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.
A lot of trailers are being released at the moment. You might not know what to make of them, so The Incredible Suit is here to tell you what to think and how to feel.
Buried continues to display some balls-out marketing madness. The new trailer doesn't even show any bits from the film, probably because it's almost entirely set in a six foot-long box and that doesn't really lend itself to hyperactive editing and pauses in the music for crap jokes. It does deliver some serious Saul Bassiness though, not unlike its second amazing poster.
I'm going for Buried as this year's unexpected smash that nobody saw coming apart from all the people who did. It had better not let me down.
Red is based on a comic book series you've never heard of because there were only ever three issues. The title is an acronym for Retired, Extremely Dangerous, and it's about a bunch of ex-CIA pensioners who are called into action when the life of the love interest of one of their number is in danger. Like Last Of The Summer Wine, but with Mary-Louise Parker as Nora Batty.
Ignoring the ropey FX on that stepping-out-of-the-moving-car gag, this could well be the action comedy that Knight And Day should have been. Although to be fair I haven't seen Knight And Day, it could be amazing for all I know.
Also any film that stars Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren, Richard Dreyfuss, Karl Urban, Brian Cox and, after what feels like a twenty-year absence, the Bruce Willis Smirk, can't be all bad. And no, your eyes didn't deceive you. THAT WASERNEST BORGNINE.
Tron Legacy is the sequel to one of those 1980s films that you either love blindly because you grew up with it or you think is a bit bobbins because you watched it for the first time as a grown man and came to the conclusion that your life is no worse off having not seen it in all that time.
At the risk of repeating myself, I'd still rather see this.
Finally, here's the latest trailer for David Fincher's Facebook movie, The Social Network. As a warning to younger viewers I should point out that this trailer contains several shots of Jesse Eisenberg's face.
Oh yeah there's a spectacularly-delivered f-bomb in there too.
I can't get excited about this, no matter how hard I try. Fincher has got so much making up to do to me after his last few films that he should screen this personally, at my house, while pouring me glasses of ice-cold panda blood and serving dodo goujons in order to win me round. Although as it's clearly going to be about three hours long he probably shouldn't bother.
Now as it happens I've got an idea for a film about a game-changing website set up by an unrecognised and misunderstood genius. Any takers?
