Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I was blind and now I can see. I never got into any of the ALI G stuff. Not that I dislike it, but I've never really seen any of it. Sacha Baron Cohen didn't mean much to me... And then today I saw a 5 minute clip from BORAT and I think I killed something inside me I laughed so hard. I have seen the light! But more on that towards the end of the report... Borat was there in person... and... well, let's knock these out of the way first...

ERAGON

I must confess to knowing very little about this. I read a little fantasy, but as a general rule I've never really been drawn to books about dragons (the Temeraire books by Naomi Novik have me reading, though). The panel had the young man playing Eragon, Edward Speleers, and showed a trailer. Not sure if the trailer is out there, but while I really want this movie to rock I can't shake a DUNGEONS & DRAGONS vibe from the visual style and the cinematography. Strangely enough, the only thing in the trailer I really liked was Jeremy Irons who didn't feel like the D&D movie, even though he was a part of it.

Tidbits from the panel:

- Eragon's dragon, Saphira, will be created tag-team style between ILM and Weta Digital. ILM's work on PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2 was top notch and Weta's always fuckin' great. This is the most exciting element of the film for me.

- The producers found Edward Speleers for the title role after months of shooting. It was almost too late. They were 2 days away from pulling the plug on the film when they found him in London.

- Vivendi/Universal is doing the ERAGON video game

RENO 911: MIAMI

This whole panel seems to be filled with things I need to catch up on. I watched RENO 911 in its first season and just felt it came off as a riff on Broken Lizard's SUPER TROOPERS flick, but with characters I liked less. I've been told the show really found its voice in the second and third seasons and after seeing the trailer and clips shown here... plus seeing the guys up on the stage... well, I laughed a ton. For starters, they introduced the characters, not the actors. Lieutenant Jim Dangle, Deputy Travis Junior and Deputy Trudy Wiegel came out on stage.

They showed a trailer and it was an exact copy of the MIAMI VICE trailer, same music and everything, but with the RENO 911 guys acting the fool. Really funny stuff.

After the trailer Lt. Jim Dangle kept asking if he could have a photo with "the Eragon boy." They talked about the film being a documentary on their lives and how everything there's a documentary they always end up taking scenes out of context and making them look foolish. First of 3 clips ran.

First clip had Dangle and Junior working an airport metal detector. One of them has a backpack belonging to a dude in a tie-dye shirt. "Uh oh, what is this? Look at this look at this..." as he pulls something wrapped in foil out of the bag. The other pulls his gun and starts screaming at the man, "GET DOWN ON THE FUCKING GROUND!" unwrapping the foil as he shouts... without taking a beat he says, "It's a burrito... it's a burrito..." The clip ends with Junior trying to move a stuck bag from the x-ray machine and he gets pulled in. "What's this radioactive sign for?" he calls from inside as his upper torso's skeletal structure appears on the monitor.

The cops didn't like that clip too much, saying in that whole day he only got stuck in the x-ray machine once, but that's the bit they decided to show. "Do you have more bullshit? Show us more bullshit."

The next clip had Trudy Wiegel walking down the beach with Deputy Raineesha Williams talking about how they react if approached. Deputy Trudy seems to want to really urban up everything she says, much to the disdain of Raineesha. The N-bomb is dropped and Raineesha stops in her tracks, head in her hand. She then slaps Deputy Trudy and they move on.

Third clip had all the cops together in what looked like Nevada, not Florida. There was a chicken loose on the road, but it was called in as something much more extravagant due to a wrong police code number given. So a bunch of cops with shotguns arrive and they all end up chasing this chicken across the road. Dangle has his gun out and tries to "knock it out" by pistol whipping the chicken. He ends up missing and almost shoots himself in the leg for his trouble. They can't catch it, so they all decide to kill it. They circle the bird and say they're going to count down from 3 and all shoot so they won't know which one killed it. Of course the go 3... 2... BANG goes Dangle's gun... one or two others go off, then the rest kind of half-assedly shoot it. The clip ends with them walking away with the dead bird in cuffs.

The cops ask "when does this giant web of lies come out?" They ask this to the 20th Century Fox moderator, a really nice sounding guy from Fox publicity. He goes, "What?" They repeat. "What?" Deputy Junior says, "He's got Jew in his ears..." The moderator just looked stunned, that kind of smiling shock look on his face.

Before they leave, Dangle gets up and holds a gun to the Moderator's nuts and made him promise to change the name of the movie to HEROES ON PATROL and to ad some "big-ass dragons."

PATHFINDER

Director Marcus Nispel and star Clancy Brown (Kurgan!!!) were onhand for this panel. Nispel looks like the devil in his picture, by the way... and Brown doesn't look much less demonic in his either... PATHFINDER is a story about Vikings landing in America 600 years before Columbus and being real dicks to the Native Americans. They are Vikings, afterall. They showed a nice, lengthy scene and talked a bit. Here's the talk first:

-Nispel thanked Comic-Con for turning the buzz around on TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE, a movie he agreed to without knowing there was previous movie since the original was banned in Germany, his native country. It wasn't until he showed the trailer at Comic-Con that the buzz (pun intended) turned for the better.

- Nispel also said he wanted to make PATHFINDER in the same tone as movies like CONAN THE BARBARIAN and FIRST BLOOD, a type of film he says we don't see much of these days.

- He loves the work of Boris Vallejo and Frank Frazetta and patterned a lot of the look of the film (and the graphic novel) on those two artists.

