Karina on SpoutBlog

The official schedule for the first full day of events at ComicCon is now up at their website, so you can compare it to the draft schedule we posted earlier this week. Plus, they’ve announced a special event for Preview Night. On Wednesday nights, the Con traditionally opens to show floor to press and passholders, and then after a couple of hours everyone adjourns to dinners and hotel parties, and starts full-bore conventioning the next morning. But this year, they’re going to have two special screenings on Wednesday night of the pilot for the new FOX show Fringe, produced by JJ Abrams and starring Joshua “Pacey” Jackson. Details here.

Under discussion:

Less Than Zero  (1987)

American Psycho  (2000)

…or, at least, The Most Essential 9:52 in All of Cinema Based on a Text By Bret Easton Ellis. Except for most of American Psycho. Well…maybe the Most Essential 9:52 in All of 80s Cinema Based on a Text By Bret Easton Eliis? Can we agree on that?

In short: Less Than Zero has been uploaded to YouTube in several chunks. Embedding has been disabled by the request of user 80sTeenMovies, but you can watch the first nine minutes and fifty two seconds––from the tacked-on graduation prologue, through Andrew “Clay” McCarthy’s EuroCine flashbacks to the dissolution of his relationships with Jamie “Blair” Gertz and Robert “Julian” Downey Jr, and up through the end of the triumphant “You can’t home home again…to a Ferrari showroom your parents mansion in Beverly Hills” montage set to “Hazy Shade of Winter” by The Bangles––here.

You don’t really need to watch the rest of the film, but if you’re looking for an excuse to kill the rest of the afternoon, you could. Or, you could just watch the above, vaguely-synergistic Bangles video, which includes that wonderful/horrible scene of Gertz and McCarthy making out in his convertible in the middle of Sunset Strip traffic.

Under discussion:

Dr. No  (1962)

Wall-E  (2008)

So, you hear about this iPhone thing? It’s, like, a big deal! We knew there would be lines; we assumed there’d be, at the very least, a Twitter outage. But apparently today’s impatient early adopters are finding that they can pay their $199, but they can’t use their new gadget thanks to an Apple network error––the dreaded 9838. But we already learned this week that some economic problems are apparently nothing but neuroses––and suggestions otherwise are apparently bait for nonsensical James Bond references as comeback. So it’s not inconceivable that maybe 9838 is a manifestation of the psychological torment and guilt shared, at least on a subconscious level, by the energy-conscious, generally politically correct consumer class who, in spite of anti-corporate, anti-waste lip service, can’t stop themselves from placing of hundreds of dollars on the feeder bar and pressing down hard every time Apple release a new slice of fake plastic happiness. Or, as Anil Dash puts it in the Twitter above, you can’t go around saying that Wall-E has the power to change the wicked ways of the world if you’re not willing to let that change begin with you.

Semi-related: If you do get your new iPhone to work (and/or have an old one), Paul Harrill has rounded up a list of relevant iPhone apps for filmmakers.