The Troma panel at Comic-Con gets smaller every year, but the sense that you’re at a really fucked up family reunion never dissipates. “What I find is amazing about Lloyd, is that everybody is connected to him in some fashion,” said panelist Steven Paul at yesterday’s session. He gestured at the room––the smallest I entered all weekend. “I bet everyone here has acted in a Lloyd Kaufman film.”
Not quite, but part of the reason to show up to this thing every year is to see which disparate characters Lloyd will rope into making an appearance. This year, there wasn’t a guest more unexpected than Paul, a producer on Ghost Rider, the visual effects producer on Karate Dog (!!!), and the man responsible for a number of upcoming “is that really necessary?” video game adaptations, including Castlevania and Tekken. What, exactly, was this guy doing on what Kaufman himself billed as “a panel of independent thinkers?” “I at one time was Steven’s teacher,” Kaufman boasted. “So there’s a little bit of Troma in the mainstream world!”
Maybe more than a little bit. Seated on the far end of the table was Mark Neveldine, co-writer/director of the budding Jason Statham franchise, Crank. “You’ll have to excuse me, because this is the first panel I’ve been sober for,” Neveldine cracked with pitch perfect post-frat bravado––now that nerds are inheriting the earth, an awful lot of them look and sound suspiciously like recurring characters on Entourage. What’s this guy’s connection to Kaufman? He’s apparently Troma’s most dedicated plagiarist.
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Agnes Varnum points to the International Museum of Women’s Online Film Festival, through which you can watch a new film by a female director every day through the month of October. There’s some good stuff, including The Grace Lee Project, and a fascinating short documentary that I just watched by Turkish filmmaker Melis Birder called The Tenth Planet: A Single Woman’s Life in Baghdad. Filmmaker Melis Birder went to Baghdad in January 2004 looking for a story, and found one in the social life of her translator, an unmarried 20-something working woman named Kawkab. Kawkab and her friends and family speak incredibly candidly about sex, marriage, Sunni/Shia conflict, the difficulties of an infant democracy, and life in Baghdad after the U.S. occupation. Watch it here, and for more information on the film, see its official website.
***Director Kathryn Bigelow has cemented a cast for The Hurt Locker, which is, as far as I can tell, the first film by a major Hollywood director to be set in present day Iraq. The film was scripted by journalist Mark Boal, who spent time embedded with a bomb squad. He tells The Hollywood Reporter: “We wanted to show the kinds of things that soldiers go through that you can’t see on CNN, and I don’t mean that in a censorship-conspiracy way. I just mean the news doesn’t actually put photographers in with units that are this elite.”
***Variety’s Brain Lowry watched I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry so that you never, ever have to. And though he concedes that “Sandler’s fans should enjoy hearing him toss off lines about being ‘big-time fruits’ or having ‘boarded the dude train’,” ultimately “it will be slightly depressing if a barrage of schoolyard gay jokes passes for ‘edgy’ a quarter-century after Victor/Victoria.”
***After the massive critical success of her feature directorial debut Away From Her, Sarah Polley will return to the other side of the camera to star opposite Jared Leto in Mr. Nobody. It’s the first English-language feature for Belgian director Jaco Van Dormael, and THR’s Borys Kit says the script is “a multilayered love story inspired by the ‘butterfly effect, the chaos-theory notion that the beat of a butterfly’s wings can cause a storm thousands of miles away.”
io9, a new blog from Gawker Media devoted to all things sci-fi, launched today. Posts relevant to our purposes so far include Six Reasons Why Star Trek Should Stay Dead, Back to What Future? and Diary of a Mad Black Trekkie.
