Comic Con, 1st Day: Bring in the Aussies!

I was waiting in the Hall H line with Ricky no more than 10 minutes when I became aware that I had to find a bathroom. I left him and went all the way over to "E" in the main convention center, but they wouldn't let me in. No matter of persuasian would convince them that a humane thing to do was to let me temporarily in to use just one of the entire bank of restrooms they had available inside.
So I went across to the Hilton, back to our room, and waited another hour before rejoining Rick. By that time, the line had started to move.

They let us into Hall H at 9:30, still a good two hours before programming started. As we walked in, they handed us each a "Klaatu Borada Nikto" t-shirt, obviously a promo for The Day the Earth Stood Still, the new movie coming out starring Keanu Reeves and Jennifer Connelly.
Keanu plays Klaatu, Jennifer an astrophysicist, and Gort will definitely be in it. They showed some really nice dramatic trailers, but no sign of what Gort is going to look like. Why TDTESS? Direcctor Scott Erickson had met Robert Wise as a film student, and told him at that time that TDTESS was one of his favorite Wise films.

Next up, we had a promo panel for the movie Max Payne, starring Mark Wahlberg. Mark, Mila Kunis (from That 70's Show), and Ludacris (going by his real name) showed up for the panel. The movie is based on the popular video game, a game I never heard of. However, Ricky tells me that Brandon has been calling him, bugging him for news about Max Payne. So it must be popular. Wahlberg commented that the movie website gets "6,000 hits a day," so buzz is positive. The footage looks spectacular for a shoot-em-up.

After that, a surprise visit: "I just got off Qantas, direct from Australia, because I wanted to come back to Comic Con and show you guys footage from Wolverine!" announced Hugh Jackman. His hair long and his beard scruffy, he boomed his enthusiastic message over to us. He got his start at Comic Con in promoting the X-Men, and he knew where to come for this latest venture. The footage from X-Men Origins: Wolverine looks intense and fantastic. At one moment, Hugh jumped off stage and ran over to the side, saying, "I just have to shake the hand of the guy who jumpstarted my career!" The Wolverine comic creator was who he was talking about.


He was only on stage about 15 minutes, which, due to the fact that the high-strung curtains in back began falling on people, delayed the presentations by about 45 minutes. However, they soon caught up, mostly. Many of the directors or producers seemed to be Australian, which I found kind of interesting. Certainly none of them had San Diego accents.

Next was Summit Entertainment, and it was their first visit to Comic Con. Push was their first movie for us, starring Chris Evans. It's about people walking among us with psychic powers, and the footage was jarring and graphic. Dakota Fanning, who showed up later after being stuck in traffic between San Diego and L.A. for 7 hours, gushed about how much we'd like the film. It doesn't look like an easy film to take, but it expands the mythology in interesting ways, and I think I'll take a look.

Knowing is another movie with psychic interpretation, starring Nicolas Cage. Nic couldn't come this time to promote the film. But the footage. which involves a time capsule from a school unearthing numbers that can predict future disasters, looked interesting if not compelling.

The next film, however, seems to be what everybody that day was standing in line for, a film we've never heard of: Twilight. Apparently there are best-selling novels out about this continuing love story between a vampire man and human woman. The author, Stephenie Meyer, was there, along with the director and most of the main cast. I didn't recognize any of the cast except for the guy who plays "Edward," Robert Pattinson, who played Cedric in the Harry Potter films. A lot of the interest was for him as well as his vampire nemesis, played by Cam Gigandet. Both Gigandet and Pattinson were fairly inarticulate, with gutteral sounds passing for speech. The screaming girls in the audience didn't seem to mind.

Footage for Twilight seems to feature some rather well-filmed fight scenes. Picture really powerful people going at it in mortal settings. This little film looks to be very popular.

After Twilight, we had the stars from Escape to Witch Mountain, Dwayne Johnson and Carla Gugino, appear with their director to promote the film. This is "not a sequel, but 30 years later." The Rock was terribly funny in anything he said. A very articulate man, I find him really hysterically funny. In spite of the talents of the Rock and Carla Gugino, this movie's trailer didn't show much that was intriguing at all.

Right when we were about to take off to register for next year and cruise the convention center dealer's room, they squeezed in another treat: a trailer for the new TRON movie. Wow! Everybody went wild with applause when the film showed Jeff Bridges. He was in the first movie, so many years ago. As Ricky said later, however, it still looks like the same boring film, people moving in a straight line across a grid. Yeah, but with fast-moving motorcycles this time.