Last week I saw the movie Paper Heart, which uses interviews with real people and the blossoming relationship of stars Charlyne Yi and Michael Cera (playing fictionalized versions of themselves) to explore what it means to be in love. Overall, I found the film to be quite charming, due in large part to Yi’s performance. Although I didn’t completely buy the romance, I thought that Yi and Cera had good chemistry and their story was a good counterpoint to the documentary. I especially liked the homemade puppet shows used to illustrate the stories of the interviewees.
But this post isn’t so much about what I thought of the movie as much as it is about how I found out about it.
Compared to the rest of the weekend, Sunday at Comic-Con was relatively low-key for me. The plan was Doctor Who in the morning and Torchwood in the afternoon, with a couple of hours to kill in between. Once the Doctor Who panel wrapped up, I started to make my way down to the exhibit hall for more browsing but then decided that I just didn’t want to deal with crowds down there (even for a Sunday), so instead I grabbed some lunch before heading back to the ballroom.
The next panel was actually a trio of short indie movie panels presented back-to-back with no breaks in between, and first up was Paper Heart. It started off with the trailer, and then stars Charlyne Yi and Jake Johnson and director Nick Jasenovec chatted briefly with the moderator before showing a deleted scene from the movie, an interview with actor Rob Huebel wherein he is confused about Charlyne’s gender and demands that she “show them (her) dick.”
After the clip, it was time for audience questions. It started off normally, but the second guy up asked when Charlyne was going to show us her dick. Charlyne looked genuinely shocked as the guy tried to start a chant of “Show us your dick! Show us your dick!” but she broke character for a second when the crowd quickly turned on the guy and started booing. She then yelled back at the guy, “I’m not a guy, I’m a girl! I have a vagina! Do you wanna see my vagina? Do you?” At which point she stood up on her chair to reveal a large black dildo hanging out of her jeans.
She had been sitting between Jake and Nick, but now that she was standing they were at eye-level with the dildo and she made a point to wave it front of each of them. When she finally sat back down, she stood it up on the table between her and and Jake, and he could not seem to keep his hands off of it. At the end of the panel, she threw it out into the audience (at their insistence). All in all, a very memorable panel, but I was now genuinely interested in seeing the movie and an instant fan of Charlyne.
There is a bit of an epilogue to the story. The weekend it was released, there was going to be a Q&A with Charlyne and Jake after one of the screenings at the Arclight, but it was already sold out by the time I found out about it, so I made plans to see it the following Tuesday after work. Coincidentally, Charlyne was at that screening dressed as an Arclight usher and helping people find their seats. Not too many people recognized her until she helped introduce the movie. According to the movie’s Twitter account, she has shown up to several screenings in “disguise.”
Last week, The Hollywood Reporter reported that that actresses Olivia Wilde and Beau Garrett are the first to be signed for the Tron sequel. Wilde is currently a regular on the medical drama House M.D. and will be playing a worker in the virtual world who has to face the MCP. Garrett, who was most recently seen in Made of Honor, will be playing a siren in the virtual world.
While the male lead has not yet been cast, Coming Soon is reporting that Bruce Boxleitner will be joining Jeff Bridges as members of the original cast making appearances in the new movie.
Bridges (who played the dual roles of Flynn and Clu) appeared in test footage that was screened earlier this year at Comic-Con, so his involvement has been presumed, but it’s good to hear that Boxleitner, who played the title character as well as the “user” Alan Bradley, is also attached.
Not much is known of the film’s plot, other than it will be true sequel, not a re-imagining. Shooting is slated to begin in the spring for a 2011 release.
I first came across this on Tumblr but tracked it back to the source on a site called Toys R Evil. A UK-based group of sculptors and model makers was commissioned by Disney to create this piece as a gift to John Lasseter. The detail is amazing and can be seen is a close-up in the original post.
Toys R Evil is, itself, and interesting site, and not one I had visited before. It gathers news on toys that you are not likely to see in a more mainstream context, such as these creations from a company called OhNo!Doom.
Intrigued, I did some digging and came across an article on IGN that described a trailer that was shown unexpectedly on Thursday at the end of the Walt Disney Pictures panel. It shows a light cycle chase and much more sinister-looking Flynn (again played by Jeff Bridges) before ending up with the number 2 in the Tron logo font as the letters T, R, and N appear around it (to form TR2N) and then fade back out.
This morning there was a Slashdot article that in turn pointed to articles on Gizmodo and Filmstalker with a bootleg video of the trailer (presented belowUpdate 7/28: I grabbed the embed from the Filmstalker article, but as you can see, it’s been pulled. The Gizmodo article still has a non-embeddable version for the time being. Update 7/29: Someone did a pretty decent job cleaning up the video and posted it to YouTube, so it’s back.). The quality is poor as no videotaping is supposed to be going on during the video segments, but it’s good enough to get a feel for what’s going on. Hopefully, an official version of the trailer will be released soon.
Talk of a sequel has been slowly building momentum for some time now. At one one point it was rumored that Pixar wanted to do a remake or a sequel. Around the time of the film’s 20th anniversary, writer and director Steven Lisberger, talked about his interest and ideas for a possible sequel. However, Disney didn’t seem to show any interest in continuing the franchise until it released the game Tron 2.0 in 2003. A first-person shooter set in the computer world, it cleverly extended the metaphors originated in the movie to include modern computing technology such as firewalls, PDAs, and the internet. It was said that the game was going to be used to gauge interest in a sequel, but nothing more was really heard until 2005 when Disney hired a pair of writers to come up with a script for a sequel. It would be two more years before Disney would hire Joseph Kosinski to direct the film (now being written by a writing team from the show Lost). The Hollywood Reporter article detailing this most recent bit of news included this tidbit:
…sources said one of the things Kosinski will be doing is working on a sequence involving the movie’s Light Cycles to work out his vision for the movie.
It would appear that the footage shown at Comic-Con is the culmination of that work. It’s exciting to see that actual progress is being made and that (at least visually) it seems to be faithful to the spirit of the original, but I’m going to try to stay cautiously optimistic until more concrete details are available.
Not that I’m obsessed over this movie or anything, but the folks over at io9 (via Metblogs) have video of a life-size animatronic of the robot Wall-E in action. He seems to have a wide range of motion and is very expressive, at one point rolling up to the camera, raising up a bit, and waving.
I’ve heard he’ll be making the rounds of the talk show circuit to promote the movie. He should also be making appearances in Disney theme parks no doubt giving Push a run for his money.
