that next weekend that Iron Man 3 movie is going to top the charts, if the buzz is any indication that movie is going to make some huge bank.  (*)

TW	LW	Title (click to view)	Studio	Weekend Gross	% Change	Theater Count / Change		Average	Total Gross	Budget*	Week #
1	N	Pain and Gain	Par.	$20,000,000	-	3,277	-	$6,103	$20,000,000	$26	1
2	1	Oblivion	Uni.	$17,443,000	-52.9%	3,792	+9	$4,600	$64,731,000	$120	2
3	2	42	WB	$10,725,000	-39.5%	3,405	+155	$3,150	$69,079,000	$40	3
4	N	The Big Wedding	LGF	$7,500,000	-	2,633	-	$2,848	$7,500,000	$35	1
5	3	The Croods	Fox	$6,600,000	-28.5%	3,283	-152	$2,010	$163,025,000	$135	6
6	5	G.I. Joe: Retaliation	Par.	$3,620,000	-37.2%	2,707	-468	$1,337	$116,396,000	$130	5
7	4	Scary Movie 5	W/Dim.	$3,457,000	-43.8%	2,733	-669	$1,265	$27,494,000	$20	3
8	7	Olympus Has Fallen	FD	$2,768,000	-38.2%	2,334	-304	$1,186	$93,076,000	$70	6
9	6	The Place Beyond the Pines	Focus	$2,699,000	-45.1%	1,584	+42	$1,704	$16,205,000	$15	5
10	9	Jurassic Park 3D	Uni.	$2,310,000	-43.0%	1,848	-482	$1,250	$42,000,000	$10	4

Credit goes to BoxOfficeMojo.com for the table and numbers.

Episode 54 Notes

Here are the official show notes for Episode 54: www.abconversation.net.  We start off the show talking about new website as well as some friends of the podcast @RDHPodcast and @Skiznot.

'Wish I Was Here' - Zach Braff Kickstarter

Well, you knew it was just a matter of time that someone remotely famous would come out and use the “Veronica Mars” method of crowdsourcing a movie.  There’s been some talks of Kevin Smith exploring these methods in the past and possibly even again with “Clerks 3”, but it turns out that Scrubs’ actor and the writer/director of one of my favorite movies “Garden State”, Zach Braff is the first to jump on this movement as tries to make his new movie “Wish I Was Here.”
This movie is in a lot of ways the spiritual successor to 2004’s “Garden State,” where that was a movie about being in your 20’s this is his take of being in your 30’s.  Ironically enough, that was the same concept Kevin Smith used for Clerks and Clerks 2 respectively, although “Wish I Was Here” is a completely different cast and idea from “Garden State.” 



While Braff had the ability to get this funded by a studio, he chose to let the fans of his work fund it, so he would have complete creative control of the movie and not lose that to a studio.  In his Kickstater video, he tells a very interesting story about getting funding for “Garden State” not from Hollywood, but from a fan of Scrubs who had faith in Zach Braff.  This also allows Braff to have “final cut” of the movie and also cast who he wants in the movie, and if the cameos in the Kickstarter video are any indication it seems plausible that Jim Parsons and Donald Faison could be appearing in one way or another.

Needless to say, I was super excited when I found out about this as I’ve been clamoring for Zach Braff to do another movie as I find him to be a very talented individual and Garden State was just mind-blowingly good. He deserves all the support he can get on this and it is nice to see that he is definitely on pace for making his goal of $2,000,000. Much like the Veronica Mars project, any additional funds will help make the movie better as there are fantasy sequences in this film that will only look cooler with the more money they can raise. Much like all Kickstarter campaigns this has some great perks including a speaking role in the film which went rather quickly. It starts off with the old Production Diary and PDF of the script, then works up to getting streaming access to the film’s soundtrack as well as exclusive playlists that Braff will make during production, which will be cool since Zach’s “Garden State” soundtrack is easily one of the greatest musical compilations in history. At the $30 tier is the ability to watch a live stream of the movie online and Q&A with Braff after it’s done. For $40 you can get an exclusive “soft as kitten taint” t-shirt. From there the perks only get bigger and better as framable artwork, advance film screenings, autographed DVDs and posters, voice and video greetings, a set visit, and your name in the credits are just a few of the many available perks for contributing. So far in just over 8 hours, the movie has done well earning close to $700,000 from over 9,000 backers. Very cool to see and I hope it reaches it’s goal plus more soon as I am eagerly anticipating this. I have included the Kickstarter video here for you to watch and please consider donating here.

