All I have to say is, “woot!” Well, really I’m going to say a bit more, but my cell phone and email have been blowing up with pals who assume I am at the San Diego Comic Con. But I am not and I am quite pleased that I am not. We had a lot of fun last year and I didn’t want to criticize in advance because I didn’t want responsibility for people deciding not to go, but . . .

The cons I initially loved were these amazing (at least for my teenage self) events. Authors and artists I looked up to would share their wisdom on panels during the day and hang out and socialize at night. There were masquerade balls for really doing it up, but lots of people, myself very much included, would run around in crazy costumes all weekend. There was a sense of fun and community and I met tons of new people every time. Occasionally, a convention hotel would give me less than stellar service for wearing (hypothetically) nothing but pins with clever sayings on them over my nipples or not peace-bonding my weapon. But there was always a chick in a corset and elf ears or a guy in painted black leather with a mohawk to agree with me that the hotel was totally unreasonable. Friends of mine who worked con security may recollect slightly differently, but only slightly. The important thing was that the events were extremely social. There was always a dealers room with unusual hard-to-find (especially pre-internet) wares. Eventually, I acquired a lot of items I treasure from exhibitors and BLT and Blue Blood both exhibited at many of those conventions, so I don’t object to a dealers room by any means.

But the San Diego Comic Con is just such a store. And it feels very stratified. I think part of the problem is that San Diego is so close to Los Angeles and comic book tie-in movies are hot at the moment. So Comic Con attracts various people who feel they are movie stars or big wig producers, who feel they should have a portable velvet rope between them and the great unwashed at all times. It is like there is this huge dichotomy between people who are trying to sell movies and people who are expected to empty their wallets. There is not even that much conversation between attendees or between guests. I think fandom should be more sociable and open and more about community than that. I live blocks from Whiskey Bar and similar haunts, if I want to have to go through a doorman. Frank Miller or Alan Moore could walk the Comic Con floor and go completely unnoticed. But Rob Zombie will bring a security detail and Steven Colbert will have a four hour line for people who want to get his autograph to sell on eBay. What actual fan wants to wait that long in the heat for a two second interaction?

Which brings me to the next reason I’m not crazy about the Comic Con. It feels like every year it gets a little bit more uncomfortable in the weather department. Maybe it is global warming. I don’t know. But last year was unbearable. It was insanely hot outside. It was impossible to park any place near the convention hall. After walking a long distance in the heat, there were huge crowds of sweaty people. Either the convention was too cheap to spring for properly air conditioning the hall or the San Diego Convention Center is simply not capable of properly cooling the building during the summer and that is why it is cheaper to rent it then. Needless to say, the weather, combined with lack of technology used to combat the discomfort caused by the weather, makes costuming less than thrilling. Additionally, all the snack stands had absurd lines and kept running out of basics like water. The convention discourages bringing in outside beverages, however. I was literally ill from dehydration at the end of the show and Scar and I both broke out from how generally scungy it was.

The show has gotten to an unwieldy size. The San Diego Gaslamp District is simply not big enough for it. Not only are hotel reservations difficult, but even finding a restaurant with food and a wait time of less than three hours is a challenge. The convention center actually sold out on the Saturday of the show last year and pre-sold out for that day this year. It makes sense that people only attend on Saturday because the event is essentially just a big store. Who would take a weekday off of work to go shopping, when they could just go on the weekend? And last year, although Comic Con supposedly frowns on this, a ton of vendors and exhibitors totally closed down and shipped out early on Sunday. This irritated me, partly because we stuck it out and partly because this meant there were booths I’d intended to see which were totally closed by the time I wandered by. There were a number of friends of mine at the show who I never saw, even when they stopped by the booth multiple times. Cell phone reception is not so good there either. And the sheer size is so overwhelming that we were all pretty frazzled when we did meet up.

So, don’t get me wrong; I had fun at Comic Con 37. It may have been mildly productive, although I’m better about contacting cool people I met at a show when I am less worn out getting home. But I am sitting at my desk now, with the central air going, drinking water, getting ready to post this article, and thinking “woot, woot, I’m not in the sweltering heat and I’m drinking water whenever I feel like it and life is good!”

It’s kind of funny that I love love love the aesthetic of the new Captivity movie, yet I’m kinda not cool with the subject matter. I’m not too comfortable with it being censored either, though.

I know people have been complaining, since before I was born, about violence in movies being okay, while sexuality is censored. But I have to say, why is it that if someone puts their cock in a beautiful woman’s mouth, the movie is probably going to get an X and thus limited distro and thus limited financing and production values? But dismember the same woman slowly and the discussion becomes R or NC-17? Is it really okay to broadcast horrors, the likes of which most people will never ever see in person, to seventeen-year-olds, but healthy sexuality, of a sort most people will experience, takes another year of maturing for audiences to be able to handle it? What kind of a society are we going to have when we show teenagers torture porn like Hostel before we let them see, if you can forgive me for invoking normalcy, normal sex?

