Since arriving at CineVegas on Thursday, I haven’t seen anything groundbreaking yet—although several of the films here do break new ground, but that’s not exactly a compliment. There have been a few intriguing entries: She Unfolds by Day and The End come to mind, but more on those (and the rest of the festival) in my first dispatch. For now, a few snapshots:
Stone Temple Pilots played at the Palms on Thursday. Panic at the Disco showed up on Friday, bringing waves of emo kids to a most unlikely locale.
A Netflix-hosted party on Friday on the top floor of the Palms provided a sweeping view of…buildings. Lotsa them.
Plenty of festival attendees came up to enjoy the view (and the free food), including Morgan Spurlock…
David D’Arcy…
LA Times contributor Mark Olsen, Gabriel Wardell, Variety critic Robert Koehler…
and Wellness star Jeff Clark, seen here contemplating the delicious free food options.
Here’s a closer look at said options.
Bill Pullman showed up for the premiere of the ultra-trippy Your Name Here, in which he plays the lead role as a Philip K. Dick-inspired sci-fi scribe.
There were many ridiculous parties on Friday night. At the least ridiculous of them, Britney Spears showed up, driving the buyers crazy for some reason. The large fellow on the far left is Brit’s bodyguard, who told me that the flash of my camera was a “distraction.” I asked him if he could throw my drink away for me. No dice.
The incessantly jolly, utterly lovable Brian Udovich (producer of The Wackness and CineVegas entry South of Heaven) with ubiquitous Film Threat dude Mark Bell. Nice guys.
Karina and Matt hang loose.
More soon…
Vegas looks a lot prettier from above, before all the slot machines cloud your vision. Here, approaching the city by plane yesterday, I got a sweeping view of the surrounding desert.
Then, things got a little uglier.
This town doesn’t waste any time before trying to take your money. Taken at the Vegas airport, moments after stepping off the plane.
The Palms, where most of the Cinevegas stuff takes place, also held a concert by the Stone Temple Pilots last night. The opening night film was The Rocker, starring Rainn Wilson. Would it make a difference if I told you the movie was terrible? It stars Dwight from The Office, a brilliant comic talent still looking for the right film role to suit his antics. I’m told you should never call him “Dwight” to his face. I didn’t.
Wilson showed up on the red carpet in full-on rocker wear, accompanied by quite the motley crew. When one reporter asked him about his role in Transformers 2, he said, “I can’t tell you anything, but Iet’s just say…” and then proceeded to jerk his neck around and move his arms a la Optimus Prime in mid-transformation. Awesome.
Yes, that is Dennis Hopper, Cinevegas’ Creative Advisory Board chairman, talking to The Strip View. I don’t think it’s a show about strippers, but you never know.
Cinevegas Artistic Director Trevor Groth, the real star of the show.
Wilson and that chick from Superbad. Actually, her name’s Emma Stone, she’s nineteen and shows a lot of promise. You can find her alongside Anna Faris in The House Bunny this summer.
Rainn really worked the crowd. Amazingly enough, after all the craziness died down, I actually had a pretty interesting conversation with him about his interest in taking on independent film roles.
Film Threat guys Don Lewis and Mark Bell at the Rocker after party. It took place on the top floor of the Palms and it was packed. I also ran into Morgan Spurlock and his wife Alex. Morgan’s on the documentary jury this year.
The glorious view of the city at night almost makes you forget the seediness within. Almost.
A reader has about complained my earlier post about the threat in The Happening, because I didn’t preface my thoughts with a spoiler alert. I’m not sure if it qualifies as such. Now, if somebody wants to discuss the contents of a movie and I accidentally encounter them, I might get annoyed. However, the fact that the environment serves as the villain in Shyamalan’s new thriller doesn’t qualify as a spoiler in my book. It’s not a huge third act revelation; we figure this out pretty early on. It’s the central thrust of the PLOT. If I were to tell you that Bruce Willis has been dead the whole time in that one movie everybody has seen by now…well, that’s a spoiler. It redefines the viewing experience. But it won’t change the way you see movie if you know the identity of the bad guy in this one. I promise. No more so than knowing that the Joker is evil in The Dark Knight. I mean, just look at him. And just look at the trailer for The Happening. No big mystery there.
In that order. Greetings from Gate 20 of the Jetblue Terminal at JFK, where I leave for Nevada in a few minutes. Stay tuned for photographs and other pretty things.
So The Incredible Hulk is a halfway decent blockbuster. I find the creature—and the history of his various permutations over the years—far more interesting than the giant-sized spectacle opening at a theater near you this Friday, but the movie clearly has enough one-sided excitement to function as the flat hunk of entertainment that it is. I’ve elaborated on this point here, in a conventional review. Check it out for more hulkish thoughts.
But let’s get back to that Tony Stark cameo I discussed earlier. As the last scene of the film, it basically reads like a commercial for a franchise that Universal hopes to god it can pull off. If it does, the results will be huge…for a little while. An Avengers movie might bring the positive marriage of good actors and energizing spectacles we haven’t seen since X-Men and X2, but I can’t help thinking that decades from now, when audiences catch The Incredible Hulk at superhero movie retrospective at some revival house, this ending will make us all look pretty damn stupid. “Boy,” one future viewer will say to his pal, “people really bought anything back then, huh?” Yep, pretty much.
Syndicate this site