• It was like a flashback to Ben & Matty’s Oscar speech…We KNEW we were forgetting something…And amidst all of the hangover haze from our summer bash, and the sticky, alcohol and potato chip coated kitchen floor, we totally forgot to mention Mr. Ben Affleck’s 27th birthday on Sunday! Our bad.

So, a belated one to ya, Ben, and here’s to many, many more!!!

• We’ve gotta throw together a quick one for ya tonight because we’re off to see the amazing Roger Waters in concert over in good old Hershey, PA! We hear he does a show of half Floyd stuff, half solo stuff (lots of what’s equally good), so we’re quite excited about the show.

In other news you may not care about, we’re now running at blazingly fast cable modem speeds at home, now that it’s finally come into the area. Let me tell ya, though, now that we’re running this fast, it’s going to be hard to EVER use a dial-up connection again. It’s THAT cool. Wait until homes are outfitted with internet jacks as regularly as phone and cable. Ah, paradise…

In the news today, we’ve got mostly NewsBite type stuff again, but definitely some GOOD stuff. Also, look for a few last minute prizes to be added to the raffle (we hope…man you people are getting a great deal for those dollars!) as well as a few new site features as soon as this weekend. Seems the new server is settling in, and getting used to having us around, so it’ll be time to start with the upgrades soon. Hey, we gotta get our money’s worth, right?

• In the spirit of keeping up with stuff and making it exclusive to RC, we’ve added a few new articles on our Dogma site. Mostly summaries of stuff we know already, as the press gets caught up on all the latest (The Lions Gate stuff especially). Check them out here and here.
• DVDexpress has made a list of the top 25 DVD’s based on content of deleted scenes. Not surprisingly, the jam-packed View Askew DVDs have ranked incredibly well. Mallrats is number 1 and Clerks is number 8.
• Finally, on the lighter side of things…What if the battle of Mr T. vs. Clerks took place? Find out here. We can just see it now. “I pity the fool that don’t give me a pack of cigarettes!”.

• So. Wow. Here we go…The start of yet another exciting week here at News Askew. Ya never know what’s gonna happen, and we guess that’s part of the fun. As for the new server, we’re hammering it pretty hard, and we’re told they’re not used to this high volume of a site. Oh well. Hopefully they don’t kick us off, it’s the first we’ve heard of this. That’s a good sign that we’re getting mondo hits, and that makes us happy! Speaking of that, you may have noticed the counters crashed yesterday. Neither us OR our new hosts could tell us why. We reset the main counters, but got rid of many of the counters on our subpages to try and prevent it from happening again. Now, there’s only counters on News Askew and Dogma RC.

As for other stuff, yes, we still have some ideas up our sleeves, but it’s all been happening so slowly around here with the switch that we can’t introduce stuff as quickly as we’d like. Bear with us. Hopefully all of you are finding us at the new server by now, but if you’re STILL getting that white forwarding page, let us know. Otherwise, the old server will go completely offline, sometime this week we believe.

Alright, at this point, not much more to say, except…On with the show!

• Comic book artist Jim Mahfood who did Clerks, Scud, Zombie Kid and GRRL Scouts is doing a signing at the Fantasy Shop in St. Charles in St. Louis, Missouri on Sat. August 21st from 1 to 4 p.m. Jim will have most of his material on hand to sign/sell and will be selling original sketches on request. Stop and say hi, Jim’s a good guy.

• Here’s that new Dogma pic from the Entertainment Weekly piece. We’ll throw it over on our RC pix section, too.
• Reminder: “Chasing Amy” is playing at the AMC South Barrington 30 tonight at 12:15am in Illinois. Past our bedtime, but some of you nite owls may wanna check it out. We gotta work tomorrow!

• Phew…The weekends go by alllllll too quickly, we gotta say. Anyway, welcome to a very small sunday update. Not much goin’ on at all around here, but we’ve got a few tidbits, as always. Just for the sake of putting SOMETHING on the site. The poll topic’s here as well, just to allow YOU all to decide the order in which we give out the raffle prizes on our September 1st chat…(Best prizes first OR last, basically). Top choice is gonna be the way we do things. Remember, though, you CAN win more than once if you got a lot of entries, so the order really shouldn’t matter too much. Okay, here we go now…

• Big news comes down today for Dogma…It’s going to be playing at the prestigious New York Film Festival!!! This is another excellent nod from the film community for Dogma, and we’re glad to see it. The fest is also showing “Being John Malcovich”, a flick you may have heard us mention before and that we’re just dying to see after reading Corona’s reports on the thing. Sounds weird. Anyway, both indieWIRE and The Hollywood Reporter ran a story on the films selected for the festival today…we’re just going to share with you the opening paragraphs of each piece, which mention Dogma, to keep this short. First indieWIRE, then Hollywood Reporter:

• Incredibly late update today, so if it seems rushed we apologize – I don’t even think I may take the time to hyperlink it…Well, let’s just see how long it takes to do. Regardless, there won’t be a Saturday update, it’s party time! Perhaps late, late Sunday, after sleeping off a nasty hangover, there’ll be the strength to type a few words for you good folks. We FINALLY got the DNS stuff straighted, so now, if you’re STILL not seeing the new page first (and you get the forwarding white page before the News Askew frontpage), let us know…We wanna see how bad the problem still is. If it’s gone, we’ll take the old server completely offline.

As always thanks for visiting today, we appreciate it…Hope you enjoy the news we’ve got for ya:

• Synapse Films Followup: Vincent contacted us yesterday with some reassuring news about Synapse’s DVD release date issues. They’ve all been due to oversights not on Don May’s part, but on unreliable sources providing inferior prints, unavoidable delays in recording commentaries, etc. Rather than release a bad product on time, May always opts to delay the production of the discs until everything is PERFECT. We like that. Related to that, Vincent tells us that yes, he and Don DO have a release date in mind for “A Better Place”, and that it’s coming along nicely. There’s still quite a bit of work to be done, though, including the insertion of additional scenes, the commentary, and a possible remix. Therefore, IF a date is announced, it will likely be later than expected, just to allow for that extra cushion. Vincent also states that he’d have no problem falling back on a release date a month or more if it means he can produce a superior product. So, in a nutshell: “A Better Place” WILL be worth the wait, similar to the wait for Mallrats. We’ll just all need to be patient.
• The newest issue of ‘Premiere’ presents a blurb about “Dogma”, which may contain some MINOR SPOILER MATERIAL about the theme of the flick’s ending, so skip down to the next bullet NOW if ya don’t wanna see it:

We don’t know where this comes from, really. Here’s why: The UNCUT version of Dogma we saw? It wasn’t bloody! It wasn’t THAT violent! And, get this…It has NOTHING to do with Columbine! If ANY piece of violence is going to be related back to Columbine now, even when it’s not school-related…well…we just don’t get it. Our opinion though? Kevin won’t touch a thing. At least, we hope not. After losing an hour and change, we’d hate to see even another SECOND go!

• Nothing new here, especially if you read our Wizard World coverage a couple weeks back, but Another Universe has done their own summary of the Marvel Knights panel:

• Another glowing review for a View Askew DVD! The August 10th issue of The DVD-DAILY Magazine is currently available online at their issue archive site, praises Clerks. Check it out.