Hey folks, Harry here.... Quint's got his DAY 2 report all finished and it is a breathless doozy of a report... tons of good stuff!!! Meanwhile he's finishing up his DAY 3 report that has even cooler shit to make your eyes bleed with envy! Here he goes....
Ahoy there, squirts. 'Tis I, the trusty, crusty seaman, Quint, here with some more cool ass shit to share with you fine folks from the last 2 days at San Diego Comic Con. Lots of info coming up in these reports. In these last two days I've seen new footage from Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, From Hell, Smallville, Planet of the Apes, The One, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and have seen Kevin Smith, John Carpenter, Sam Raimi and Joss Whedon speak.
Let's start on Friday morning. I was going to hit a panel on DVDs, but decided to make a quick detour into the autograph area and hook up with TV's Wil Wheaton, who I met last year at the Comic Con. We became quick friends and have kept in touch, and you might remember we even did a kickass interview a while back. I spotted him pretty quickly. We greeted each other and started talking. He invited me to sit with him, behind his table. So, I got to see what it was like to be a celebrity for an hour.
Good God, I have no idea how he can do it. In that hour I saw more crackpots interact with Wil than in a whole season of Jerry Springer. Don't get me wrong, there were the cool fans, too. The ones happy to meet him and weren't... scary... But good God...
Anyway, I soon remembered about the DVD panel and was off to hit that. I got there in the last 10 minutes of the panel. Oh, well. I took a seat and waited for the next presentation in that room: 90 minutes of trailers, clips and featurettes, all supposedly of a genre nature. I love trailers, I collect 35mm trailers myself. I could watch hours upon hours of trailers. But the presentation here was pretty goddamn lame.
There were a few exceptions, like a brief featurette on FROM HELL about how historically accurate and graphic the mutilated whore bodies in the film are (and Heather Graham saying the film is very similar in tone with Silence of the Lambs), The Musketeer trailer (which got an amazing response from the crowd), a Comic Con exclusive teaser for The Powerpuff Girls Movie where the creator of the series was talking about how it was going to be an origin story and how they're trying to strike a balance by pleasing the die hard fans and not alienating those not familiar with the series, and some of the better trailers for upcoming films, like Harry Potter, Ice World and Rush Hour 2 (which got the single biggest applause at the end... astounding).
Warner Bros. premiered a bit on Smallville during this presentation. You know, that new show about the "untold stories of Superman" as teenager, growing up. Not bad looking actually. I'll give it a try. I took a little issue with the fact that Lex Luthor is in it so much, but I came to realization that it was pointless for me to be pissed off at the breaking of the continuity with the comics/films/whatever that came before. The show is set modern day, for God's sake. In what I saw, the actors seemed to be pretty strong (for WB) and I think they could do some interesting things with the series.
Here's exactly what I saw: The clip opened with a meteor shower coming down on Smallville, blowing shit up, killing people, etc. In this meteor shower is baby Kal-El's spaceship. When his ship strikes down, it nearly kills a little red-headed kid. We see a shot of this little kid, barely alive, amonst the smoldering ash a wheat field, his hair gone. The Kent's find the child, take him in and it flashes to modern day. Clark is fiending after Lana, whose parents were killed in the meteor shower. He acts weird around her and for a second you don't know why, then you realize she's wearing a neckless with a piece of meteorite in it... Kryptonite, obviously.
Anyway, the young, rich Lex is speeding through Smallville and gets in a wreck. Clark ends up saving him, after getting hit by his car. It's Clark's first real clue that he's not an average joe. There are a lot of quick cuts of various action from this point on. Lex says something along about how that since he survived that accident, he was meant to move onto bigger and better things. He turns to Clark and says, "Do you believe a man could fly?" And it only comes off as half-cheesy. There's also an awesome shot of Clark, just about crucified with Lana's Kryptonite neckless around his neck and he's weakly talking to someone. "Please... help me..." Now, I don't keep up with TV, so I have no idea if this stuff is already out there, but there you have it anyway!