To The Wonder Review

I’m going to try to do more written movie reviews for things we don’t cover on the podcasts.  The first of these is the new Terrance Malick movie which was just released on a limited basis throughout the country, “To The Wonder.”  Here is my review of the movie:

Let me just start off by saying, I am not a fan of the Terrence Malick movies that I have seen. I have great respect for him as a filmmaker, he just doesn’t make movies that I enjoy.  His previous work, the Academy Award nominated “Tree of Life” bored me to tears.  Because I wasn’t going to get anything out of the nonexistent storyline, I ended up “watching” it on 10x fast forward on Blu-Ray.  While “Tree of Life” was a beautiful movie it makes a better screensaver or visual effects demo reel than movie.

This movie was not much different and really felt like deleted scenes from “Tree of Life” pieced together with some footage of Ben Affleck and labeled a new movie.  While this was on a much smaller scale than “Tree of Life” which basically told the tale of the beginning of the Earth to death, this covered mostly just the lives of Neil (Ben Affleck) and Marina (Olga Kurylenko) from their meeting in France to their journey to his home in Oklahoma.  What happens from there is your normal series of romantic ups and downs of a couple that probably shouldn’t be together.

To be perfectly blunt that just by describing this movie, I’m practically giving away everything that happens.  For Malick fans this ok, since you are just in it for the experience of the movie and for a deeper meaning rather than pure entertainment value.  It seems like Malick stockpiles as much footage as possible of these actors wandering around aimlessly and tries telling the story in editing.  The astonishing thing about Malick’s movies is there are always actors that he shoots footage of and then they don’t make the final cut of the movie, in this case Rachel Weisz, Michael Sheen, Amanda Peet and Barry Pepper were all in it at one point but gone by the time the movie was released.  To be fair, Javier Bardem, who plays a conflicted priest, and Rachel McAdams, who plays Neil’s ex-flame who briefly comes back into his life, also could have been completely cut from the movie with little being missed other than running time.  While I do respect Malick as a director sometimes I question whether or not he really knows what story he is trying to tell until he gathers all of the footage and decides from there.  For as much as I didn’t like “To The Wonder,” there’s no doubt that Olga Kurylenko carried this film and absolutely loved the material she was performing.

It was ironic that Neil and Marina spent part of the opening of the movie drudging through mud flats in France as this seems to be an analogy for the pacing of “To The Wonder.”  Terrence Malick’s films are the movie equivalent to jazz, to some they are beautiful and compelling, while others just experience an incoherent mess that seems to go on for too long.  This film tends to explain itself through its actions and not its words.  Too much is told through montage sequences with random poetic lines of narration.  While there is one scene where emotions are actually explained through dialogue and not scenes that look like a perfume commercial, this three minutes of movie is not enough.  There tends to be an interesting story in this movie, however Malick would rather show you random shots of interesting things.  While ultimately much more focused than “Tree of Life” and by therefore much more watchable, this classic case of style over substance disappoints.

2 Stars out of 5

Thor: The Dark World Trailer

Thory I didn’t post this sooner but the Thor: The Dark World trailer was posted online this morning and it looks like a slobberknocker.

Episode 53 Notes

Here are the official show notes for Episode 53: A Fistful of Horsey Sauce.  We start off the show talking upcoming concerts in the area.

Episode 52 Notes

Here are the official show notes for Episode 52: Podiversary.  We start the show talking about Anthony’s adventures at a Chris Hardwick stand-up show.

Episode 51 Notes

Here are the official show notes for Episode 51: The Debt Ceiling.