What characters were rip-offs of others? Are comics and pro wrestling actually tied together? Is the story from the comic better than the story in the movie? Just what the heck was happening in comics in the 90’s?

These are some questions any reasonable human being who contributes a portion of their weekly salary to the funny books may ask. The Flickcast alumni Jonathan ‘Wally’ Weilbaecher and I join forces with Golden Apple Comics in Los Angeles to answer these and more.

With regulars Joe Slepski of The Joe on Joe podcast, Pablo Romero-Estevez and Alan ‘Sizzler’ Kistler of Crazy Sexy Geeks and some guests like Lucha Underground’s Joey Ryan and The Flickcast co-founder Matt Raub, we haven’t come to many conclusions but we have had a ton of fun arguing our way there.

Zac Effron is Jason, a 20-or-so book-cover designer living in New York with his best friend and co-worker Daniel (The Spectacular Now‘s Miles Teller) and other best friend Mikey (Michael B. Jordan). Mikey discovers his wife canoodling with the lawyer who will eventually handle their divorce, and so he and Dan and Jason make a pact to remain single. However, Jason meets Ellie (Imogen Poots), they hit it off, but he’s reluctant to tell his friends because of, you know, the pact.

And Dan meets someone. And Mikey hooks up with someone. And they keep those trysts secret, too, because, again, pact. And to go any further meet be a spoiler, but so then would be any wild stab-in-Central-Park conjecture as to what happens.

That Awkward Moment isn’t a difficult movie to review, because it’s not very good. The dialogue plays like any mid-90s attempt to imitate Pulp Fiction — which is basically sitting around a table dwelling on the minute, trying to sound clever.

Jason, for example, believes it an incredibly profound insight that, when coming from a girl, nothing good ever follows the word, “So…” as in “So, where is this going?” a phrase I’m certain was the film’s title in at least one stage of development (but then they couldn’t say “Based on the popular meme!”), and yet, who reading this has not had an awkward break in the conversation when “So…” has led to intercourse?

I wasn’t holding out much hope for this one. Like anyone with a brain and a distinct fear of transforming from an adventurous roustabout into an office drone, I have a deep appreciation for the work of James Thurber (not to mention Danny Kaye, who starred in the original adaptation), and when the trailer hit, it looked like Ben Stiller’s take would be much more of a saga instead of a few simple flights from banality.

And while Stiller’s Walter Mitty departs halfway from flights of fancy, the first half is a delight. Mitty is a negative assets manager at Life Magazine – negative assets as in he’s the guy who handles photo negatives, and Life Magazine as in the periodical that Gestapo agents read when they’re tailing Indiana Jones and which, specifically in this flick, is in the process of becoming a purely online publication.

Mitty’s tasked with developing the final cover’s image, which has been misplaced, and which causes the sleazy consultant handling the transition (Adam Scott, in a wickedly dorky beard) to breathe stertorously down his neck.

In addition to that, Mitty’s currently engaged in setting up his eHarmony profile despite having gone nowhere and done nothing, diminishing his chances of attracting the pretty new hire (Kirsten Wiig). Helping him is Todd (a voice that may be recognizable, but whose identity is one of the best reveals, jokes, and sequences in the film), an overly dedicated eHarmony assistant.

The film has a fantastic start, as all the major performers – Stiller, Wiig, and Scott – come from the background of exploiting social awkwardness and revel in creating a facade of meekness in their characters, a meekness that barely veils the passions behind it. Scott in particular, is so good at each little passive-aggressive dig (I especially liked the progression of how he says “guy”: first cloying, then annoyed, then furious). And, thankfully, not all of Mitty’s daydreams are treated as immature revenge fantasies or love-struck dalliances. One sequence in particular gets very creative as Stiller and Scott battle over a Stretch Armstrong doll throughout the streets of New York, using the roads as skis and whatever else as improvised weapons.

When the original Kinect launched in 2010, it is safe to say the peripheral had a share of flaws. It wasn’t as detailed as one would expect and couldn’t detect hands and fingers the way it was originally designed to. It also had a hard time reading individuals under a certain height. Considering Microsoft was trying to drive kids to play games like Kinectimals with the controllerless gaming, that was up there in the list of top functionality f&#* ups from them.

One that also seemed to be an issue was the rumor that the Kinect also had trouble reading people with darker skin tone. This lead to the premise that the Kinect was actually racist.

