• While you’re enjoying today’s new SModcast, check this little snippet out from Joe Gross — In the vein of those animated shorts that fans sometimes do to Howard Stern clips, Joe’s animated a hilarious snippet from a recent SModcast where Kevin and Scott discussed Malcolm Ingram’s Canadian political knowledge — Take a look at the fun clip right HERE.
• Variety quotes Kevin in this article about Celebrities using the internet to reach their fan base:
  George Lucas has long cultivated an interactive relationship with the geekerati on all things Lucasfilm, especially “Star Wars.” Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones 4” approach derives from the Lucas DIY ethic. “They’re keeping their fan base happy until the movie comes out,” says web-savvy director Kevin Smith. “‘Indiana Jones is presold, man! That audience is coming.”

  
  Early Internet adopter Smith learned about a group of “Clerks” fan sites back in 1996 when he was depressed after “Mallrats” bombed. Reading the commenters buoyed his spirits. He hired one of the site creators to build his first site. When Smith suggested doing a weekly live Q&A, he was told all he had to do was join the site’s message boards and chat with his fans directly whenever he felt like it. Ever since, Smith spends several hours a week with fans. He’s proud that the site has grown organically, adding merchandise when fans demand it. Smith uses his year-old MySpace page, which boasts more than 172,000 friends, to announce book-signings and public appearances, which promptly sell out. “I don’t organize with the studio at all,” he says. “It’s about letting us do whatever we want.”

  Listening to your fans can be both good and bad, Smith says. “It’s not Kenneth Turan of the L.A. Times, it’s what the guy who paid for your pic has to say,” says Smith. “You have to keep in perspective that you can’t believe the enthusiastic positive stuff or the shitty horrible soul-crushing stuff. The truth is between the two.”

• Cinematical has picked up on Kevin’s recent praise for Ben Affleck’s directorial debut, “Gone Baby Gone”.
  
  
  

• We ran the text last update, but here’s the actual scan of Entertainment Weekly’s recent mention of Kevin’s blog (with that A-rating)!

• And finally today, just because it’s a SModcast-heavy update, the world’s tallest man, who was discussed at length in the very first SMod, was recently married. Mr Bao Xishun , who stands at 7ft 8.95in tall, tied the knot with Xia Shujian, 29. Later!

• Entertainment Weekly has some great things to say about Kevin’s famous “My Boring Ass Life” blog. This comes from their story “Top 20 Best and Worst Celebrity Blogs”. You can probably guess in which 20 Kevin’s site appears:
  KEVIN SMITH
  The Fairly Odd Filmmaker

  silentbobspeaks.com

  ANGLE: Diary, comedic op-ed, and plugs for his ”SModcast” podcasts and live appearances.

  HIGH POINT: It’s a tie between a happy-birthday greeting for his wife (”From a one-night-stand to my partner and soul mate. You boggle my mind, you fill my heart, you race my blood, you take my breath away”) and a series of e-mails between Smith and a writer from The Clarion-Ledger in Mississippi debating whether Alanis Morissette sang a tune called ”One of Us.” (Smith was right — she didn’t.)

  LOW POINT: After famously attacking film critic Joel Siegel for walking out of a Clerks II screening, Smith repents when he discovers that the spat is mentioned in a Siegel obituary.

  VERDICT: Smith calls his diary ”My Boring-Ass Life”; it’s apropos, given that much of it addresses subjects such as his diet and his man-crush on Bruce Willis. Nonetheless, fans will appreciate his candor.

  GRADE: A-

  The blog’s been around for quite a while now, and continues to evolve to reflect the current atmosphere at View Askew and in Kevin’s life. We expect the blog to continue for many years, and look forward to all the great “Zack & Miri” news that we’re gonna see in there in the coming months.

• Oh, boy, VH-1 dug up some dim bulbs this year for their always fun to watch “World Series of Pop Culture” — So far folks have been missing some easy quizzers, including last night’s new episode. The defending champs were given a question about “Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back”. It was: “What was the name of the comic book characters Jay & Bob go to stop a Hollywood movie?” Believe it or not, NEITHER team could get this one right! We won’t insult you by giving the answer here. Sigh.
  
• Kevin makes a very brief appearance in the new trailer for Jaws documentary “The Shark is Still Working”. The guys who put this together have worked their butts off to live the Jaws lifestyle and cover all aspects of this historic film. Kevin was interviewed a while back for the doc, and definitely appears in the final cut. That’s it for today, so far — We’ll have more news later as it breaks! Thanks for visiting the new News Askew, watch for more visual enhancements to the site soon (hopefully, this weekend).

