Jamian’s Food and Drink on Monmouth Street in Red Bank will host a season-six premiere party Saturday for “Comic Book Men,” the AMC cable show set in film director Kevin Smith‘s Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, on Broad Street.
The free-admission party begins at 8:30 p.m. and, weather permitting, will include a screenings of classic episodes on the back patio. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)
Harley Quinn Smith, Johnny Depp and Lily-Rose Depp co-star in “Yoga Hosers,” the new feature film by Kevin Smith. Below, the cake that Cake Boss Buddy Valastro made for Smith’s birthday appearance at the the Count Basie Theatre in 2010.
The last time filmmaker/ actor/ Smodcaster/ writer/ King of Most Media Kevin Smith commandeered the Count Basie Theatre for a public birthday celebration, it was with an August 2010 Q&A session that saw his milestone 40th and magnificent head immortalized in buttercream by a fellow Jersey celeb soon to establish Red Bank cred: “Cake Boss” Buddy Valastro.
The multi-platform cult figure (and self-described “fat guy who got thrown off the plane”) may have left Leonardo for Los Angeles years ago — but as he approaches his 46th birthday, he returns to the borough of his birth; the town he gae its big-screen close-up in features like “Chasing Amy” and “Dogma;” a burb that sits at the nexus of the comix multiverse courtesy of the Smith-owned Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash and the AMC TV series Comic Book Men.
The trailer for “65 Percent,” a documentary by Mike and Jon Altino of Middletown, screens at the Red Bank Middle School at 1 p.m.
Saturday-morning cartoons, a locally made documentary and shorts-in-a-bunch enliven Saturday’s schedule of the Indie Street Film Festival, which got underway in Red Bank Wednesday night and continues through Sunday afternoon.
Click the “read more” for the full schedule and a sampling of delightful and outrageous movie trailers. Read More
Sand artist Joe Mangrum creating a temporary painting at the festival opening-night cocktail party on the Count Basie patio Wednesday night. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
Screenings at four Red Bank venues fill Friday’s schedule of the Indie Street Film Festival, which got underway Wednesday night and continues through Sunday afternoon.
Click the “read more” for the full schedule and a sampling of delightful and outrageous movie trailers.
A documentary about people who eat white dirt adds some grit to the first full day of the Indie Street Film Festival.
Scandalously long, beautiful legs. A guy with a compulsion for commandeering buses and trains. Geophagy, or dirt-eating.
These and other delightfully strange and wondrous topics fill the schedule of Red Bank’s Indie Street Film Festival as it enters its first full day of screenings and other events Thursday.
Click the “read more” for the full sked and a whole dirtload of delightful and outrageous movie trailers.
The festival flickers to life with “Morris from America” on the big screen at the Count Basie Theatre. Here’s the trailer.
Day One of the first-ever Indie Street Film Festival gets underway in Red Bank Wednesday, kicking off five days of heaven for movie lovers.
The opening day schedule is light, with one just one film lighting up the giant silver screen of the Count Basie Theatre and two parties. But the festival shifts into high gear Thursday with daylong screenings and other events at five venues, and keeps up the pace through Saturday before winding down Sunday.
Check in with redbankgreen throughout the week for festival coverage and next-day schedules with tons of trailers to help you decide which darkened room to bring your popcorn to. Meantime, here’s the first-day lineup:
A mural on Monmouth Street near Maple Avenue touts the five-day Indie Street Film Festival, which flickers to life Wednesday. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge.)
For the first time since 2007, Red Bank will swarm with screening maniacs this week as independent films, filmmakers and cinephiles invade the downtown — and one or two nearby outposts.
Encompassing nearly 100 feature-length and short films, four screening venues and a handful of bars and restaurants, the five-day Indie Street Film Festival kicks off Wednesday, promising to liven up a post-Independence Day interval when the borough traditionally slips into an early doldrums.
A merry band of self-described hippies get ready to reboard their bus, dubbed the Stockpot Kitchen, after a stop in downtown Red Bank Friday.
Traveling America “with the purpose of feeding and supporting everyone, everywhere,” according to their Facebook page, the collective just had to make a stop at Jay and Bob’s Secret Stash, the comic book store on Broad Street, they told redbankgreen. (Photo by Trish Russoniello. Click to enlarge)
Spoiler alert for fans of the cable show ‘Comic Book Men,’ shot in and around Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash on Broad Street in Red Bank: a future episode will feature a race between the Batmobile and the Green Hornet’s Black Beauty, shot Thursday afternoon on Bridge Avenue in Gotham Red Bank.
And who was riding shotgun for a faux Batman? None other than onetime Batman portrayer Adam West himself, now 85 years old. Andres Verde of Red Bank, above, got a selfie with West, following one take of the low-speed race. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)
Serial Grammy winner Alanis Morisette returns to the greater Green this Sunday, for an unplugged concert at the Count’s place.