The team at Whiskey and Waffles joined up with Sandwich Productions (because the combination just sounded too damn tasty to ignore) and created the mocumentary simply entitled Racist XBox. We were thrilled with the end result and just how awesome WallE looked as a forensic scientist. We won’t spoil anything here but I will say there is a little bit of mature language so I wouldn’t go showing this to your 10 year old.

YouTube has more than its fair share of short form series. It also has heaps and heaps of video game content. But with the exception of a few standouts like Freddie Wong’s Video Game High School, there aren’t many great examples of gaming and short form series together.

Someone trying to change that is Petros L. Ioannou and his series My Life as a Video Game. Funded by a Kickstarter that raised $32,000, My Life as a Video Game will be a 9 episode first season that explores what happens when gamer Don DeWitt, played by Petros, gets too into the game and is pulled in to a world where games are real life.

Exploring multiple gaming genres, Don finds Kera Althorn (Jennifer Polansky) and is guided by the MENU System (Brent Black, better known on YouTube as BrentalFloss) through this pixel infused world. FPS, side scrolling beat ’em up and space combat all look to be fair game in this epic launched on Petros’ YouTube channel LeonUnity. You can head there now to check out the first two episodes of My Life as a Video Game or check them out after the jump.

As the Flickcast’s resident bachelor, I am well acquainted with the world of dating apps. Of those, one that stands out amongst the crowd is Tinder. What starts out as a binary system of yes or no, users are able to hop on and swipe one way if they are interested and another if they aren’t. Get a match and skip the initial fear of rejection since you only find out if someone is interested in you if you both have swiped yes. But since it is a dating iPhone app, it is ripe for comedic mocking and possibilities. That brings us to Tinder: The Movie.

Tinder: The Movie is a mashup of the popular dating app combined with the storytelling from The Social Network’s trailer. What Bad Weather Films does alongside fellow YouTubers Matthias, Justin James Hughes and Olga Kay is create one of the most interesting and comical trailer parodies currently on YouTube. These guys hit all the beats with their humor but still get across why the Tinder app is as popular as it is because of its unique functionality. Sam, from Bad Weather Films, takes the starring role while his counterpart Peter takes the role of the computer geek that makes it all possible.

The poster declares the theme of the film to be “knowing when to say when,” which is as good a summation as any, and has just the right amount of vagueness. In this case the “when” applies to, well, I’m not entirely sure — on the surface it’s when to draw the line at casual flirting. Or when to break up with a partner who’s coasting through the relationship. Or when to grow up — a theme that’s driven far too many indie films.

That lack of understanding is probably my fault, but it may also be director Joe Swanberg’s intent. This is the same guy who made Silver Bullets, a film that made me want to abort fully developed children, mainly because it meandered through the running time with no direction, no story, and a mass of sickly dialogue that wanted to sound fresh and spontaneous but came off as fully self-aware.

He tries a similar approach in Drinking Buddies, but it works infinitely better here. The actors improvise their dialogue, with an outline of the major plots points to guide them. I think that works best whenever the characters have an uncomfortable pause, but aside from that there is an easiness to their interactions. Granted, it should be simple for anyone to sell an attraction to Olivia Wilde.

Who else but Edgar Wright can draw so much pathos and emotion from almost nothing at all? “Nothing” in the sense that when his best films Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and now, The World’s End jerk you into seriousness, you’re surprised by how you care about the characters – before then it’s been joke after joke, and somewhere along the way, or perhaps all during it, they’re endearing themselves. Since he’s been able to do it twice before, it’s not a fluke; it’s a skill, and a damn good one.

I’m still not entirely sure how he does it, but I do know that he doesn’t pause every other moment for some dubious self-reflection, and he makes a lot of character-based jokes – that is, jokes that are funny within the context of the character telling them. He also drops clues here and there so that when the tonal shift comes, it’s a payoff instead of a distraction – more importantly, it means something.

Vague enough? Well, whatever it is that Edgar Wright’s able to do and do well, The World’s End is the best display of that yet – in addition to being a very funny movie.

