Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with what will be my final bit of ShoWest coverage, filling you in on what I saw and did today, the last day of the convention. Specifically, the awards ceremony where they showed some footage from upcoming films.

Thank the lord of movies Rachel McAdams was given the Female Star of the Year award because I got to catch a glimpse of SHERLOCK HOLMES. If you missed my earlier report, those fuckers hid that footage from me, so I skipped what I thought was going to be an industry wankfest in order to be earlier in line for the next presentation (Disney) and then they up and showed Sherlock Holmes, Terminator: Salvation and Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince footage.

Of those, the only one I was bummed about was the SHERLOCK HOLMES footage. They didn’t replay all of the Holmes footage, just a quick 20 seconds or so that featured Rachel McAdams in sexy turn of the century London lingerie. She’s undressing for Robert Downey Jr.’s Sherlock Holmes and pulls a dagger-like broach from her hair and makes to stab him. Downey grabs her wrist. She answers with a punch from her other hand, which he also grabs. He smiles, a “gotcha” look on his face. Then she knees him in the nuts and he falls to the floor, the smile fading from his face.

We get Holmes’ POV, sideways McAdams from head to toe bending down to look at him. Then we see Holmes handcuffed to a bed, McAdams looking over him. Downey realizes where he is and gives a “Well, what’re you gonna do?” shrug.

So, at least I got something. The filmmaking looked very modern, not trying to put on a sepia tone or something. I don’t know how it’s going to play out, but I will say that McAdams was smoking and Downey looked at the top of his game, oozing charm and likeability from every pore, even in the few seconds of footage that was shown.

And McAdams was shaking nervous when she accepted her award and made all the more crush-worthy for it.

Also saw scenes from a couple of Paramount flicks: TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE FALLEN and STAR TREK. The Trek footage has been seen and written about a lot, but I’ll give it a bit of a go-over before knocking out the TRANSFORMERS footage, which was the first stuff shown outside of the trailers.

The Trek stuff was for Chris Pine who was accepting the Star of Tomorrow award and was, of course, a Kirk-centric scene, him picking up Uhura at a bar. He asks what she’s studying and she tells him, not thinking he’ll know what exactly it is. He surprises her, saying her study focuses on alien language and culture. She’s impressed, but still sly.

Pine plays Kirk as cocky and a bit drunk. A big dude comes up to Uhura and asks if she’s being bothered by this guy and she says very much so, but she can handle him. Kirk gets into the meathead’s face… like I said, cocky. The big guy’s friends come up and he says something like, “What’re you going to do? There are four of us.” And Kirk responds with a “I’ll let you get a few more so this will be a fair fight” and gets a punch in the mouth for it. He smiles as he grabs his bleeding chin and then fights back, taking the big dude out.

Pine was pretty good, I thought. He was certainly not imitating Shatner, but had the charm. I’m interested to see what exactly he brings to the full picture.

TRANSFORMERS… Michael Bay accepted the Vanguard Award and then showed a full scene and a quick edit of action from the flick.

The full scene was Shia LaBeouf and Megan Fox going into Sam’s parent’s garage to talk with Bumblebee, who is, apparently, still having trouble with his voicebox. He’s able to cough up a few staticy words, but still communicates mostly through pop songs (lame).

Shia tells Bumblebee that he’s going away to college and can’t bring him along. Freshmen aren’t allowed to have cars at his college, apparently, and Sam doesn’t need protection anymore anyway, he says.

As he talks with Bumblebee, Fox is outside… we see that the Witwicky house is being repaired… so I take it this isn’t too long after the first one or there was a bit of action that happened prior to this clip.

Anyway, Fox stips out of her black leather pants and jacket, revealing a dress… Prom? Something. But Megan Fox stripping is a-okay for whatever reason.

Back in the garage, Bumblebee isn’t taking the news well, dramatically crying (window-washer liquid) and waving his arms. This could have actually been fairly emotional. LaBeouf is playing the scene that way, but the robot is so over the top I don’t know if it was supposed to be a comic scene or not.

So, the scene wasn’t all that great, but the montage of action was fucking awesome, as I’m sure Bay would say. We get a look at the Devastator (massive and pretty sweet) knocking the hell out of Optimus. The shot is from far away and Optimus is fighting in a large, open grass field in bright daylight. He’s hit and sails through the air towards us, hitting the ground and rolling to a stop right at the camera. He sits up and spits out something metal (robot tooth?).

There were quick flashes of a lot of cool action. There was a Decepticon with giant saw blades that cuts a car in half, splitting up Shia and Fox. There was a shot of a decepticon bug being forced into Shia’s mouth… another shot was of a transformer fly that Shia has pinched between his fingers… and a lot of quick big action scenes… a transformer that is two giant wheels, ‘splosions, etc, etc.

Looks like more of the same so if you hated the first movie you probably won’t like this one much more, but I hear that the action makes the first movie look like DRIVING MISS DAISY… and that Bay learned a few lessons from the first, focusing on the robots more than the humans this time out. I hope so.

Okay, that’s about it. Had a fantastic day… nice free dinner at the awards ceremony and a fantastic 30 minute chat with the living legend, Sir Michael Caine, earlier in the day. It’s been a great day and now I must pack up for my trip back to Austin in the AM.

Thanks to Heather Lewandoski for making this ShoWest experience so flawless and stress-free, unlike in previous years. And thanks to you guys for following along!

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
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