Saturday 14 August 2010

Movie-Con III: Day 1

My new regular Saturday feature has already been shunted out of the way because this weekend I'm spending unhealthy amounts of time surrounded by like-minded geeks in obscure movie-referencing t-shirts at London's BFI, wherein Empire magazine's third annual Movie-Con is being held. If you're unaware of the intricacies of the event, imagine 500 nerds in a room watching random bits of footage of unfinished films. Sounds tremendous doesn't it?

Oh and the Con in Movie-Con is short for "confiscated", as in "your phone will be, to prevent you from posting wobbly footage of trailers that are already online or will be in a matter of days".


Day 1 started yesterday evening with Empire's Chris Hewitt carpet bombing us with excruciating jokes until we couldn't take any more and the first bit of footage was shown: an exclusive trailer for Danny Boyle's new movie and this year's London Film Festival closer, 127 Hours, starring James Franco.


127 Hours is a true story about a man who literally gets stuck between a rock and a hard place (for about 127 hours, I'm guessing) and has to resort to desperate measures to extricate himself. The trailer doesn't tell you much more than that and I'm not about to start describing trailers because that's been proven to be the least exciting thing anyone can do on the internet.

Danny Boyle turned up for a quick Q&A, was very funny, relaxed and charming, spoiled the end of his film and expressed a desire to do a musical or animated film next. SCOOP.

Following that the rather excellent director-producer team of Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith showed up to promote a film they had nothing to do with, utterly mentile Belgian animation A Town Called Panic. They showed some clips and a trailer that have already been on YouTube for months, and which were projected at the wrong aspect ratio so we couldn't read the subtitles. Fortunately they won us over with a clip of Adam Buxton pretending to be a belligerent Belgian animator, so we forgave them.



Next was the LFF's opening film Never Let Me Go's trailer, which everyone has also seen already. There was another quick Q&A with two of its producers, Andrew Macdonald and some other bloke, which was a bit dull until Macdonald started talking about his next project, Judge Dredd, at which point the audience woke up and got excited when he announced that it would be (surprise) a gritty, R-rated version of the comic, and that Dredd - played by Karl Urban - would keep his helmet on this time. Everyone was very happy about that, except Karl Urban presumably.



The main event was a screening of The Expendables, during which everybody clapped and cheered whenever anyone got shot (which was quite frequently), and then there was a party but by that time I was on a tube home surrounded by Australians in togas.

More tomorrow!

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4 comments :

  1. "More tomorrow!"
    So you are watching and writing knight and day, sorry, by night and day just to keep us blog watchers bang up to date and you are getting diddly squat for all this effort. Why are you doing it? When you see hacks earning a living from little more than cutting and pasting bits of press releases together does it not ever make you wonder why you are The Incredible Suit? I do not believe in altruism. Is it just an ego trip?

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  2. vicariously clinging to your every report as I've had to be out of town this weekend 0x

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  3. Boyle always spoils his films' endings in interviews, the big eejit.

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  4. From now on he is to be known only as Danny Spoyle.

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