The story proper follows Gary King (Simon Pegg), a man inches away from full-on dereliction who opens with a story of the greatest night of his life. We see VHS-style grainy flashbacks to the early ’90s when Gary and his crew attempted the Newton Haven Golden Mile – a 12-pub crawl that no man survived, or at least conquered. Gary gave up after the ninth and went to watch the sunrise. As he glows in nostalgia, the camera zooms out to show the people Gary’s telling his story to, and it’s a very big laugh.

YouTube’s favorite gal pals are making a movie. Hannah Hart (MyHarto), Grace Helbig (DailyGrace), and Mamrie Hart (You Deserve a Drink) will star in Camp Takota as announced at VidCon 2013.

Inspired in part by Mamrie Hart’s experience working at a summer camp, the plot of the film is pretty simple: Helbig is a twentysomething who finds herself returning to her old summer camp to work. There she runs into two old friends, played by Hart and Hart. Hijinks, humor, and booze are sure to ensue if the ladies’ history holds true.

The first trailer for Camp Takota released at VidCon 2013 and mainly consists of a lot of flubbed lines and laughter, much to the delight of fans. A booth at the convention let attendees sign up for camp, get a friendship bracelet and take their camp picture.

Camp Takota will be made available exclusively on pay-to-view platform, Chill.com.

We had a pretty neat opportunity over the weekend film going audience. Pacific Rim, a phenomenal summer block buster that didn’t rely on existing IP, was going up against the scourge of cinemadom, Grown Ups 2.  A win for the former could signal a turning point in the battle between lowest common denominator and inventiveness. Instead Grown Ups made more than it’s predecessor and Pacific Rim settles for 3rd place. We all screwed the pooch on this one people.

But before we get into that, lets give props where props are due. Despicable Me 2 continues its dominating run by coming in first place against both newcomers this weekend. The $44 Million dollar weekend represents a great 46.4% drop proving that the interest in Gru and his minions is not as front loaded as some had suspected. The movie is homing in on mega-hit territory and should finish it’s run well over $300 Million.

But that’s not why we are here people.

Coming in second place was Grown Ups 2 to a total of over $42 million. I think we might now have that pesky question to the life, the universe and everything Douglas Adams wrote a whole lot about. How many millions are people willing to fork over opening weekend to a lazy, low brow ‘family comedy’? 42!

One was a slam dunk, the other was a blockbuster to be that came into the weekend stinking of behind the scenes drama. Yet in the end both hit theaters this week and obliterated expectations.

Monsters University is the prequel to one of the older PIXAR classics, telling the tale of how everyone’s favorite boogie men, Mike and Sully, learned their scare trade. The film took in $82 million over the weekend giving PIXAR its second highest opening ever, and their 14th strait number one debut. Lets just ponder that for a second, even as the creative armor of the premier animation house of the west shows some chinks in their armor, they maintain a perfect record on the financial side of the movie equation. The quality of the recent PIXAR films is up to some debate, but what can’t be denied is they still know how to make a movie people want to see.

While everyone and their mother knew MU would be a hit, the big surprise of the weekend came from the Brad Pitt zombie blockbuster, World War Z. The studio had modest expectations initially, and the general geek community had no expectations. The film veered far from the source material that is much beloved, the movie was plagued by re-shoots and seeming instability from the set, and it is a PG-13 zombie film which just feels wrong. Despite all of that working against it in the buzz department, the film was well sold and generally positive reviews helped to make all those other issues all but disappear. The net result was $66 million at the box office and a lot of turned heads.

I’ve had, for some time, the suspicion that the current comedy troop of Rogen, Hill, Cera, and Franco would eventually get to the point where, instead of a script, they would just sit around and talk. Now we have This Is the End, and if this isn’t the logical conclusion of the gang’s comedy, it’s damn close.

The premise is that Jay Baruchel is in LA to visit his friend Seth Rogen. Their friendship has been on the skids, and Rogen’s insistence that they attend a party at James Franco’s house instead of, I don’t know, hang out and smoke weed. doesn’t help. At Franco’s they meet up with Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, and several others within or slightly out of their group’s ever-expanding radius, such as Aziz Ansari, Mindy Kaling, Martin Starr, Chritopher Mintz-Plasse, and now, I guess, Emma Watson.

Freak disruptions start to occur all over the place — sinkholes swallow up many of the party-goers, others are lifted to heaven in columns of blue light, fires explode across Hollywood, and the five find themselves barricaded in Franco’s house — until Danny McBride shows up and makes their sixth.