• Thanks to ALL of you for the entries in our name the View Askew 5 title page contest. By far with all the talkbacks and emails, we had over 500 titles suggested, so you all came through with flying colors. You did not disappoint! Thanks to each and every one of you who entered.

After careful consideration, we’ve got a winner — John Lovegrove came up with the title of “SCOOPING THE MONKEY” and it sounds just perfect. It’s simple, takes a cue from the excellent “Developing The Monkey” column at Psycomic, thus, “Scooping The Monkey”, or STM for short, will be how we refer to the new page. Congrats again to John who will be sent a brand new Chasing Amy DVD for his excellent suggestion.

The new page’s full title will read “View Askew 5: Scooping The Monkey”.

Okay, didn’t win? Want another chance? Read below for your chance to enter phase 2 of the contest!

• Alright, we’ve got a title. Now comes the REALLY tough part. We’ve always been the first to admit that we plain SUCK at graphics design, so yet again we’re putting a call in to the News Askew readers with some graphics talent to undertake the design of the logo for our new Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back page.

The rules? The image must fit nicely as the title of a page. It doesn’t need to follow any strict height or width requirements, mind you, but it SHOULD be wider than taller. Look at the main News Askew logo for an idea, but again, no strict dimension requirements. Those of you who take a stab at this probably know what we mean anyway.

Next rule: The new site will have a BLACK background, so the graphic must project well on top of solid black. ‘Nuff said there.

Finally: The graphic MUST incorporate the following text: “Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back: Scooping The Monkey”. Break it up however you want, with the first part at the top, “Scooping The Monkey” at the bottom, whatever. Hey, if you are just creative with text, you can make the logo out of text entirely without any pictures. Just give it a shot!

That’s about it, really. Include any colors, graphics, and embellishments that you want, so long as you follow the requirements above, and you’re good. When you’ve got a masterpiece you’re happy with, send it along to SCOOPS@NEWSASKEW.COM. We’ll pool all the entires and choose our favorite or, if we get a TON, maybe hold a vote to let you choose your favorite.

The winner of the best logo contest will get a brand new, sealed Chasing Amy DVD as well as a rare sealed Mallrats DIVX disc. Again, no deadline on this one, but we’ll give you some time, since we know this graphics design stuff ain’t easy. Good luck!

• Check it out, folks! What we’ve got here for ya is a scan of the ad running in the new Video Business magazine for the Clerks cartoon DVD! We’re pretty sure this represents what the final cover to the disc will look like…The prices you see in bold are the prices the dealers pay for the units though, which explains why they’re so low…Retail on the DVD will be $29.99 and $19.99 on the VHS. The DVD bonuses will be: Animatics, Audio Commentary, Character Development Feature, “The Clerks Style” Feature, the Superbowl TV spot, and more. DVD-ROM owners will get access to Storyboards and screenplays from the episodes. Very, very cool! Don’t forget Kev & Jason intro each and every episode as Jay & Silent Bob! Needless to say, each and every one of you should use some of that Christmas money and get yourself a copy of this one when it hits shelves on February 20th.

• We ran the announcement on this as a newsbite last week and apparently some of you didn’t notice it, so we’re running the summary as a full story this time around. Anyway, Bravo’s “Inside The Actor’s Studio” show is a very well done Q&A session that gets famous folks from the biz and covers an actor or actress’ career, shows clips, and the like.

On the episode, Ben gave alot of really funny answers to (host) James Lipton’s questions, and Lipton had quite a bit of praise for Chasing Amy and Dogma. They showed clips of both, as well too. Toward the end, they pointed out that Matt Damon was in the audience, along with Harvey Weinstein. They obviously taped this just a few weeks before Bounce came out, as they referred to it as his new movie — coming soon. Sum of All Fears was even discussed. We assume this program will re-air on Bravo soon, so check your local listings and catch it if you have the means. Sorry if you missed it due to the small newsbite last week.

• Psycomic has posted a review of the Clerks trade paperback.
• “Bruno”, the film that we reported Joey Lauren Adams appearing in a while back, will surface on Starz this month. Joey’s got only a very small bit of screen time in this one, from what we hear. Our scooper reviews it HERE.

• We’ve been holding out over the weekend on posting the new Psycomic info as we’ve been waiting to see if anything else majorly newsworthy popped up and, well, it just really didn’t. With the movie not yet shooting, Psycomic and the trades are going to be the best place to dig up casting info until Kevin can finally make some official announcements. That being said, here’s a couple of the things we COULD come up with, along with the aforementioned Psycomic column news from this past Friday:

• This week’s Psycomic “Developing The Monkey” stems from Kev’s 5 hour or so chat with Selma Blair, who had quite a bit to discuss about a past nemesis of his, Reese Witherspoon. The title? “The Unholy Tale of Greasy Reese Witherspoon”. That just about says it all, doesn’t it? Here’s a little preview:

Read all about it right HERE!

• A piece regarding Kevin Smith & Peter David’s supposed rivalry appears at Silver Bullet Comics today, entitled “The Battle of the Bulges”. You can find it HERE at the Silver Bullet Comics website. They give it a “rumor value of 9 out of 10” since it’s based on posts Kev’s made, so it’s not as much rumor as a lot of the other stuff there.
• The Fall 2000, Volume 9, #1 issue of Filmmaker magazine has a brief article on Vulgar on page 38. There’s a picture of Scot Mosier, Kevin Smith, Monica Hampton, and Bryan Johnson, as well as the article below:

• Was anyone else out there not THAT impressed with “Unbreakable”? Sure, one can appreciate the pacing and the comic book stuff and how it all builds, but it just more seems like we’re looking at a director who gets an idea for a shock ending and works backwards. It seems like Unbreakable is one of those movies that film buffs should appreciate for what it is, but the payoff when it came, while a good surprise, just didn’t seem worth the ride. We assume you’ll all talk about this now, so we warn those of you that didn’t see the film yet to stay away from the Talkbacks, as once you know the secret, any fun of an initial viewing will be ruined for ya.

Alright, so things are slowing back down again here, but we’ve gathered a couple of NewsBites as we hate to take 2 days off straight. There’s always SOMETHING worth reporting! So let’s take a look:

• Don May’s posted some nice comments about Vulgarthon and his experiences there at his Synapse Films website, which you can read HERE. Don’s working on the finishing touches for the “A Better Place” DVD as we speak.
• The New York Times posted an article on that Affleck/Damon “Project Greenlight”. The big news here is about the website itself that’s surrounding the event.
• Speaking of those guys, they’re donating a fiberglass cod (yeah, you read it right) for an auction benefiting some local Boston charities. Here’s details: