Informed Art - Comic-Con Revealed

Lionsgate closed out the Hall H programming for Thursday with stars on hand for the crowd. Fantastic Four star Jessica Alba was out to promote her new R-rated comedy Good Luck Chuck with co-star Dane Cook. The premise of the film is that Cook plays a guy who when he sleep with a woman she breaks up with him and then finds their soul mate. When he meets Alba’s character, he tries to resist her to see if she’s the one for him.

As much a celebration of genre films, Lionsgate brought Ben Foster (X-Men: The Last Stand) and Peter Fonda (Ghost Rider) to talk about working on Western 3:10 to Yuma. Foster said that he learns to respect Americans who lived in the 1800s, because of how uncomfortable it was filming in the cold in the desert, knowing that they didn’t have the same means to get warm as we do today. Fonda, who called himself a “gunhead,” didn’t have to go to cowboy camp with Foster and co-stars Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, but was jealous of the barbeque they ate, because actors love free stuff. Well, with all the shwag being passed out at Comic-Con, Fonda will have a great first Comic-Con.

With the panel starting off with two non-visual effects films, it closed with two horror flicks. The first is Clive Barker’s Midnight Meat Train. The panel included Barker, director Ryuhei Kitamura (Azumi), actors Vinnie Jones (Snatch), Leslie Bibb (Talladega Nights) and Bradley Cooper (Alias). Cooper plays Mahogany, a slaughter house worker by day and subway killer by night. Cooper plays a photographer, who gets obsessed with the killer, and Bibb plays his girlfriend. A very “relaxed” Barker talked about eating a plate of “special” cookies at a party and coming up with the title for the film. The story comes from Barker’s free of the slaughter house, which Mahogany creates on the metro.

Director Darren Lynn Bousman, producer Mark Burg and Jigsaw actor Tobin Bell closed out the panel to preview Saw IV. Bousman and Burg announced that the film just received an NC-17 from the MPAA. Bousman commented that the intensity of the film is what is raising the ire of the censors. Tweaks will be done to get a hard R rating. The filmmakers wanted to show the first five minutes of the film, but that was rejected by Comic-Con as too graphic. So the fans were treated to a scene that chained together a man with his eyes sown shut against a man with his mouth sown shut and pitted them against each other. When asked about the violence of the series, Bousman said that they don’t hide what he’s making with pretty unicorns in the ads.

So that closes out Thursday.
From Rick’s view