Still, it’s fun, and the animation is lovely. The full film stars Kristen Bell as “Anna,” the lead, and Idina Menzel as the Snow Queen. It hits theaters this Thanksgiving (or that weekend, anyway), on November 27, 2013.

Chris Pratt plays Emmet, an ordinary dude mistakenly chosen to go on an epic adventure to stop President Business (Will Ferrell) from taking over the world, or something like that. Liam Neeson plays President Business’s henchman Bad Cop, who’s hot on his trail. Hey, and Superman is in it.

The Lego Movie also stars the voices of Morgan Freeman (which you already know if you saw the trailer), Alison Brie, Elizabeth Banks, Nick Offerman, and Will Arnett.

Look for it in theaters on September 13.

Well, what we see here in this first trailer for The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug looks a bit like more of the same, but at least we’re past the slow, introductory bits and into the meat of the story, so perhaps it will be more fun. In any case, as a movie tech nerd, I’ll see it for the high frame rate, which I thought looked wonderful outside of some very brightly lit scenes (a shortcoming of the cameras Jackson used, not high frame rate as a technology, I think).

The film hits theaters on December 13th.

Daniel Farrelly and I have been working hard on a complete rebuild of the Multiplex iPhone app. (Him more than me, really.) It should be more stable than the existing app and the revamped user interface is — I think — pretty sweet. There isn’t a whole lot in the way of new features, but this 2.0 version is laying the groundwork for some sweet new features in the versions to come, including an iPad specific interface (in a universal app, of course), an integrated Chapter eBook store and reader, and more!

The app itself will be free — and ad-free, as well — but we need some volunteer beta testers with iOS devices of all kinds — iPhones, iPads, iPod Touches — to help iron out some of the kinks in the interface, find bugs, and so on. If you have some time to poke around the app and rummage through the archives with this beta version, please fill out the survey linked below to let us know what kind of device(s) you have! We can only handle about twenty people, so if we get more interest than that, we’ll need to choose from the “applicants” (based on your devices and iOS versions, as well as any relevant knowledge or experience you have). Even if we can’t use you for this version, your time is greatly appreciated, and perhaps we’ll be able to use you in a future testing round!

Please click here to fill out the survey/“application” to be a beta tester!

EDIT: Okay! I have all I need for this round of beta testing. If you’d still like to throw your name in the hat in case someone drops out, or for the NEXT version (2.1), we will need more people eventually!

Awwwwwww shit.

Alphonso Cuarón’s long-awaited follow-up to Children of Men, Gravity, finally arrives on October 4th.

If this trailer doesn’t get you more excited about Pacific Rim, I’m revoking your geek card.

The film stars Charlie Hunman, Idris Elba, Rinko Kikuchi, Ron Perlman, and Charlie Day. It opens on July 12th.

(via Tom Brazelton)

The new trailer for Michel Gondry’s next film has a little more plot and a little less Lumineers than the first one, but it’s beautiful. Keep this one on your radar. Mood Indigo stars Audrey Tautou (Amélie), Romain Duris, and Omar Sy (The Intouchables, X-Men: Days of Future Past).

The film is based on the novel by Boris Vian. Its synopsis follows:

In a world where you can travel around on a pink cloud or literally be swept off an ice-skating rink into a hole, Colin, a wealthy young man and inventor of the cocktail-mixing piano, wants to fall in love. With the help of his cook Nicolas and best friend Chick, he meets Chloe, the incarnation of a Duke Ellington tune. But soon after their wedding, Chloe falls ill. She has a water lily growing in her chest. Ruined by medical expenses, Colin resorts to increasingly desperate methods to save his beloved’s life…

Mood Indigo opened yesterday in France and Belgium. It doesn’t have a US release date yet.

(via Coming Soon)

The first trailer for Thor: The Dark World is now online. There’s an immediately apparent difference in tone (at least in this trailer, if not the film) than the first Thor — darker, less silly, hints at Natalie Portman’s Jane Foster getting taken captive (or killed)… Since Gwen Stacy is almost certainly dying in Amazing Spider-Man 2, and Pepper Potts’s days look numbered in Iron Man 3, are we going to get a dead-girlfriend hat trick? Two out of three? Place your bets, folks.