To music fans that have helped her move more than 60 million units of sales worldwide — at least half of them via her 1995 blockbuster Jagged Little Pill — Alanis Morissette is the multiple Grammy winner (and onetime Canadian teen-pop star) who exploded onto the alt-rock landscape with “You Oughta Know;” who duetted in short order with everyone from Ringo Starr to Tricky, and who more or less taught us a new meaning of the word “Ironic.”
To Red Bankers — or at least those borough-based viewers of the Kevin Smith askewniverse — Alanis Morisette is nothing less than God, the supreme being that she portrayed for the last act of Smith’s controversial 1999 epic Dogma. On the evening of Sunday, July 27, God herself returns to Red Bank for an “intimate and acoustic” sermonette on the stage of the greater Green’s most glittering cathedral of entertainment, the Count Basie Theatre.
COMIC BOOK MEN’s Ming Chen and fellow marathon runner Nicole Corre kick off their charity run of the San Francisco Marathon with an event at Jamian’s Food and Drink on Thursday, June 26.
Longtime habitues of Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash know Ming Chen as “weekend man” at Kevin Smith’s Lourdes-like grotto of pop pilgrimage — and the burgeoning fanbase of the Smith-produced AMC series know Ming as one of the Comic Book Men who’ve helped put Red Bank on the map of the multiverse for comix culture. But if you haven’t known Chen as a Marathon Man, then an upcoming event on Thursday, June 26 is designed to make the public aware that, when it comes to philanthropy, Chen is in it for the duration.
Hosted at Jamian’s Food and Drink on Monmouth Street, the “Not So Ordinary Fundraiser” party serves as the official kick-off to Ming and Nicole Run San Francisco, an endeavor in which Chen and fellow endurance runner Nicole Corre will take part in the upcoming San Francisco Marathon, scheduled for July 27.
Robert Bruce at a Glen Goldbaum fashion event in Red Bank in 2011. A regular on “Comic Book Men,” set at the Broad Street store below, he’s about to get his own show on AMC. (Photos by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
The Red Bank comic book juggernaut Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash continues to add to its amazing superpowers.
“Comic Book Men,” an unscripted TV show about buying and selling comic books that’s based in the Broad Street store, has been picked up for a fourth season by the AMC network, according an entertainment industry report.
It’s also spawned a new show starring borough resident Robert Bruce, a regular on “Comic Book Men.” And it looks like progenitor-of-all-things-Stashian Kevin Smith will get one, too.
Kimberlee Thornton, self-styled “production mom” for the reality show “Comic Book Men,” rocks a superhero cape on Broad Street in Red Bank Monday to mark the start of taping for the show’s third season. “Comic Book Men,” set in film director Kevin Smith‘s Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash, will again run on the AMC cable channel in the fall, having moved last season from Sunday nights to Thursdays. (Photo by John T. Ward. Click to enlarge)
Cliff Galbraith with his two recent comic books, above, and talking with fan John Hanley on Broad Street, below. (Click to enlarge)
This Saturday, a pair of Red Bank comic book aficionados dealer and Comic Book Men star Robert Bruce, and author/illustrator Cliff Galbraith are putting on Asbury Park Comic Con 2, reprising an event they debuted in May. redbankgreen spoke with Galbraith recently about his own relationship with the printed form of his work.
By JOHN T. WARD
It took a kind of SMACK! to the head, but Red Bank’s Cliff Galbraith learned his lesson:
When it comes to comic books, the web isn’t nirvana.
Fans waited in line as long as 10 hours with Kevin Smith books, films and artwork to be signed by their hero. Below, actor Jason Mewes, trailed by a video crew. (Photos by Stacie Fanelli. Click to enlarge.)
By STACIE FANELLI
North on Broad Street, around the bend at Mechanic, sharp right into an alley, past the “end of line” sign and back around again. That’s the route hundreds of fans took Sunday, inches at a time, as they waited in line to meet director Kevin Smith.
Some came from down the block, others from up to five hours away all to spend maybe 60 seconds with the Highlands native and owner of Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash in downtown Red Bank. The store is such a haven for comic book fans that it is the focal point of AMC’s reality show “Comic Book Men,” for which Smith’s appearance was a part.
The reality show about comic book aficionados is being taped once again at Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash as well as at 28 Broad Street, above. (Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
Production of the second, full season of Comic Book Men got underway Monday, giving a prominent vacancy in downtown Red Bank something to do for the next 10 weeks while its owners continue trying to attract a more permanent tenant.
The reality show, which had a limited run earlier this year on AMC, is set in Jay and Silent Bobs Secret Stash, owned by filmmaker Kevin Smith, and follows the jostlings of the shop’s employees and customers.
Additional footage, featuring Smith and an Algonquin Rectangular Table of comic book aficionads shooting the breeze, is to be recorded on a sound stage built across the street from the store, at 28 Broad.
That’s the former home of Prima’s Home Café, a furnishings store that vacated back in January, when the building changed hands for $1.175 million, according to property records.
