Multiplex - a comic strip about life at the movies
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Archive for the ‘Bonus Comics’ Category

 

Multiplex Movie Review milestone goal: Jason reviews every Harry Potter movie

In case you missed it… in order to — fingers crossed — hit the Multiplex 10: the animated short’s base goal sooner rather than later, if we can reach $15,000 on or before Wednesday, April 26 (according to Eastern Daylight Time), I’ll write and draw Multiplex Movie Review comics for all eight of the Harry Potter movies. And if we do it on or before Monday, April 24, I’ll throw in Fantastic Beasts, as well.

These strips will be different than previous review comics, though: Jason will review them at the age he was when each movie was released. So the first ones will be set before the comic strip began, and we’ll get a glimpse of his life before the Multiplex 10, then see him get older with each new movie along with the characters in the movies, etc.

Multiplex Movie Review: Primer (2004)

Hello! Miss me? I’ll be posting Multiplex Movie Review comics here occasionally for the near future, so don’t forget to come back by or cyberstalk me on one of the umpty-million places you can do that.

The Multiplex 10 Kickstarter project has passed $10,500 (as of this writing) in its first week thanks to over 300 backers. There’s plenty of time left, and that’s nearly 70% of the goal — so things are looking good. But the sooner the project passes its goal, the better chance it has at getting pledges from people who aren’t as familiar with Multiplex and my work as you guys are.

Thanks once again for all your support — especially to my Patreon backers — and for all the heartfelt messages over the last week.

p.s. Primer is on Netflix.

UPDATE: By popular demand, Jason’s T-shirt (or a slightly tweaked, more accurate version of it) is now in the Multiplex Store. And yes, it’s also available in women’s sizes!

Multiplex Movie Review: The Island (2005)

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This is  not as accessible to people who haven’t seen the movie as I like these reviews to be, but if you’re not familiar with The Island or Never Let Me Go at all, the premises are that clones are raised and educated as “spare parts” — which is just plain absurd. (The idea that such a thing would be allowed by any reasonable society made the premise impossible for me to swallow, except as a very far-fetched Twilight Zone-style scenario. At least in The Island, it was secret and illegal.)

An absurd premise isn’t a deal-breaker, though, really. But The Island never lets you go past its implausible premise, because it is constantly trying to explain how it all works in equally stupid ways, further compounded by Bay’s typical disregard for logic and continuity:

  • Once Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) learns the truth about their lives, he goes to the apartment of Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johannson) so they can escape. She greets him at the door by saying, “How sweet! You came to see me off” (I’m paraphrasing some of that)… yet their next scene, moments later, she is surprised and exclaims that he isn’t allowed in the female tower (as it’s called). This might be able to be explained away by some contrived explanation, but… the two moments feel completely incongruous.
  • The massive underground facility the clones are kept in is maintained by presumably hundreds of normal human employees (including Steve Buscemi, Sean Bean, and Yvette Nicole Brown’s characters) — complete with a showroom for ultra-rich potential clients. Yet Lincoln and Jordan emerge from it into desert with nothing around. No helicopter landing pad, no parking lot… nothing. We even see a helicopter landing pad later in the film, yet it is again nowhere to be seen at the very end of the movie.
  • Pursued by mercenaries, Lincoln and Jordan end up in a train station. The mercenaries open fire, killing Steve Buscemi, and a panic ensues inside the station… yet Lincoln and Jordan run onto the train with oblivious workers and passengers milling around calmly — and it then proceeds to leave the station as if no one has just gotten murdered… and arrives some time later in Los Angeles, without incident.

Minor or not, the sheer number of them just keep piling up. sigh

Anyway.

This is the last of the Multiplex Movie Reviews I’ll be sharing here in the Deleted Scenes blog for the near future. I hope you’ve enjoyed them!

Patreon patrons and Kickstarter backers will see more of these in their respective feeds come January — as well as the Multiplex: The Revenge bonus comics, of course. (There may even be a few movie review comics during the semester as time permits, but I can’t really promise anything. I’ve got A LOT of work to do for my thesis!)

EDIT: By the way, I wasn’t familiar with Parts: The Clonus Horror when I did this strip. (I don’t watch MST3K; I can’t bring myself to watch movies that shitty, even if there are incredibly funny motherfuckers talking over them.) But several people have told me about it since. These kinds of things are usually largely coincidental (or unintentional) — different people independently arrive at similar ideas all the time. $130 million movies generally don’t need to rip off obscure B-movie (or book, or comic book) plots when there are thousands of equally good ideas that they can legitimately use for less money than a settlement.

Multiplex Movie Review: Transf4mers: Extinction of Ultron

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