There was also a trailer for a new DVD series put out by Universal and Flix Mix, the first installment called BOOGEYMEN. This DVD is a compilation of the best scenes from the best recent (last 25 years) horror flicks that have a "boogeyman" character in it, edited together. Being the freak I am for horror flicks, I dug the hell out of the trailer they showed me. After the presentation, I was approached by a rep. from Universal who gave me a sample DVD of BOOGEYMEN. I watched it later that night in my hotel room. It had the first 4 clips on it, which included the final scene in Hellraiser, the first killing in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the final scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the first phone call to Sidney in Scream.
What was interesting about the clips was this little running trivia bar on the bottom of the screen. I fucking loved it! As the scene was playing, the trivia bar would pop out a bit of trivia about the film, the filmmaker, the actor, whatever involved with that scene. Think pop up videos, but slightly more serious. Apparently, Robert Englund is Universal's official spokesman for this DVD and he has a running commentary throughout all the clips. The commentary wasn't on the sample DVD I got, but the rep. told me the commentary was amazing, that Englund knew something about each and every one of the flicks represented on the disk and his commentary on things he wasn't associated with plays very well.
She promised a screener DVD for me in a couple of weeks, so if that happens, I'll let you squirts know how it works out. The next DVD planned for the series is a compilation of the best fight scenes in all of Hong Kong cinema. She was really interested to hear what you guys think should be included on this DVD, so give her a helping hand and talkback below. My vote goes to the Tofu scene in Wing Chun. Michelle Yoeh is a goddess.
So, the trailers ended and the room tensed. It was time for Kevin Smith's 3 hour long panel. Kevin appeared onstage with his daughter, Harley Quinn Smith, and was greeted by a chorus of "Oooooohhhhhhh." He picked up the mic, turned to his daughter and said, "Say hello." She leaned into the mic and said, shyly, "Hullo." The room vibrated with applause and an even louder "Awwwwwwwwwww." Kevin spoke into the mic, to his daughter, once more: "Now say FUCK." He put the mic in front of his MAYBE 2 year old daughter who paused then said, "No." More cheers. Kev's wife took the stage and relieved him of Harley. As she left the stage, Kevin sat down and said, "That was my wife... not too bad for a fat guy, huh?" God Bless You, Kevin Smith!
So, he announced there was a screening of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back that night, but he only had 250 tickets. He ended up giving away a ticket to each person who came up and asked a question. People started rushing the mics, wanting to get a Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back ticket. Kevin made a comment about how he's not worried because he brought his body guard along. "Is my body guard here? Come here, body guard." And Jay Mewes himself comes walking out to thunderous applause.
From this point on every possible question about the Viewaskewniverse was asked and answered. Hell, Kevin even brought up the interview he recently did with Mysterio on this site. He also showed some stuff from J&SBSB. The first thing up was a gag reel, which I'm sure'll be on the DVD when that comes out, that had lots of people cracking up: Ben Affleck, Jason Mewes, Jason Lee, etc. Pretty funny stuff onscreen. In writing it'd sound retarded, so I'm not going to even try.
He also showed a little behind the scenes footage, a mini-documentary on Mark Hamill on why he agreed to do the film being that his character, Cocknocker, is a nod to his Star Wars work and he's turned down Star Wars related cameos time and time again... until now. He basically said that if any working filmmaker today deserved to have his Star Wars cameo, it was Kevin Smith. Lots of cheers for Mark.
Then Kevin showed about 8 minutes from the film, from Bluntman and Chronic's Bong-saber duel with Cocknocker. Fucking hilarious... Bong-sabers... God Bless You, Kevin Smith! Mark Hamill was perfectly over the top in his role. "Don't fuck with the Jedi Master, son." Holy shit, everybody was on the floor. The attempts to get tickets for the screening intensified. There was a stampede when they decided to give out the remaining 75 or so tickets at the end of the panel.
I didn't get a ticket. I didn't think I would. Not a big deal, right? So, there I was, crying in the hallway outside of the panel room, sobbing like a little bitch... "Huuuuuhhhhhh.... wwwwwwwwwaaaaahhhhhhhh I WANNA SEE DA MOOOOOBIE!" I got myself under control when I heard a popping sound from behind me. I wiped my eyes as I turned around to find Mysterio rolling out from a cloud of vapor, his eyeballs sloshing around in the blender from all the movement. A voice came from a speaker on his chest. "Quee-aunt. Are you leaking?" I had to tell him I wasn't leaking, just upset that I didn't get to see da moobie that night.