Michael Zapcic with Thomas Mumme, left, during Thursday’s live ‘SModcast’ at Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash. Below: Kevin Smith on the center monitor during a taping earlier this week in Red Bank. (Photo below courtesy of Robert Bruce. Click to enlarge)
By JOHN T. WARD
Michael Zapcic had the “really surreal” experience earlier this week of walking past Madison Square Garden, glancing up at the massive Jumbotron and seeing a commercial for ‘Comic Book Men,’ a new cable show in which he appears as himself: a self-described comic book geek.
“I’m like holy crap! It’s them! It’s us!” he recalled Thursday, in the tone of an average, fedora-wearing citizen spotting a caped man flying overhead.
Life in the mini-Gotham that is Red Bank may never be the same.
Only, yeah, it will be exactly the same, because ‘Comic Book Men’ is a reality show, one focused on the daily interplay of three employees of “possibly the world’s most famous comic book store” Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash on Broad Street, where the show is set.
Over six episodes, four opinionated, superabsorbent sponges of superheroism Zapcic, Ming Chen and Walt Flanagan, plus original store manager Bryan Johnson spend a lot of time “just arguing about stupid movie plot points, which happens every day without cameras anyway,” says Chen.
Recent activity reports, unedited, as provided by the Middletown Township Police Department.
On January 31, 2012 Detectives Laurence Schachtel, Adam Finck and William Strohkirch arrested Christopher Martin, age 26, from West Washington Avenue in Atlantic Highlands, NJ, and Trevor Pituk, age 23, from Center Avenue in Leonardo, NJ, for committing an armed robbery that took place on January 12, 2012 at the Quick Stop Convenience Store located on Leonard Avenue in Leonardo, NJ.
Police say Martin entered the store with a butcher knife and demanded money from the clerk while Pituk acted as a look out. The pair then fled the scene. Police credit Corporal Ronald Chesek and Patrolman Donald Coates with developing the information that led to the arrests.
Recent activity reports, unedited, as provided by the Middletown Township Police Department.
On January 12, 2012 at approximately 10:00pm police responded to an armed robbery at the Quick Stop Convenience Store located at #58 Leonard Avenue in the Leonardo section of Middletown. Police say a male subject approximately 600 tall, 175 pounds, wearing a black hooded sweatshirt, blue jeans, a black mask and blue surgical gloves entered the store and approached the cashier.
Crew members from the reality TV pilot being produced at Kevin Smith’s Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash prepare a replica Batmobile for filming on Mechanic Street in Red Bank Friday morning. The vehicle was expected to be downtown for a few hours. (Click to enlarge)
Not that we condone defacing of other people’s property, of course… but this guy looking down on Broad Street in downtown Red Bank gives us a chuckle.
Is he looking for criminals in Gotham? Checking to see if his parking meter is still in the green? Or is just keeping a jealous eye on the cable-TV reality show being shot across the street? (Click to enlarge)
The Broad Street store will serve as the setting for an unscripted series. (Click to enlarge)
From ‘Jersey Shore‘ to ‘Jersey Store,’ the reality TV juggernaut continues…
Kevin Smith‘s Red Bank emporium, Jay and Silent Bobs Secret Stash, a magnet for comic book fans and camera-toting devotees of the filmmaker himself, has been greenlighted as the locus of an unscripted series.
Six one-hour episodes of the show, with working title “Secret Stash,” have been ordered by AMC, home of ‘Mad Men,’ ‘Breaking Bad‘ and ‘The Walking Dead,’ according to a post on Smith’s Silent Bob Speaks website.
Filmmaker Kevin Smith is casting a pilot show about comic-book fandom this week at his Broad Street comics and memorabilia store. (Photo by Dustin Racioppi; click to enlarge)\
By DUSTIN RACIOPPI
Kevin Smith seems to have a Brett Favre-y way of retiring sans allegations of creepy text messages.
The cult hero/director/producer/author/schmoozer and SModcaster, who announced earlier this year he’s bowing out of the film scene, isn’t completely leaving the entertainment world.
Smith’s next venture is reality TV and he’s looking “for real people who live and breath (sic) the comic book lifestyle. Must be funny outgoing and have a knowledge and passion for comics, superheroes, movie memorabilia and everything that goes with it.”
In other words, he’s looking for people a lot like himself.
Smith is set to produce a pilot show billed as a sort of “Pawn Stars for fanboys” at his Red Bank comic and memorabilia Mecca, Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash.
Filmmaker Kevin Smith‘s 40th-birthday Q&A show at the Count Basie Theatre Monday night drew a scale-model lookalike. One covered in icing.
A few hours before the show, the auteur of such films as ‘Clerks‘ and ‘Chasing Amy‘ (and owner of the Red Bank comics/toy store Jay and Silent Bob’s Secret Stash) got a delivery of a cake in his own likeness from fellow Jersey native Buddy Valastro, aka the Cake Boss.
“It was huge,” says Basie spokeswoman Diana St. John. “I mean, like, bigger than Kevin Smith’s actual head.”
A man tackled the heavy snow at the corner of Harding Road…
Red Bank’s main business thoroughfare was all but shut down by midafternoon Thursday by the third major storm to hit the region this month.
But as always, there were signs of life. Click ahead for some more pix of what redbankgreen saw on a walk down Broad Street.