Movie-Con III: Day 2

Yesterday left me feeling like I'd spent seven hours being run over by a 3D CGI steamroller driven by Trailer Voiceover Man. As much as I love trailers, it is possible to have too much of a good thing. It's also possible to have too much of an average thing, a category into which much of yesterday's footage neatly falls.

Before I get my grump on though, I should mention the goodie bags. There they were, waiting for us like packed stockings on Christmas morning, and - like packed stockings on Christmas morning - there were only really two great presents:

Not that I was ungrateful for the A-Team box set, the New Moon DVD, all the t-shirts or any of the other stuff. It'll all make great actual Christmas presents (except maybe the London Film Museum lanyard). But you can't beat Jelly Belly, and Bitch Slap, well, I'll enjoy finding out if you can beat that.

Anyway I saw so much footage and saw so many panels that I should only really tell you about the awful stuff and the great stuff. So:

The Awful Stuff

The teaser for Captain America is predictably abominable and abominably predictable. Stock WWII footage, some fancy graphics and a shot of Chris Evans in an embarrassingly bad costume that looks like he sewed it himself while drunk does not an appetite whet.

There was other awful stuff but I'm politely glossing over it in favour of:

The Great Stuff

My Cowboys And Aliensometer has returned to the "enthusiastic" position. Daniel Craig looks ace as a cowboy with his face hewn from Monument Valley rock, and Harrison Ford being old and cantankerous is exactly what the world needs right now. On yesterday's evidence this could be Jon Favreau's redemption for Iron Man 2.

Monsters, which I had lazily dismissed as a District 9 clone, might just be better than District 9. The stuff we saw included bonkers creatures and intimate character moments, but the highlight was a Q&A with writer / director / cinematographer / production designer / God knows what else Gareth Edwards, one of the most genuine, down-to-earth people to grace the Movie-Con stage. He was immediately likeable and I hope to Christ his film is good because he deserves to go far.



And I've already banged on about Buried, but watching the first eight minutes of the movie and then listening to its excitable, hilarious, self-deprecating director Rodrigo Cortés giggle with glee at how much shit he put Ryan Rodney Reynolds through to make this film just made me want to see it more.

Apart from all that, Chloe Moretz is a 30-year-old in a 13-year-old's body, Cary Elwes is a rogueish raconteur and Daniel Radcliffe is tiny and needs a haircut.

Then some guy proposed to his girlfriend on stage, everyone stood up to applaud, and in doing so I lost my pen and therefore failed to write anything else down, which I imagine comes as some relief.

Still more tomorrow!

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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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