Category: Son of Stuck Funky

Jarre Adore

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Finally. And what a payoff! It turns out that Mrs. Winters is a frumpy, Westviewian-bodied, patented Tomban “cute mom”-type who probably has the milk, cookies and comic books on the coffee table already. That BanTom, never afraid to firmly stick with what works.

Meanwhile we can probably assume that the perennially disappointing Frankie will use the dismal lighting at Marianne’s mom’s house to his advantage via the magic of those darn computer machines they make these days and create a scandalous video he’ll sell to DMZ for cash-money-profit. I guess he’ll use some sort of filter to rein in Mrs. Winters…uh…”ample” behind to match Marianne’s painfully bony and weirdly angular body type. Absolutely brilliant.  God I just want to punch this comic strip so hard sometimes, you know?

Seriously though, how much would some gossip outlet really be willing to pay for something like this? Maybe ten thousand dollars or thereabouts? I just can’t see how Frankie breaks even here, much less makes a profit at this. And I still don’t understand his motive here, did he choose the SJ production because it’s the next big thing and just happened to run into Darin by chance or did he choose to target SJ because Boy Lisa works there? Because right now Frankie is a guy who laid out what had to have been many tens of thousands of dollars at the least to obtain a piece of gossip worth a fraction of that, for no established reason other than he just does stuff like that sometimes. As usual, none of the pieces fit together at all and everything contradicts everything else.

And No One’s Gonna Save You When DMZ Reports This Tripe

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(Note to Ban, Tom: using words like “thrilling” in the dialog fools no one. “Gee Mason, this sure is an entertaining briskly-paced car ride!”…see what I mean?)

The greatest trick BanTom ever pulled was somehow managing to rehash the plot of the very story he was telling even as it was unfolding, something few if any writers have ever pulled off. Mainly because most other ordinary writers like to entertain their readers with, you know, ideas and plot twists and cool stuff like that. But not our pal BatNom, no sir, he likes to keep things simple and repetitive. Repetition: the shitty writer’s best friend, lifelong pal, reliable chum. Good ol’ repetition. Always there when you need it.

(SIGH) So Frankie is still scheming will ill intent and Mason and Marianne are still driving around. The studio certainly grants Mr. Jarre a lot of leeway, you know? The guy abandons the set on a whim whenever he likes, sometimes for days or weeks at a time. Maybe he can score Mrs. Winters a job on the movie, I mean why not just go all-in at this point? I will tell you this though, if they’re not at her mother’s house by tomorrow, everyone dies. One of the things I really miss about old-fashioned newspapers was the way I could always tear out that day’s FW strip and angrily rip it up when it annoyed me like it is today, but that’s too expensive nowadays.

How I Took A Week And A Half To Meet Your Mother

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That look on Mason’s face in panel two is without a doubt the look of a man who’s just become very aroused by the thought of meeting his sexy young co-star’s mother, who’s probably just about in his wheelhouse age-wise too. I just love how oblivious and blithe he is about it all too, like he doesn’t give a damn about Cindy and her jealous nonsense anymore, not when there’s a hot starlet’s mom out there just dying to meet him.

And check out Frankie, lurking around with his cell phone camera like some low-budget Allen Funt, still ominously sneering away with abandon. Heh heh heh, this will serve that Mason Jarre right for, uh, being his first paying customer and, uh…what’s the point of this again? Oh yeah, that’s right, TomBan never bothered to tell us what Frankie’s motives are here so as of right now it’s just stuff happening for no apparent reason. In other words, your typical FW Act III story.

Film Food Flim Flam

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Looks like it’s Frankie’s lucky day, which by my calculations will mark his first lucky day since way, way back in Act I when his poodle-headed cockeyed homely nerd girl fantasy finally came true. Now comes the part where he concocts a phony story about Mason and Marianne, which will send Cindy into a violent huge-fonted rage. So predictably BanTom. And that dialog is just atrocious…”even when I didn’t believe in myself”…LOL, once again Batiuk just uncannily captures the way “real” women speak.

The whole Film Food thing continues to amuse me to no end. Look at that set-up, chairs, fancy-schmancy two-pronged forks and everything. He must have spent a small fortune on that thing, not to mention the licenses and permits and so forth. Seems like a lot of work and expense to go through just to obtain some gossip, he could have just used a fraction of that money to bribe someone or something.

And this whole “Mason is merely mentoring his younger fellow actor and not trying to hit on her at all” thing he’s doing with these two is making me queasy. Wasn’t his fiancee totally melting down just a few minutes ago in strip time? His first reaction was to grab an intimate bite at a mysterious food truck with his co-star then volunteer to meet her mother? Obvious Mason hasn’t been in too many committed relationships before, as getting closer to the perceived enemy your significant other despises tends not to work very well in most cases.

Takes One To Blow One

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“Lampshades Askew – The Cliff Anger Story”

I’m looking forward to the part where Cliff explains what he was doing for those sixty years between film gigs. Should be some compelling stuff there. She’ll no doubt have minutes of footage to sift through. It’ll be the first documentary film ever where they ADD stuff from the cutting room floor.

“Food, dope, hookers…you can get anything delivered in Manhattan but just try to find a lampshade de-skewerer that speaks f*cking English in that town, consarnit! No one knows the shame I’ve had to endure (beings weeping). Uneven shadows, difficulty reading properly…so many wasted decades….damn that Nixon for de-regulating the lampshade de-skewering industry back in ’73!”

BanTom is really going all out to very, very slowly and painstakingly set the stage here, or as we call it, “killing as much time as humanly possible to avoid having to exert any effort at all or create a story anyone would actually want to read”. I’ve seen enough wry Mason/Cindy banter for ten lifetimes, just get to the f*cking fireworks factory already, dammit. And what the hell is the deal with this f*cking movie? What is it, “9 1/2 Weeks In Space” or something? It’s more like “9 1/2 Years”, amirite?