The footage:

The long clip starts with Karl Urban watching a circle of Vikings. He's hidden in the foliage and they're surrounding an older Native American guy, a big clumsy Viking sword in his hand. He looks terrified, the Vikings around him beating on their shields and a big fucking Viking in the circle with him, swinging a mace. The Native American attacks, clumsily, with the unfamiliar weapon and he's easily disarmed by the Viking. The Viking is called off by a bigger dude, obviously the leader. This is Clancy Brown. He speaks (every bit of dialogue from the Vikings is spoken in Icelandic, with subtitles for us). He says they must show respect to their host... "he dies by the sword!" and he runs the poor bastard through. Before the Indian can fall over, Brown uses his hair to clean the dude's own blood off the sword.

Urban comes running in. Obviously, this older guy meant something to him. They say Urban looks different, but give him a sword, sticking it in the dirt in front of him. The mace dude approaches. Urban looks around, hand on the hilt of the sword. He kicks the blade, sending up a shower of dirty and pebbles, blinding his attacker and attacks masterfully with the heavy sword, killing at least 3 Vikings (and cutting the eyeball out of another one. No shit. He swiped, the blade cuts through the forehead and down to the cheek, slicing the eyeball right out of the dude's face). In the confusion, he grabs a shield and runs.

Clancy Brown calls for a charge after him. "He knows our ways!" A big chase through the woods follows, Urban deflecting arrows with his metal shield. They end up chasing him to an area of the woodlands with some low-laying water. The lead Viking enters the water, looking around for Urban, who pops out of the water behind the Viking. As the Viking turns, Urban upper-cuts him with the shield, sending the sharp edge up underneath the jaw. That was the end of the footage.

The footage looked great. Cinematography was beautiful, the violence and gore top notch. This one could be a whole lotta fun. Now let's look at a crazy picture of Clancy Brown!

X3: THE DVD

- It will have 21 deleted scenes.

- It will have 3 alternate endings.

BORAT

Holy God... They announced Borat was there, in person, and would come from the Woman's restroom in the hall. Sure enough, out he comes surrounded by a video crew. He's applauded as he walks up to the front of the stage and has to navigate the guard railing set up. He finally gets around that and tries to pull himself up on stage.

See that table to his left? Seconds after this picture was taken, he grabs ahold of the cloth and tries to use it help him up on the stage. All he does pull the table about 2 feet closer to him, ripping off the cloth and sending him falling back. He finally manages it up and waves to us all. He goes up and speaks. He talks about loving comic books, how there was a popular comic book in Kazakhstan called Astonishing Woman (or something very close to that. Hard to hear over the laughter) who had the power of having 6 breasts... two on her back, two on her front and two "underneath" and had a magic vagina that could give birth to 14 healthy baby boys at the same time. Then introduced the clip... Oh sweet lord...

It starts off simply enough. Borat is in a Civil War antiques store, Confederate flags everywhere. The owner obviously isn't an actor, but a real dude... or at least a brilliant actor that made me think he was a real dude. Borat ends up doing some weird pratfalls breaking nearly every antique plate and dish in the room. He caused $425 in damages and tries to pay it off with human hair, bagged from Kazakhstan. The owner is getting pissed and a short, fat dude comes in to help pay his debt (Ken Davitian). They argue in a foreign language and the redneck owner just gets fed up and tells them to just get out.

They drive back to the hotel, Ken chastising him for breaking all that stuff and taking up a ton of their budget for their American trip. The next thing we see is them inside their hotel room. Borat is in the bath, soap bubbles hiding his junk. He's sitting forlornly, contemplative look on his face. Here's where it got me...

Borat walks out, naked, but we only see him from the waist up. When exits the bathroom and sees the bed Ken Davitian is completely naked, vigorously masturbating to a nudie magazine, held just in front of his junk. This image fucks me up. Ken is a short, hairy extremely fat dude.

Borat gets furious. Apparently someone in that nudie book means a lot to him and we get the impression that he's in America searching for her. But he charges the fat dude and tackles him. What follows next is an all out nude man on man wrestling fight. Borat's junk is blacked out, but the black bar indicates at least a 2 foot penis. They're rolling around, hugging each other, pushing away and inevitably end up in almost every sexual position. Borat throws Ken against the bed, he doubles over and Borat goes in for a wrestle hold, laying his naked body bare on his back, his cock press against teh dude's ass. They somehow end up on the bed in a 69 position, the fat guy's harry spread butt-crack going up and down right above Borat's nose, his gigantic pear-shaped balls hovering just over Borat's mouth.

The fat guy gets off and runs out of the room, still naked as hell. Borat gives chase. They run down the hall and both run into an elevator... a full elevator. With people that didn't expect to see 2 naked men fighting each other. The look on their faces are priceless. The elevator dings and it looks like everybody gets quickly out of the elevator, even if it wasn't their floor. The two still tussle and the camera pans over to see one old dude who wasn't willing to get off on a floor that wasn't his, no matter what the hell was in that elevator with him.

The elevator opens on the lobby. The chase continues and eventually ends up in the conference room of the hotel where a real estate agent's convention is going on. The run through the shocked crowd and finally tackle each other on the stage. One of the yuppy looking real estate guys screams, "GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!" and really violently grabs Borat by the back of the neck. The clip ended here.

I will have nightmares about the begin of that naked fight. But count me as one of the converted. I've seen the light and it is good. Long live Borat. There was a screening of the full BORAT film tonight, but unfortunately I wasn't invited... still was able to nab some tickets to it, but the SNAKES ON A PLANE panel didn't get out in time for me to make it over. I will have to suffer and wait. I'll count the days, though, after that clip...

Some more comin' squirts! Be back soon!

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com