BEFORE: July is usually convention time for a lot of people - I worked a booth at the San Diego Comic-Con for about 15 years straight, or maybe it was 12 and just felt like 15. Anyway, it stopped being profitable at some point and I was getting more and more frustrated with it, so we called it a day in 2017. And I finished my last SDCC very tired, very pissed off and with duct tape holding my pants together. (It's a long story, you can probably find it on this blog if you know where to look.)
There's not going to be a real San Diego Comic Con this year, because of Covid-19 concerns in California - it was cancelled a few months ago, around the time San Diego started housing homeless people in the convention center. Plus, having THAT many people gather together, in a place with poor air circulation on the convention floor, plus people camping out in sleeping bags for Hall H programming, plus partying, plus hotel pools, plus shaking celebrities' hands... Well, you get the idea. A big convention has always been a giant petri dish for colds and diseases, STDs, UTIs, you name it. I've been sick there myself enough times, and that was before the time of Corona.
BUT, all is not lost, there is a virtual version of the San Diego Con planned, July 22-26, which will feature much of the programming that WOULD have been in Hall H, but without all that annoying human contact and standing in line. I'll admit that a virtual costume contest doesn't have the same appeal of a live one, but to make up for it, all the programming and virtual events are FREE, you just have to register. (and hey, who's to say there won't be a bit of unplanned nudity in a virtual costume contest - they can't control that, if you think about it...) There are usually people who get shut out of the SDCC every year, who don't realize you have to buy tickets via lottery months in advance, but with a virtual con, there are no limits, they could have MILLIONS of people attending online, and they keep their brand alive, and then maybe next year, but we'll see.
We're waiting to hear about the New York Comic Con in October - my boss registered for a table in Artists Alley, but they have neither confirmed nor cancelled to date. Obviously the virus numbers are good for NYC right now, but nobody can say what things will be like in October - plus the Javits Convention Center was used as a Covid-19 field hospital, so there's that. And if it goes forward, everyone will have to wear masks, but since it's a Comic-Con, many people are ALREADY wearing masks as part of their costumes, they'll just have to add a filter or a surgical mask underneath.
Mike Epps carries over again from "Dolemite Is My Name".
THE PLOT: A rag-tag group of former TV stars and comic book artists, who make their living working at conventions, decide to steal the loot from a crooked promoter and an overbearing former TV icon.
AFTER: OK, so this one's not set at the San Diego Comic-Con, or even the NY Comic-Con - BUT it is set at a (fictitious) convention that takes place on... the Fourth of July weekend! How about THAT for an unintentional coincidence? See, believe in the chain, and random acts of serendipity will happen. However, I don't think there are any Comic-Cons that take place on major holidays, but I could be wrong. The thing is, the people who work at the convention centers, like security guards and installers and cargo people, they're all union. Working on July 4 is probably like triple overtime for them, and that would make the convention not so profitable. So, nice coincidence and all that, but I still have to call a NITPICK POINT here, story-wise.
Sometimes I'll program a short film prior to a feature, or if I'm on Netflix and a movie's not that long, I may watch a comedy special post-movie, and in that case I'll try to pair up an appropriate comedy special with the film as a tie-in - so today I was on Amazon Prime for "Supercon" and I followed that with a Russell Peters special called "Deported". I haven't seen much of Peters' comedy work, and I remain unimpressed - he's no Lewis Black or Jim Jefferies, that's for sure. But he's Canadian and of Indian descent, so perhaps his comedy just doesn't speak to me. His timing's off, and making a lot of jokes about protecting his butthole, mistaking an endoscopy for a colonoscopy, that's very un-PC now, it could be seen as anti-gay. I guess they're pretty conservative up there in Canada, eh?
But let's get back to "Supercon". Over the years I've had a couple good ideas for movies - and sometimes you just KNOW you've got a good idea if you've never seen a movie like the one you're thinking up. Just think about how many movies I watch, and if I can think of something I've never seen before, that's an accomplishment, with all the competition that's out there. A few years back we were visiting some of my wife's family friends upstate in the Kingston/Rhinebeck area, and we visited the Culinary Institute of America (we're big "Top Chef" and "Chopped" fans) and I realized the initials C.I.A. were shared with a certain intelligence agency. "What if," I thought, "some foreign terrorists attacked the U..S., but didn't do enough research, and accidentally attacked this cooking school, thinking it was the OTHER C.I.A.? Then there would have to be some would-be chefs battling the terrorists with their knives, and maybe some pots and pans - like, who wouldn't want to see a terrorist get flambéed by some culinary students? But the best title I could come up with was "Fry Hard", so that really made it seem like a silly idea.
