Taking aim at the best and worst of movies and television.
Nerd's delight: One of the Predators from Robert Rodriguez's upcoming reboot, 'Predators.'
At some point on Friday afternoon, the buzz started spreading like a bad contagion: The place to be was the Alamo Ritz theater downtown, where at 10 p.m. director Robert Rodriguez was set to premiere footage from Predators, a reboot of the Schwarzenegger classic Predator, which he produced and Nimrod Antal (Vacancy) directed.
There were even rumors that Rodriguez would be screening the entire film, which isn’t set to hit theaters until July. That resulted in a long line down Sixth Street, and dozens of members of the press corps trying to squeeze into the theater.
By the time Rodriguez took the stage and showed us a whopping three minutes of footage -- along with the trailer for the film, which he played twice -- I realized I had been hoodwinked.
The Predators presentation was the kind of thing you’d more commonly encounter at Comic-Con or some similarly-themed geek convention: Rodriguez and Antal, along with one of the creature designers on the project, took the stage and coyly leaked a few details about the story (basically, it’s The Most Dangerous Game -- with a group of predators hunting the actors, played by the likes of Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburn and Topher Grace). At some point, they invited the assemble audience to come to the front of the theater to gape at the predator mask they had brought along -- like the Crown Jewels of England, only made of rubber.
Some of the audience member’s questions were so nerdy that they probably would have made even a 12-year-old cringe. To hear Rodriguez and Antal parcel out information, you would have thought they were sitting on the Pentagon Papers, circa the early late 1960s, instead of what looks to be a predictably schlocky action-horror movie.
I get the idea that South by Southwest wants to brand itself as a democratic film festival for the fans. But when you’re officially sanctioning events that function solely as publicity stunts -- even if the publicity is for a hometown hero like Rodriguez -- then perhaps it’s time for a gut check.