The big-budget sequel stars Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman, Tom Hiddleston, Stellan Skarsgård, Idris Elba, Christopher Eccleston, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Kat Dennings, Ray Stevenson, Zachary Levi, Tadanobu Asano, Jaimie Alexander, Rene Russo, and Anthony Hopkins. Alan Taylor (Game of Thrones) from a script by Christopher Yost, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely. The film hits theaters on November 8, 2013.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I’m frustrated that the book is running late. I had hoped that the new content would have been done at the end of the summer, so my “free time” during the school year could be used to do the various rewards, and I could get a Book 3 Kickstarter going for the summer. Obviously, that didn’t happen, and I intend to finish everything related to the Book 2 Kickstarter project before launch a Book 3 Kickstarter project — but I still hope to get the next book started much, much sooner — so that I can get it out in under a year.

I shouldn’t need as much time with Book 3, because it will have fewer bonus comics than Books 1 and 2 did — roughly 20. Books 1 & 2 had about 30 bonus strips, plus Book 1’s Prequel story. Anyway, last weekend, I ended up taking a look at what Book 3 will entail and got sidetracked with thinking about what I would do in the bonus comics for the first chapter in Book 3 (a.k.a. Chapter 11). Aaaaand since I was enjoying myself, I decided to do this strip, despite having other things I should be working on (like graduate school stuff)…

Anyway, the strip below is set prior to Multiplex #217, making it the first strip in the book.

 The Hollywood Pitch

I’ve only seen one Zack Snyder movie that I’d say I liked (Watchmen), and even that one with a lot of qualifiers — but I gotta admit, the man gives good trailer. And unlike any of the other films he’s made, it looks like the actors will actually talk more like normal people…

The latest Superman Man of Steel trailer gives what seems like a good overview of what the film is about. The film opens on June 14, 2013, and stars Henry Cavill as Superman, Michael Shannon as General Zod, and Amy Adams as Lois Lane. Rounding out the cast are Antje Traue, Laurence Fishburne, Diane Lane, Kevin Costner, and Russell Crowe.

The final trailer for J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness has hit the internet, and (I think) it’s the best one yet. Heavy on the gravitas, and a few big, big plot teases. This is gonna be fun.

Star Trek Into Darkness hits theaters next month, on May 17, 2013. It stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Benedict Cumberbatch, Zoe Saldana, Karl Urban, John Cho, Alice Eve, Anton Yelchin, Simon Pegg, and Bruce Greenwood.

I finally broke through my artist’s block on the Book 2 cover, and so aside from some corrections and technical mumbo-jumbo left, Multiplex: There and Back Again is DONE. Finally.

I’ll keep you posted when I have a better idea of when it will be published and available, but I’m hoping sometime this summer or early fall — things with the distributor take a little longer than if I were just self-publishing, unfortunately.

Thanks are due to my friend Gene Ha for some invaluable suggestions on this cover concept!

Sweeeet.

Iron Man 3 was directed by Shane Black (Lethal Weapon, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang) and stars Robert Downey Jr., Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ben Kingsley, and Guy Pearce, among others. It hits theaters on May 3.

Holy wow. This is a really interesting story — a woman named Vivian Maier worked as a nanny in Chicago for about 40 years. In that time, she took about 100,000 photos, which even people close to her never saw. At one point, she became poor and a storage locker of her stuff had been auctioned off, discovered by art historian John Maloof. He identified her eventually (she took a few self-portaits) but didn’t manage to track her down until coming across her obituary in 2009.

None of this would matter, of course, if her photographs weren’t beautiful, and they are, and they’ve become something of a hit on the art scene. Anyway. Check out the trailer, and check out more of her stuff at http://www.vivianmaier.com.

The documentary about Maloof and her work was directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel; it will be released “sometime” in 2013.

A kinda-sorta “recap” of Book 1 has been finished, and all that remains is waiting for an intro from one fellow webcartoonist (who shall remain secret for now) and a cover from, well, me. Truth be told, I have struggled with this cover for too long, and I have enlisted a little help in getting me past my own artistic block with it. Hopefully I’ll get that done in the next couple of weeks, and then the book can go to press. It is safe to say that the original April-ish release is not happening, but it should be in your hands this summer.

——————————

The Multiplex Card Game is another story. I am still very excited about it, but development on it has had to stop for the time being, because of my workload at school. I need to do a ground-up rework of the box office (revenue generation) system in the game, because under the current rules, while there are a lot of die rolls for two players, it is still fun and manageable — once I play-tested it with three players, though, it becomes a massive clusterfuck.

When I am able to do anything more than just barely keep up with the two weekly strip updates, I’ll try to revisit it. I am still hoping to get a Kickstarter project for that off the ground for the summer — but obviously, finishing Book 2 and fulfilling all of the Kickstarter rewards for that will come first.