But the OTHER good idea I had for a movie came from my experiences working at San Diego Comic-Con, when on Sunday, the last day of the convention, I had to take cash from our till and walk across the very crowded convention floor to the show office, and put down a deposit on next year's booth, which could cost over $3,000 - and they wanted to get half of that in cash, a year in advance. So that meant walking through a crowd carrying $1,500 in cash, always afraid that someone might pick my pocket, or I might drop the envelope with the cash. Then I thought, if I'm paying the convention staff $1,500, and the guy in the line in front of me is doing the same, and the guy in front of HIM is doing the same, there's a lot of money in that show office. What if somebody robbed it, or worse, what if they robbed everybody standing in line and we didn't even get credit for making the deposit before the robbery? But that's when I started thinking that you could set a heist movie at a comic-con, and this was 7 or 8 years ago.
I got excited when I heard that somebody had a similar idea - unfortunately earlier this year I recorded "The Con Is On", thinking that was the movie about a Comic-Con heist, and it wasn't. But that made me look up the name of the movie about a Comic-Con heist, and it's "Supercon", now available on Amazon Prime. Such a rich opportunity for a heist film, there's all that nerd cash, and nobody expects a bunch of criminals at such a nerdy event. Plus there are costumes everywhere, and a lot of them are similar, so there's a chance to pull a "switcheroo" where the cops unmask the thief, only it's not the right person, just someone with the same costume idea. Chase scenes through a crowded convention center - disputes over whether an artist doesn't deliver on a character sketch he was paid to do, and one year in San Diego somebody got into a fight over saving seats in one of the programming rooms and stabbed a guy in the eye with a pen!
So there's a great, Oceans-11 style heist film that could be set at a comic book convention - only "Supercon" just isn't it. This is four or five loser characters who all want to get back at a famous sci-fi TV star who's making thousands of dollars signing autographs, and the convention promoter who coincidentally fired all of THEM, banning them from the convention for fighting with this A-list arrogant actor. So since none of them can earn any money from their booths, they decide to steal the money from the show office, but on the last day when every other guest has been paid EXCEPT for the A-list asshole actor. Umm, this isn't really how conventions work either, so NITPICK POINT #2 - the convention promoter is there to TAKE money in from the people with booths, he wouldn't be giving it out. It's like four-walling, the convention promoter would charge all of the famous people (or their representatives) for their booths, and then it's up to the artists/writers/actors to sell their wares and try to turn a profit - good luck with that. But I can't imagine a scenario where the convention would take in all the money and pay the vendors a cut, that's just not how it's done.
It's a bit funny that these four people - a former child actor, a female comic artist - and honestly, I'm not even sure what the other two people did, that's how weak the story is here - have no idea how to be criminals, so they propose a number of different heist scenarios, all of which come from people who have watched WAY too many movies, and in all of them the woman is wearing something skimpy. Somehow they think if you just send somebody through the air ducts of a building, they can get into any room and unlock it from the inside, for example - these are the lessons that Hollywood teaches us, right? So their heist in the end bears little resemblance to their far-fetched plans, but that's OK - they stumble through the heist and one has a very unfortunate accident falling out of that air duct into the world's messiest toilet. Messier than the one seen in "Trainspotting", even - but yeah, that sort of rings true for a comic-con - I've seen (and maybe caused) enough of those situations.
But the description of the theft that went down at the Atlanta convention, with the thieves dressed as stormtroopers and blending in with the crowd - THAT'S a better story than the one we're presented with here. Why couldn't some of the exciting elements of that tale been worked into the main story here, why are they just thrown away via an anecdote? Right there is proof that a good Comic-Con heist story is still out there, waiting to be written, and it doesn't just have to be a couple pudgy guys in silly generic superhero costumes stumbling their way through the maze of locked doors behind the scenes in a convention center, or smelling bad convention farts in a men's room.
One other brief, shining moment as the A-list star chases after his stolen money, and gets caught on camera going on a tirade and denouncing all of nerd culture, causing a shameful "TMZ"-style carerr-ruining moment. And how they got John Malkovich to be in this stinker, I'll never know. It couldn't be the script, so did he just have an available week and took this on a whim, or did someone have blackmail material? (Maybe there's some magic involved - if you say his name out loud three times, he appears to accept a role in your indie film.) Except for his performance, nothing's really funny here, it's all just lackluster and flat, where a comic convention is supposed to be an exciting, entertaining place, not just a bunch of nerds waiting in line for autographs. Well, OK, it is that, but it isn't JUST that. It would be nice if a screenwriter understood the material a bit more, or at all.
Also starring Ryan Kwanten, Maggie Grace (last seen in "Faster"), Brooks Braselman, Russell Peters (last seen in "The Clapper"), Clancy Brown (last seen in "Chappaquiddick"), John Malkovich (last seen in "I Love You, Daddy"), Caroline Fourmy (last seen in "Pitch Perfect"), George Murdoch, Donald Watkins, Hunter Burke, Anthony Nguyen, CariDee English, Jeff Pope, Candi Brooks (last seen in "Get Hard"), Devyn A. Tyler (last seen in "12 Years a Slave"), Zak Knutson (last seen in "Tusk"), Matt Shurley, Josh Perry, Freddy Waff, Andy Sipes, Russell Tyrrell, René J.F. Piazza (last seen in "The Paperboy").
RATING: 3 out of 10 signed glossy photos
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