So I just got back into town after my three-day trip to San Diego for the Comic Con convention. It was my first time there and thus I was new to the overwhelming crowds, the elaborate costumes, the excessive nerditude, and the long lines. On Friday morning, I participated in round table discussions with Samuel Jackson, Snakes on a Plane director David Ellis, and snake handler Jules Sylvester. At some point in the near future, I will post video of those discussions. In the meantime, here are some things I found out:

• The snake on the teaser poster is a western diamondback rattlesnake, according to the snake handler.
• David Ellis: Quentin Tarantino is a huge fan of Snakes on a Plane.
• Samuel Jackson asked to be in the movie as soon as he heard about a movie called Snakes on a Plane and verified that it was about snakes on a plane. When I asked him if he still would've taken the role if the title was metaphorical (my example was something like "if it was about, say, convicts in Kansas"), he responded in the negative.

As you can see, I threw some hardballs out there.

I also went to the panel in a huge room later that evening, filled with 5,000 or so Comic Con attendees. The panel was quite entertaining, especially because of how Samuel Jackson handled the questions from the nerdy crowd. They also brought in some live snakes and showed a 10-minute clip from the film. (Unrelated: they also screened 5 minutes or so of the new Tenacious D rock opera movie, which looked great.) Watch the panel, and/or read Brian's coverage.

A few more things I saw:

• Frank Miller and some people from the film 300, based on a Miller graphic novel about the Battle of Thermopylae. Looked very violent.
• Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez talking about Grind House, which features two full-length features, one from each director, as well as some fictional trailers thrown in. You can read AICN's coverage here, but it looked incredibly fun.
• Caught a clip of Southland Tales, Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko. The clip they showed came off as a bad music video, featuring a bloody Justin Timberlake singing The Killers while playing with a beer can, supported by dancers in nurse uniforms. His description of the plot sounded intriguing, so I'm hoping the uncomfortable clip is justified by the film somehow.
• Looked at a lot of comic book art, but didn't buy anything since I don't really read comic books.

Anyway, more to come when I get the video clips from New Line.

This weekend I will be attending Comic-Con 2006 in San Diego. There, with some fellow bloggers, I will be participating in (closed-door) round table discussions with three people involved with Snakes on a Plane: Jules Sylvester (a snake handler), David Ellis (the director), and Samuel Jackson (bad-ass motherfucker). I guess they liked my review of the novelization. (Oh, and being friends with Brian doesn't hurt.)

The pictures above were sent to me by New Line and are of the Snakes on a Plane booth during construction. If you'll be at Comic-Con, you'll likely find me wearing my Regulate Marijuana t-shirt hanging around the Snakes on a Plane session Friday afternoon. Come say hi.

Chuck Klosterman writes in Esquire on the "tragedy" of Snakes on a Plane. He seems to fear that the film will encourage awful copycat attempts by studios to make blog-inspired movies, and that the movie will be too self-conscious to be "so bad it's good." He's wrong for several reasons:

1. Hollywood's copycat obsession is a symptom that has dominated modern cinema for years, and Snakes on a Plane can be hardly blamed for it. You can't pinpoint what's wrong with the horror/action genre on one film, especially when the genre is already in dire straits. (Incidentally, I saw Jaws yesterday for the first time. It was good.)
2. Over 95% of the movie was written and filmed before the Internet phenomenon became fully defined, meaning that the studio was never fully enslaved to the whims of the blogosphere. They did 5 mere days of reshooting -- hardly a choose-your-own adventure, or a wiki for that matter.
3. "[P]eople now say 'Snakes on a plane' in place of 'It is what it is.'" The only people that use the phrase that way are stodgy NPR cultural analysts and people outside the phenomenon looking in.
4. Whether or not the movie is bad enough to be good is somewhat irrelevant. Everyone in the audience (at least when I see the movie) will be there with a shared connection, familiar with the Internet phenomenon, and not just the Keith Olbermann or New York Times coverage. We'll be there to see Snakes on a Plane, and not to witness the harbinger of a new "wikifilm" genre.

His cultural commentary here seems to be much ado about nothing, or more accurately, much ado about the wrong thing. (via soab)

The Onion AV Club isn't very excited by the movies coming out this summer, and neither am I. I was particularly bored by the recently unveiled Superman Returns trailer. I will likely see Mission Impossible III, but more for Phillip Seymour Hoffman and director JJ Abrams than anything else.

At the moment, I can only think of four movie going experiences that I'm looking forward to in 2006:

• The Fountain
• The Borat movie
• Snakes on a Plane (note that I said "experiences")
• The Tenacious-D rock-opera

And maybe Fantastic Mr. Fox. (Yes, these aren't all summer films.) As for the summer, I will go see the sequels for X-men and The Pirates of the Caribbean, but I'm not expecting much from either. Admittedly, I'm not familiar with the Fall crop of Oscar-baiting films -- anything else I should be looking forward to?

Update: Ah, two more summer films: I'll go see A Scanner Darkly and Gondry's The Science of Sleep as well.

(via kottke)