• Looks like we’ve got the first glimpses of home for an official “Zack and Miri” website — Both domains www.zackandmiri.com as well as www.zachandmiri.com (in case someone makes a spelling mistake) have been registered, and currently just house that famous page of the script that was sent over to Entertainment Weekly magazine. Keep your eyes on these sites, we’re expecting some more tidbits may show up here and there — And you can bet we’ll have full coverage here at the new News Askew X as well.

• Kevin and Scott did indeed find time to treat us to another episode of their compelling and free MP3 podcast, SModcast. These guys just continue to come up with some of the most intriguing and funny conversations — We’re hooked and know if you’re not, you will be soon. SModcast remains one of the best shows on the web, and we’re proud to send you their way every week. Exclusively at Quick Stop Entertainment, courtesty View Askew Productions! The rundown for this week:
  
  
  SModcast 19: We Owe It All to Nook-Nook – In which our heroes broadcast from a talking house, get their Trek on, briefly interrupt the proceedings to do some work, suss out why they never abused the casting couch, debate an indecent proposal, brag about oral proficiencies gone to waste, marvel over the frigid, define love, and hail the first cro-magnon sexual astronaut…

  Get on over at grab your own personal copy! As always, listener discretion is advised.

  And hey, while you’re over at Quick Stop Entertainment, check out some of the other great exclusives there — It really is an amazingly cool site full of content — Including a new epsidoe of Paul Dini’s entertaining “Monkey Talk”. You just can’t go wrong with puppets.

• Via this board post, Kevin confirms that “Zack and Miri” has been moved to the proverbial front burner of the stove, so to speak, making it very likely the next View Askew production to be filmed and released. “Red State” will continue, just a bit further down the line (likely still the next flick after “Zack and Miri”).
• Director Richard Kelly updated the “Southland Tales” MySpace blog with an update on the flick. He says that they are about halfway through completing new visual effects for the film, and that they “have to deliver everything by the end of summer.” He goes on to mention that “a company has been hired by Sony to begin work on a trailer,” and that a release date will be announced very soon. We’re not sure what this means for Kevin’s part, though we certainly hope he’s still included in this new version.

• Stevan Mena’s BRUTAL MASSACRE (Brian O Halloran’s new horror-themed comedy) will premiere, appropriately, this Friday, July 13th, on Long Island. O’Halloran will be there in person, giving you the chance to meet him, especially if you missed him at the recent Fangoria con up there. The showing is part of the Long Island International Film Expo, at the Bellmore Movies in Bellmore, New York. Fun begins at 9:45 PM. You can get tix at the theater box office. Visit the official website for futher info. Stop by and see Brian, one of the kindest dudes you’ll ever meet. And Brian O’ Halloran WILL be there that night if fans want to meet him but couldn’t get to that Fangoria con!

• Our thanks again to master capture dude Will who’s got the high quality MP3 audio for just about all of the program captured in each segment (no commercials, of course). The first 10 minutes are missing, other than that, it’s all here. Enjoy, and thanks as always to Will for doing his great work.
  Segment 1, 64Kbps, 11.45MB
  Segment 2, 64Kbps, 7.19MB
  Segment 3, 64Kbps, 9.92MB
  Segment 4, 64Kbps, 5.44MB
  Segment 5, 64Kbps, 6.06MB

• CHUD calls Mallrats #40 in their list of 50 cinematic “guilty pleasures” with a fairly extensive write-up. Here’s a few tidbits:
  Instead of pushing off from the critical success of Clerks, Kevin Smith made a film that proved he might actually be the voice of a generation, if Generation X was the lazy, unmotivated bunch of bums some claimed it to be. The characters in Mallrats occupy some neutral zone between junior high and college, and instead of the relatively accurate, if exaggerated dialogue of his debut, they all spew the verbose fantasties and monologues which would later be proven as Smith’s de facto m.o. The only time the dialogue works this time is during the game show finale, where I have to admit it’s actually funny as hell, even if Jason Lee’s jabs at Brian O’Halloran amount to shooting fish in a barrel. “I should know — we can smell our own,” gets me every time.
• How ’bout some more Rats news? Mallrats hit HD-DVD on June 26th, and High Def Digest has the first review that we’ve seen (we don’t have the high def equipment setup to review these puppies just yet). In short, the reviewer does give high marks to the film and the disc, which contains everything in the Mallrats 10th Anniversary package from a couple years back. Sounds like the picture and sound both offer some small step ups in quality.
• Shock Till You Drop and Cinematical have more San Diego ComicCon details realeased today. As we mentioned, Kevin will be speaking on Friday July 27th – STYD calls it a Q&A, while Cinematical just refers to it as a talk. Expect the usual format there, we’re betting on some new stories, too — A preamble to the big August 2nd event in Red Bank!
• Check out a new View Askew themed podcast called Salsashark. Looks like he’s got some more episodes on the way, too.

