Bone's Thursday at C-Con Shoot 'em Up and throw 'em up!

The baby from Shoot 'Em Up!

When it comes to Comic-Con, Adam is a relentless and unforgiving taskmaster. He insists on being in the front of a line at an event that draws 123,000 attendees. As you might well surmise this involves hauling your "went to bed at 2 in the morning" ass out of bed mighty early, try 4:30 - driving to the Convention Center, shlepping your fuzzy noggin into line (a pretty small one to Adam's credit) and then attempting to pull together another couple hours scratchy-eyed sleep on a sleeping bag laid across cement. Among so many people dressed up as alien monsters you're never sure if you're awake or dreaming, but thanks to Adam's organization, and our crews "never take no for an answer" boldness – we got into every screening.

Beowulf

After quickly getting our press credentials squared away, we followed a tip from our buds at comingsoon.com about a possible screening of Beowulf and fought our way through the hordes infesting the Gaslamp district of San Diego to the Horton Plaza. We had no trouble getting into the theater (which proved to presage our amazing good fortune for the rest of the Con) and sat among our many friends and acquaintances in the movieweb game. Since Adam has already covered our evening with Beowulf, I won't rehash it any more than just to say that the motion capture on display was sumptuous but the actors (particularly Ray Winstone) looked odd and made me think I was playing a video game more than watching a movie.

Also way below par from how my imagination had envisioned 30 years ago when I read the book were the creature Grendel and the great mead hall Heorot. Grendels ferocity and prolific killing skills bespeak a great and fearsome beast, not a skinny pale cross between Smeagol and Freddy Krueger. Similarly the way Heorot is described in the book, it inspired something a little more regal in my imagination than the glorified barn in Zemeckis' creation.

There were a number of interesting tidbits that writers Neil Gaimon (Mirrormask) and Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction) brought to light in their discussions. They originally hammered out the script in a two week marathon session 10 years ago in the Nordic climes of Mexico. At every juncture the writers agreed that Zemeckis encouraged them to write without any thought to budgetary constraints. If you think it would be impossible to capture it on film, write it that way. Explaining that in the mo-cap process that nothing is impossible and every frame costs the same. The problem I noticed right away as we were treated to the second reel of the film was that this shoot the moon licence Zemeckis granted is chained down terribly by the fearsome PG-13 monster. A good example is the slaughter scenes we got to see courtesy of the gimpy Grendel. We saw two of these and they pretty much consist of Grendel breaking down the door, capering about menacingly, growling, jumping up on a table, a quick whirlwind of confusion and screaming and suddenly everyone is hanging from the rafters dead and bleeding. Boring really.

The thing I most admired about what this team has done in their efforts to bring Beowulf to the screen is the clever way they've filled in a few of the blanks that the book leaves open. They've taken a great story, perhaps the second greatest story ever told and enriched it considerably. I couldn't delve into this without spoiling, but for those familiar with the story you will be pleased with their embellishments – simple but clever. Although the 3D aspect of the presentation is fun, the mo-cap is rigid enough to be disconcerting and make you wish Zemeckis had made it in the same fashion as Lord of the Rings.

After Party

The after party was a classy intimate affair, with an open bar and plenty of starlets mingling with the press. I must have had one too many G & Ts because the last thing I remember was dancing on the bar with Rosario Dawson. Sweet kid. Actually, since we'd RSVPd for the same presentation the following morning, us zbonesters were not on the list and moped away from all those starlets and free drinks discouraged and ashamed.

Sicko

Much to the dismay of all concerned I woke up Thursday morning with some sort of gastro-intestinal challenge that would take me out of the game most of the day. Tyler stayed behind to make sure I didn't die and found us a shuttle back to the CC in time to join Adam and Sheldon for the nights screening of Shoot ‘Em Up.

Shoot "Em Up (R)
Starring - Clive Owen, Monica Belucci, Paul Giamatti
Director – Michael Davis
New Line Cinema

Shoot Em Up could not be more appropriately named. The producers probably spent more money on fake blood than Clive Owen. It's certainly one of those films that are a nice palette cleanser where you can leave your brain in the car and just have a good time. Like El Mariachi, SEU tells the story of one bad ass mofo pitted against an army of gangster thugs, this time lead by the fiendishly fun Paul Giamatti.

Though the plot isn't bad, it's execution falters at times, but not to worry, it's truly nothing more than an excuse to get the led flying fast and furious. The film starts as a pensive Clive Owen sits on a bench on a dark, deserted and somewhat dangerous looking street. As expected a beautiful pregnant woman runs past crying hysterically, soon followed by a black sedan that takes the corner too fast and crashes into a parked car at the top of the street. The driver pops out, wagging a large handgun and yelling vituperatively at the woman who turns into a parking garage seeking refuge. After chasing her to the mouth of the garage the gunman stops long enough to ask Owen "what're you looking at?" Famous last words.

Owen utters a beleaguered "bloody hell" and soon enough he's dragged into a mysterious caper that will require him to expend enough bullets to fill a swimming pool. Within the next few minutes Owen is pressed into service as a gun-weilding Gynocologist who must assist in an impromptu birth amid a maelstrom of gunfire. Owen learns soon after the delivery that the mother has been fatally wounded and all the sudden he's got a newborn to protect from an ever growing army of gun toting toughs. With a little good fortune on his side he manages to extricate himself from this scrape, killing off all the evil-doers in a series of acrobatic ballistics while cradling the infant under his left arm.

Giamatti is the wise-cracking head of the legions of bad guys, and much to his consternation he is forced to continually recruit men from other kingpins as Owen systematically dispatches hood after hood in wholesale numbers until Giamatti's ranks are all but decimated time and time again. Leaving a despondent Giamatti to exclaim "do we really suck that bad, or is this guy that good?" By strong-arming a local prostitute (Belucci) Owen learns that he's gotten himself in the midst of a black market baby ring that also involves organ harvesting – maybe who knows? He is able to recruit the help of Belucci and with her help he's able to fall back and regroup long enough to reload his guns anyway.

The fun of the film is the pure pleasure of watching Owen come up with creative ways to extricate himself from seemingly hopeless jams long enough to run headlong into another. The gunplay choreography is great, if not a tad implausible, but the audience was eating this ultraviolent slam bang affair like popcorn and I don't blame them. I enjoyed it myself.

The grand finale (involving jumping from a plane with no parachute) gets awfully far fetched, but again this film is about shooting them up and on that account it succeeds well enough to drag its silly plot and a strangely lifeless performance from Belucci to the finish line where I'll award it a recommend and a

B-

After the screening a jubilant Davis and Clive Owen fielded questions from the crowd. Owen heaped plenty of praise on Davis as a director and told stories of how he became involved in the project. Not only did he enjoy the script, but Davis (an artist) also shot a short of the film from storyboard-type drawings, which was the straw that turned Owen's head. He became so excited about his involvement with the project that he remembered telling his friends about Davis, whom were skeptical when they were unable to find him on imdb.

Davis spoke of Owen's help on set, and his standing up against the studio when they would harass the first time director. If he had a dollar for every time he heard Owen shout "Lay off Michael, he's doing a good job." The best story came from Davis who told of his love for action films as a boy. He said that when he was a lad he sneaked a cassette recorder into James Bond movies and recorded the audio. He said while other kids were listening to the Beatles he was listening to James Bond movies.

Adam's computer went tits up on him before he could email me his Thursday report, but I can't wait to get it because he said it took him 5 hours to write. By tomorrow, I'll have a full Friday report – lots of cool stuff to come.