CON: Dark Castle

Apparently I was the only dude in the world to never hear about this Rain guy until last week. Women were losing their f*cking minds over him throughout the panel. Every jumbled English word was met with screams, every smile made someone faint. Anyhoo, NINJA ASSASSIN is about an orphaned ninja that must face the music once he turns his back on those who raised him. The trailer had enough ninjas to start a football team. Wouldn’t that be sweet? A ninja football team? Um…. Everything else about the clip was pretty generic. There was some kissing, fighting in the rain with Rain, swords, kung-fu, shirtless dudes, and a girl-on-guy fight set in a laundry mat that reminded me so much of the playground fight from DAREDEVIL that I almost threw up in my lap.

• Almost every single question was for Rain and asked by teenage Asian girls. I think he gave the same answer twenty times in a row. “Uh, I love America. There are lots of girls. Go see Ninja Assassin.” People clapped every time like it was some new deep thought.

• Apparently Rain is a great dancer (woo-hoo) and this made the fighting choreography very original and exciting. For who, I’m not sure.

• Rain (are you starting to see a pattern here?) did all his own stunts. Director, James McTeigue, of V FOR VENDETTA fame, says they really tried melding animè into the live action.

• When someone finally got around to asking Naomi Harris a question she said she loved playing Selena from 28 DAYS LATER and would love to bring the character back for another movie.

This is the one everybody was waiting for. A star-studded panel took the stage including Gerard Butler, Guy Ritchie, Jeremy Piven, Idris Elba, and Ludacris. We started off with a trailer that, apparently, nobody has ever seen. I swear most of this shit in already online though. There’s lots of witty dialog we came to love from LOCK STOCK and SNATCH, Piven seems in top form and fits right into Ritchie’s world even though his character was written for a black man and Ritchie had never seen an episode of ‘Entourage’. The star of the trailer though (slightly ahead of Butler’s stomach) was the absent Tom Wilkinson. I love old, angry, British dudes.

LUDA!.

The film involves scrappy tough guys from the streets getting involved with London’s underground crime scene due to the whereabouts of some stolen paintings. When asked if Ritchie felt pressured by his fans to go back to the style of film that made him popular his response was a very abrupt and confident “Yup.” Then, when asked if there is any truth to the reports that he will be doing a Sherlock Holmes film he answered simply, ‘Yes'”. Not too talkative that Guy Ritchie. It wasn’t really his fault though as the rest of the cast pretty much owned the panel. Every word out of Butler’s mouth was gold and I couldn’t get over hearing Stringer Bell (Elba’s character from ‘The Wire’) speak in his natural British accent. Here’s what else happened.

• One of the first woman to ask Butler a question was dressed as some sort of Queen and Butler cut her off by asking “What the fuck are you wearing?” He then couldn’t understand what the hell she was asking and totally brushed her off the mic. The guy was a blast.

• Ludacris was pretty quiet during the whole panel but clearly had a huge fan-base in the crowd. Every five minutes or so you could hear somebody yell “LUDA!” to which he simple nodded his head and smiled.

• This was the first time Piven had ever been to the Con and was “completely overwhelmed at the dedication and focus” of the fans. He then offered to service the entire crowd. Things turned kind of ugly though when he said Chicago (his home town) was a real city. To apologize to the San Diego crowd he offered to take his shirt off. Never happened.

• Butler said ROCKNROLLA is better than sex. He then corrected himself by saying “not better than sex with me, but better than sex with Idris. I love this guy.

• Butler, continuing his domination of the crowd, told the story of how sick he was during the filming and how Madonna had to shoot him in the ass with a shot of B12.