• We appreciate the feedback we’ve heard form you all on the new design and site so far. First up, we want you all to know we’re glad that you like what you’re seeing, and also appreciate what we’re doing. The site that you’re looking at is, really, in our eyes, still very much a “beta” site. We didn’t want to miss our 10th birthday, and had the site at least in good working order, for the most part, so we decided to go ahead with the rollout, figuring more eyes on it would mean more testing, and more feedback. So, we thank you for all you’re doing so far.

  The first round of bugs we plan to tackle are visual ones. We can see that a lot of you (almost 50% of the site visitors) are using Internet Explorer 7 or 6. This will definitely result in some display issues, especially in IE6. Once we get the bug fixed, you’ll see all the pretty pictures much better. We also have some toolbar overlap with the top dropdown menus that’s only happening in IE, not Firefox or Safari. So, visually fixing up the site is our top task at the moment.

  For those of you with smaller screens or resolutions, we hear you. The right sidebar is a bit larger than necessary and we’re working to take that down a bit to assist you. The site looks awesome in widescreen settings and higher resolutions, and takes full advantage, it just doesn’t scale down as nice as we’d like. We’re working on it, and we’ll ensure that you have as pleasant an experience as the rest of us. We have already started removing the sidebar from pages such as a the Drinking Games splash screen, where the large image was causing issues for smaller screens.

  Header graphics will return, either the one you know and love or a brand new design. We’re doing all the design off-site right now, so our changes don’t interfere with the site you’re viewing. When we get it looking pretty, we’ll roll out design fixes, as available. The site’s look will evolve over the next few weeks and months, all for the better.

  Iphone users: We hear the site looked pretty good on the phone’s safari browser, though with all the extra header and sidebar fluff, we worried it was a bit much. So, for now, you’ll get a special version of the page automatically when you connect via your iphone, that will just give you a plain version of the news. We’re hoping to soon add in an option that will allow you to switch between the bare bones version and back to the full colorful version, if you choose.

  Our live archive is something we love and will continue to improve over the next few weeks. It involves going back to every story and categorizing it to allow more specific searching through old posts. Soon, we’ll have an advanced search that will give you category based control, as well. But not until we have everything in its place. Categories are brand new for News Askew this time around, so it involves a lot of time and effort in reading each old post, and deciding where to put it. Even creating new categories as we see fit. The live archive is up and running but is beta software using javascript. It may not work for you. If not, please try a more recent browser and ensure your javascript is running.

  We sincerely hope you are enjoying the new News Askew, and that you’ll stick with us as the new site continues to evolve into its new form. Thanks as always for your patience and support.

• Just to let you fine folks who employ our handy RSS syndication feed, when the new site went live, the feed address CHANGED. We temporarily still have the old RSS file up to allow folks and sites time to switch over, however, that will soon go bye-bye. So, if you have any subscriptions, please update them. Also, if you make use of any RSS syndication sites out there (Feedburner and the like), please drop them a line and let them know that our address has changed. We assume this eventually happens automagically, but if there’s a quicker way to help that along, cool. We notice a ton of RSS traffic in our new hitlogs, so we know a lot of folks have been using it. Most modern browsers will pick this up on their own, however, outside websites and external RSS applications won’t, so please update your devices and software.

So, note the NEW address, http://www.newsaskew.com/feed. And tell your pals. Thanks for shopping with us at the new News Askew today. We’ll have a news update for ya later — Just been spending the day categorizing for our new Live Archive. Have you checked them out yet?

• Not only is the world going 7/7/07 crazy today, but we are too, celebrating exactly TEN YEARS of News Askew on the web — Wow, that’s a LONG TIME. Ten years. In porting over the redesign and news database for the new site you’re now viewing, we had the chance to look back on our travels and experiences since we started posting on the web back in 1997. What a long, fun ride it’s been. We’re very happy to continue to provide your almost daily dose of View Askew news, and thankful for those of you that have been with us, whether it’s for 10 years, 1 year, or 1 week. It’s readers and scoopers like yourselves that keep this site alive, and have made it the success that it is. Today’s new site represents a fresh beginning for the next ten years, and presents the most advanced base for News Askew that we’ve ever had.

Let’s learn more about the new site, including what’s done, what’s NOT done, what’s on the horizon, and more. We’ve also got your weekend edition of News Askew, so let’s not forget about that (the show must go on, after all, despite our lack of sleep squashing site bugs). And of course, let’s again say THANK YOU to each and every one of you for keeping the site alive, and of course to Mr. Kevin Smith, who pays the bills and keeps this site coming your way.