Comic-Con

Disneyland for Nerds

For most of the year, the Hard Rock Hotel in San Diego is a hipstery boutique hotel, all darkly gleaming surfaces and pulsing music with a 1950s-themed coffee shop at street level. But every July the San Diego convention center—separated from the hotel by just a few lanes of traffic and a couple of trolley tracks—hosts Comic-Con International, and 150,000 avid fans of comic books, science fiction, horror, action figures, and anime show up looking for a place to get breakfast. So the Hard Rock Hotel's coffee shop transforms to accommodate them. Like last year, Syfy Channel covered almost every surface with posters and flat-screen monitors advertising its shows. There were new menus, renaming dishes after characters or actors from Syfy shows (Lou Diamond Flapjacks was my favorite—he plays a soldier in space on Stargate Universe). And the coffee shop got a new sign out front, too: Syfy renamed it Café Diem, after the restaurant in the show Eureka.

Cute? Sure. And the Café Diem was one of the more subtle remoldings of space at Comic-Con this year. One of the things that draws geeks like me to Comic-Con is the chance to engage deeply with alternate universes that we love—to talk to the people who draw our favorite comic books or star in our favorite movies—and feel more connected to them and our fellow fans. More and more, Hollywood money at the Con is fulfilling that desire with elaborate sets, rooms, and buildings remade to look like places that don't exist, but that we all feel like we know. They're pop-up theme park attractions tailored for an audience that obsesses over details, over the artifacts and trappings of genre fiction.

Zack Snyder's 'Sucker Punch' goes for grrrl power

Zack Snyder, perhaps best known as the director of the musclebound movie "300," is getting in touch with his feminine side with "Sucker Punch."

The movie, due out in March, is based on an original script that Snyder co-wrote with Steve Shibuya. The concept, which had been germinating for eight years, involves five girls who use their imaginations to escape an insane asylum, Snyder told the audience Saturday afternoon at Comic-Con.

As with "300," the movie features hyper-stylized fighting sequences in which the female characters -- Baby Doll, Amber, Sweetpea, Rocket and Blondie -- slash, hack and kick their way past horrific monsters and lecherous men. Snyder drenches the movie in a sepia tone similar to "300," but adds a splash of the burlesque, a dose of steampunk and a whiff of Nazi Germany to the movie's fantastical settings.

Source:


http://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2010/07/comic-con-disneyland-for-nerds/60359/
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-comic-con-sucker-punch,0,3407204.story