In between film panels at the New York Comic Con they showcased a couple of highly anticipated sneak peeks. Here’s what we saw.
“The Green Hornet”
As in a few other conventions, “The Green Hornet” had a presence on the floor, with the Black Beauty car on display for a number of fans. What was different was an entirely new action sequence, with 3D glasses handed out to patrons. In the short scene, Jay Chou as Kato dismantles a number of thugs using his martial arts expertise. In the trailer there’s a flash of this sequence when Chou kicks an enemy across a car which then visually becomes a number of cars refracted through each other, a neat visual that shows up twice in the clip that was presented. There had also been assurances in the past that the post-production 3D conversion wouldn’t be like the typical hack-and-slash job, and to this we can heartily say they are trying something fairly new here.
During the fight sequence, the image was slowed so we could see events happening at the speed that Kato sees them, the much-touted Kato-vision, but what we noticed was that there were effects added that could ONLY be seen with 3D glasses to illuminate specifically what Kato was focusing on. It was very cartoony and comic booky, perhaps a little like “The Spirit,” but it was a fairly imaginative fight scene, even if the trick is meshing that with standard boilerplate superhero movie dialogue.
There was also a trailer, extended from what we had seen before. Still, the footage is punchy but uninspired, showing off the gizmos, guns, and training montages of the film. Seth Rogen continues to look wholly unconvincing as an action hero, and we remain in the dark about the identity and motivations of Christoph Waltz’s gangster character, who says he wants to “control all the crime,” whatever that means. The clip also again seems to want to hide Cameron Diaz’s presence, and focuses so much on the origin that it’s stunning that Michel Gondry was behind the camera, and that the finished film isn’t a laundry list of superhero origin material. There was a few quick teases of comic violence to suggests that, though he departed, former director Stephen Chow did leave his mark on the material, but we’re waiting to be thrilled. Footage that someone shot off the screen below.
Battle: Los Angeles Despite a few clips surfacing, this may be the first full length trailer anyone’s seen for this buzzed-about war film. The Jonathan Liebsman-directed actioner concerns Aaron Eckhart as a soldier leading troops into battle against war-mongering aliens who attack on our home turf, and the footage was appropriately hectic. The clip, set to some unrecognizable, but ominous auto-tune humming (think of a haunting alien keyboard sound not unlike “Close Encounters Of The Third Kind”), showcases large-scale war sequences, hiding the fact until the end that we are actually fighting beings not entirely human.
The footage looked not unlike war images we’ve seen on CNN for a decade now, which was perverse and fascinating back in 2007, but seems a bit dated in 2010. It’s clear the studios think they can help us process the war in the Middle East by translating the frightening images we see every day into science fiction and action, but this “realism” also creates a distancing effect with real life, and more importantly renders the other side of our struggles as even more unrecognizable, unrelatable, inhuman. Alien, naturally. But that’s really something to potentially be said about the finished film. The footage itself was polished, unsettling and immediate, and since the promotional machine for this film hasn’t started for the general public, putting this clip in a theater on a Friday night will no doubt excite the average moviegoer.
“The Roommate”
Screen Gems continued their onslaught of substandard genre fare with a peek at two films. “The Roommate” has a premise, but we’d be playing a fool talking about it when we can just say it’s a very obvious retread of “Single White Female” set in college. The casting coup is finding Leighton Meester and Minka Kelly, two starlets who look almost exactly alike, but it did appear that they cast the film with nothing but pinups that all look exactly like each other in the first place. Maybe it’s a perverse joke (the audience was surely laughing at this film). Not sure. It went over with the crowd like an ad for Neutrogena, which it very well may be. Truthfully, the trailer has been online since September, but because this film has zero heat, its New York Comic Con appearance was the first time many of us had seen it.
“Priest”
“Priest” is a comic adaptation from the writer-director of “Legion,” and brooding action hero Paul Bettany does a lot to make the two films look nearly indistinguishable. The clip, which showcased some vampire-holy man conflict set in the desert, was longer and more detailed than the original trailer released, but we might be totally wrong, since that clip was such a forgettable avalanche of sci-fi/fantasy/horror cliches. Nevertheless, there was a close-up look at the characters played by Karl Urban, Christopher Plummer and Maggie Q and a certain amount of in-your-face shots to convey the 3D-ness of the whole thing. It looked like a Screen Gems trailer. You know what to expect. Again, this trailer has been online for a while, but it’s probably the first time anyone saw it in a big theater.
“Sucker Punch”
This trailer, slightly extended from the teaser, shows only slightly more than what we’ve seen before, though our untrained eyes only glimpsed new angles and gaudier special effects for Zack Snyder’s 2011 effort. There was more of an emphasis on the skimpy, schoolgirl-ish looks of the cast — Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino — but given that Comic Con shared the Jacob Javitz center with the Anime Festival, that angle made complete sense. To be completely honest, the visual effects are striking and they prove once again that Snyder may be peerless when it comes to creating a visual world — this one part, steampunk, part burlesque strippers, part dungeons and dragons on acid — but as a narrative filmmaker he’s shown that he’s not really adept at character and it remains to be seen if this film will be anything more than a superficial style spectacle. A gloriously good looking one, sure, but honestly? Watching this footage just made us tremble for the thought of his version of “Superman.”