Hey everyone. Capone in San Diego here catching up on some of my panel reports at Comic-Con. What most people don't remember about the panel that birthed the now-legendary TWILIGHT presentation/rock concert was that it was actually a three-part event. TWILIGHT was the third of three film presented by Summit Pictures, and the other two films both hold promise in my eyes. The first presentation was of a film that has definitely been flying under my radar to date (granted, the film doesn't open until February 2009. The first thing I like about the film is that it's directed by Paul McGuigan of LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN, GANGSTER NO. 1, and THE ACID HOUSE fame. He also did WICKER PARK and THE RECKONING, so I guess that tips the scales in the wrong direction slightly, but the guy has such a distinct visual signature, and the two clips that were shown were great. The other thing that intrigues me about this film is the eclectic cast: Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Camilla Belle, and Djimon Hounsou, among others. The opening clip that was shown was actually the opening of the film, and nice montage of archival images from the last 60-70 years with a narration by Fanning, I believe. She describes the origins of the Nazis rounding up people who show signs of having psychic powers and essentially running tests on them like lab rats. Soon after the war, most industrialized nations (and maybe a few that weren't) began developing similar programs, and the world's young psychics began hiding out to avoid detection and capture, and a few of the band together and hide out in Hong Kong (where most of the film takes place) to fight against government agents who would do them harm or at least rob them of their freedom. Apparently scientists have developed a drug designed to boost psychic abilities; the problem is everybody dies who gets injected. If my notes are correct, Camilla Belle's character is the only one of these kids who survives the injection, which makes her a target. These young people don't see themselves as superheroes of any kind; they simply want to be left alone to lead normal lives. There are different levels of psychics: watchers (who can see the future); movers (telekinetics); pushers (who can plant thoughts in your head); and many others. The second clips shown was a short one with Hounsou, who plays the films villain, who leads one of the organizations gathering psychics. He's a pusher, and he convinces the guard who let Belle's character (also a pusher) that he needs to shoot himself in the head for his being deceived. It's a quick and nasty sequence. The final clip was my favorite, with Fanning (a watcher, who is sometimes wrong) attempting to convince Evans (a mover) to join the group of resistance fighters while they share a meal in a Hong Kong fish market. Fanning still blows me away with how she commands the screen. She's so damn authoritative in this scene, and does a great job trying to reason with Evans. He'll have none of it, but the two are soon attacked by a group of "screamers," psychics whose screams are so powerful that they can break all the glass in the fish market and make your ears bleed hard enough to knock you out. The number of fish tanks destroyed in this sequence is massive, with dead fish flopping around everywhere, and the noise the screamers make is really scary. The sequence reminded me a bit of Deckard chasing Zhoma in BLADE RUNNER, and that's a great thing. The scene also reveals something about a few of these characters: since many of them go out of their way not to use their abilities, they don't always know the extent their powers will manifest themselves or whether they can control them fully. I'm still undecided about PUSH's potential. It could be another piece-of-shit JUMPER-like movie, but these are a better class of actor and nobody's running around trying to look cool or show off what they can do. I'll have a few more details for you about the film during my interviews with Evans, Belle, and, yes, Fanning very soon. The panels that was standing between 6,000-plus TWILIGHT fans and the object of their affection was a short but cool panel for the Nicolas Cage film KNOWING, due in March 2009, from director Alex Proyas (DARK CITY; THE CROW; I, ROBOT). Proyas showed us what appeared to be extended trailer-like footage that spells out a complex but fascinating story. In the 1950s, a teacher asks her young students to draw a picture of what the future will look like for a time capsule. One little girl scribbles out an endless series of numbers, which the teacher is annoyed by, but she still puts it in the capsule. When the capsule is opened 50 years later, each student of the current year at this school is given on the drawings, and it just so happens that Cage's daughter gets the page with the numbers on it. Due to a slightly coffee stain accident, Cage notices that the numbers on the paper are not exactly random, and eventually he works out a cypher system that leads him to believe that half the numbers are a series of dates when major disasters happened in the world in the last 50 years. This doesn't sound so bad until Cage realizes that some of the dates are in the near future, and so the question becomes, What happens when the numbers run out? The money shot of this particular footage begins with when Cage gets stuck in traffic while driving on the day he believes another major disaster will occur, in which, according to his numbers, 81 people will die. But the police tell him only a couple people have been hurt. Then a plane drops out of the sky right onto the bumper-to-bumper traffic. It's a harrowing sequence, one of many that were shown. The tone of KNOWING looks incredibly dark, but it also seems far more "realistic" than anything Proyas has done to date. During the Q&A, Proyas said his mission was to make the film as believable as possible and that his touchstone for the overall feel of the film was THE EXORCIST. Proyas also indicated that the plane crash sequence was only one of many disasters in the film and that it wasn't even the most impressive one. Gulp. To read a more detailed account of what the film encompasses, be sure to read Quint's interview with Proyas. That's all for now; lots more to come. Hold tight. -Capone capone@aintitcoolmail.com