"Explain," said Mysterio.
"I need a ticket to get in to the theater tonight," I said, tears building again. Mysterio paused. "No ticket. Can you describe ticket?" I tried, but it was just confusing the poor machine. A lucky bastard with a ticket walked by, so I just pointed and said, "There. That's what it looks like." The blender turned, following my pointing finger, saw the ticket and started jerking around, water in the blender sloshing around as he did so. Mysterio then turned around, bent over and out from his "ass" came a perfect Jay and Silent Bob screening ticket.
I stared in amazement. "Do not say that Mysterio never gave you anything." I agreed and jumped for joy as Mysterio sputtered something about having a date with a hot toaster oven that he was late for. He disappeared as I ran around showing my new prize off.
I ended up having some time before the screening, so I met up with Don Coscarelli, Reggie Bannister and Joe R. Lansdale and went out to eat the most... classy... ahem... chicken and rib place in the Gaslamp District. We talked about Bubba Ho-Tep, Phantasm 5, our families... my new girlfriend... they couldn't believe it, so I had to show them photographic evidence. Reg turned to me after I showed him the picture of Auntie Meat and said, "How did a guy like you get a girl like that?" I said, "I don't know, but it must be the shark, Reg. It's like a guy in a park with a baby or a dog. It's a babe magnet."
So, we all hung out, had a merry time even though our waiter was literally telling dolphin fucking jokes while taking our orders and throwing handfuls of napkins on us, the ground, our food... like I said, classy place. The time came for us to part company. We said our goodbyes and I headed off to the Horton Plaza theater to watch Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.
There was a large line when I got there, but that was a given. I was only an hour early. A Miramax lady was checking IDs and being kinda nasty. I was worried about getting found out and quickly hid the lower half of my body behind a plant as she walked by. She didn't find me out, thank god, and I got to watch da moobie.
I have 5 words. Just 5. God Bless You, Kevin Smith.
OK, so I lied. I have more than 5 words. I really have no idea how you fine folks are going to react to this film. Of all of Kevin's movies, the one that it reminds me of the most just happens to be my personal favorite of his films... Mallrats. The jokes fly fast and furious. The cameos are hilarious and in great quantity. The casting is dead on. And it has a monkey in it! And we all know that if you have either a monkey or a midget in your film, your film has an automatic boost of coolness.
The reason why I said I don't know how you folks will react isn't just because of the mass disapproval of Mallrats, but... well, the film touched me in a way that most of you people won't associate with. Harry was correct in his review. This movie is a big middle finger to all the negative, "everything sucks because I say it does" anonymous, illiterate bastards who post in boards much like the below talkback. Now, before you start the lynch mob, recognize that I said the always negative talkbackers. The ones that will just say fucked up shit because it's fucked up shit. I don't mean to say that the few intelligent people we have posting on this site (and others for that matter) get the jab like the rest... but if you are one of those intelligent people, then you knew that already.
As someone who is constantly being made fun of by people that have never met me because I have a differing opinion on a film or because I (gasp, shock) write an article that's over 500 words or (ack! No!) have fun during my interviews... well, this movie made me smile. Attention, you dickless fucks that go out of your way to piss me off! Go see Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back and by the end of the movie you'll know what your fate is. Next time you think about being a dick for the sake of being a dick... remember. Your doorbell might ring one day and Moriarty and I'll be standing there, eagerly awaiting our revenge.
Seriously, people, if you're a fan of Kevin Smith's at all, you should love this movie. It has everything. Those who don't love Kevin Smith, his films, or his sense of humor... well, why are you even reading this? You probably won't like this movie. It is pure, unadulterated Kevin Smith, putting it all out in one final Viewaskewniverse extravaganza.
Stay tuned, squirts. I have Day 3, the one with all the Spider-Man, Harry Potter, LOTR, etc news coming up in the next installment. I was going to include it here, but I haven't quite figured out how to save this report as I'm writing it in my email program on a new computer. My laptop is making weird sounds and is starting to pause every now and again and I don't want to have to rewrite all that above goodness.
So, go check out the next report! Do it now!
-Quint