What’s wrong with it is this: the app was developed in C# by my brother using Monotouch, an iOS development suite (or something like that — I’m not a coder, man, gimme a break if this isn’t 100% right technically). It’s a great program, but what happens is that Apple occasionally does shit that breaks its apps. So nothing changed on our end, but iOS and Monotouch stopped liking each other. Unfortunately, my previous developer — my brother Lawrence, who built this site — is a little busy with my two nieces to keep maintaining the app  (for free, as he has always done), and so this time around, the app has stayed broken.

I do have a new developer lined up — another volunteer, because I am broke and the app loses me a small amount money every year. I’ll announce who it is when we have a new version. His first order of business is to rebuild the entire app in Objective C, so future iOS updates won’t break compatibility. (As much?) And then, if all goes well, we will start working on new features — including making it a universal app, in-app purchases of the eBooks, and some other things that have been on my to-do list, but dormant for lack of time in my brother’s schedule.

Any feature requests would be welcome!

The French trailer for his next film, Mood Indigo, is online and it looks wonderful. The story may not hold together, or it will be a little too weird for many of you, but it’s a safe bet that some of the images will make me smile, so I’ll be there.

Here’s the synopsis (courtesy Coming Soon): “In a world where you can travel around on a pink cloud or literally be swept off an ice-skating rink into a hole, Colin, a wealthy young man and inventor of the cocktail-mixing piano, wants to fall in love. With the help of his cook Nicolas and best friend Chick, he meets Chloe, the incarnation of a Duke Ellington tune. But soon after their wedding, Chloe falls ill. She has a water lily growing in her chest. Ruined by medical expenses, Colin resorts to increasingly desperate methods to save his beloved’s life…”

Mood Indigo stars Audrey Tautou, Romain Duris, Omar Sy, Gad Elmaleh, Philippe Torreton, Aïssa Maïga and Charlotte le Bon. It comes out in April in France. There’s no telling when we’ll get it over in the States.

Thanks to Miles Mercer for access to the Hollywood Theater and Earl Luckes for access to the Parkway Theater (and turning on the projector). Historic photographs of the Hollywood Theater courtesy the Northwest Architectural Archives, University of Minnesota Libraries.

Music: “Virtutes Instrumenti” by Kevin MacLoed (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Here’s one more piece of art from the Multiplex-inspired card game I’m working on for my Game Design class.

This card illustration is by Angela Melick, who does the aweseome strip Wasted Talent. She also did this guest strip for Multiplex not very long ago, so you should have already started reading her comic. If you haven’t, you and I cannot be friends.

Angela was tasked with the film still for Katy Perry’s Grandmama, in which Katy Perry (“in her directorial debut”) goes undercover as her own grandmother (Obviously, it’s a lazy reference to Tyler Perry’s Madea flicks, mixed with more than a little bit of Big Momma’s House. Blame me for that.)

There’s stil time to contribute a film still to the Multiplex card game, please e-mail me some LINKS to your samples (no attachments!) — gordon at multiplexcomic.com, of course — and also let me know some genres of film you might be interested in doing. I need the art by the end of the month (and I might be able to push it a little bit longer than that), so get a hold of me soon!

Here’s another piece of art from the Multiplex-inspired card game I’m working on for my Game Design class.

This card illustration is by Jason Swearingen, who was one of my writers at the late, lamented Movie Make-out. He currently draws and designs comics for the Dread Arts Company, a Chicago-based comics publisher, so check that out.

Jason’s “assignment” was to create a still for the (fake) Gangers Action flick, Mexican Standoff. The synopsis read: “When three criminals on the lam from three different cartels take refuge in the same safehouse, all hell breaks loose.” Jason took an “A Gang Apart” (Tarantino) approach to the project, and I think the results are pretty freakin’ fantastic.

Once again… if you would like to contribute a film still to the Multiplex card game, please e-mail me some LINKS to your samples (no attachments!) — gordon at multiplexcomic.com, of course — and also let me know some genres of film you might be interested in doing. I need the art by the end of the month — so it’s a quick turn-around! Please do not volunteer if you cannot meet OR BEAT this deadline or follow directions, because I won’t be able to use your art and you will have wasted your time, and I will feel badly about it, but that’s just how it is. (If you’re interested in doing more than one, that would be awesome, too, but we’ll take it one at a time.)

The shitty part is, because this is a student project, there is a zero dollar budget. However, there’s a chance that if playtesting goes well, I’ll be publishing this as a proper game next year (or so), in which case all of the artists whose work I use in that will be paid to license their work. And, of course, you/they would keep their copyright.