Full disclosure: Obviously, you all can’t have missed the advertisements Captivity bought on a number sites I work on, including this one. And, yes, if you went to the premiere party at Los Angeles meat market Privilege, you probably spotted around half a dozen hotties you recognized from BlueBlood.com, along with various other contributors.

It bums me out, on a number of levels, that the premiere party was billed as ground-breakingly outrageous and nasty. This seems to show a simultaneous lack of respect for the performers and desire to profit from them. Although the cigarette smoke-stained off-white interior of Privilege generally plays host to more vanilla smutsters, Los Angeles has seen tattooed hotties doing BDSM once or twice before. In point of fact, the club is essentially a tent erected by where the Coconut Teazer nightclub used to stand. So that very location has probably been host to more than its share of tattooed hotties with fetish gear over the years. The most ground-breaking aspect was probably that it is unusual for a movie to not screen at its own premiere.

Anyway, both the MPAA, which rates movies, and a variety of watchdog groups have objected to Captivity’s presentation well before they started planning a premiere. After Dark Films pulled thirty of their billboards from Los Angeles and more than fourteen hundred taxi cab adverts, the creative for which featured the slogan “Capture, Confinement, Torture, Termination.” over very beautiful stylized photos of a very small portion of a scene involving a woman. I can’t emphasize enough how great the color scheme of those advertisements was. Meanwhile, the MPAA jerked the movie company around on when the film was even going to be rated. After Dark Films co-founder Courtney Solomon claims the MPAA rigmarole with Captivity is just about the MPAA maintaining their position of power. “They needed a whipping boy. They’re not about protecting parents or kids. They’re about keeping their power in Hollywood.” The upshot of this was that a schedule May 18 release date became a July 13 release date. While releasing a horror flick on Friday the 13th is always nifty, any organization which can keep audiences away from a product is scary. And not scary in an entertaining way, scary in a bad way.

A quick history lesson: The Motion Picture Association of America was founded in 1922 as a trade association. Although the initial industry concerns it dealt with had more to do with copyright and contract standardization, over the years, it has become almost synonymous with the ratings system it devised. Many industries choose to police themselves, partly out of decency, and partly out of a desire to take care of it internally before outsiders do it for them. So the MPAA ratings board determines whether a movie will receive wide release as a PG flick or the financial death knell of an NC-17. Representatives of the six major studios sit on the board. These studios includes Disney, Fox, Paramount, Sony, Universal, and Warner Brothers.

Now, the opening weekend gross for Captivity was only a bit over a million bucks, which is pretty terrible for a major studio release and brought the movie in at a ranking of #12 for domestic releases that weekend. In all fairness, the flicks Captivity was beaten out by were Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Transformers, Ratatouille, Live Free or Die Hard, License to Wed, 1408, Evan Almighty, Knocked Up, Sicko, Ocean’s Thirteen, and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. Had the movie been able to open as planned, if the MPAA had not hung them up, then it might have been able to do better against the movies opening that weekend. Although a $1.4 mill opening is lackluster for any theatrical release, especially a heavily advertised one, had Captivity opened May 18 with the same total, it would have ranked #8. Then again, maybe it would have gotten its ass kicked by Shrek and Spider-Man, just like everybody else.

Part of the difficulty I have parsing out my feelings on the brouhaha is that it is difficult to figure out whether an After Dark Films release counts as a major motion picture or a plucky little guy trying to make it. Captivity is “co-released” by Lionsgate, but Lionsgate leaves all the responsibility for potentially problematic promo on After Dark’s doorstep. I’m not sure what “co-releasing” means exactly, but Lionsgate has a market capitalization of one point three five billion dollars and an estimated four hundred full time employees. Which I would not categorize as small or independent. I think it is important to note that the distro on a partner-produced movie like Captivity is a microscopic portion of the business of a behemoth like Lionsgate, which is responsible for very enjoyable and successful projects such as the Academy-award-nominated The Cooler and innovative DVD packaging and distribution for projects ranging from cutting edge fare like Weeds to cult classics like King of New York. Then again, if you inflicted the Care Bears movie on your kids, that is partly Lionsgate’s responsibility too.

According to the New York Times, Courtney Solomon, who put himself on the map by optioning Dungeons & Dragons and parlaying that into a much-lambasted directorial turn, “persuaded the director of Captivity, Roland Joffé, the much-honored filmmaker behind The Mission and The Killing Fields, to undertake reshoots. These added explicit torture, including a so-called “milkshake” scene that involves body parts and a blender, to a picture that was largely psychological in its thrust when After Dark acquired the rights to it.” Both to the New York Times and in other media outlet, Solomon chortles about what a freakshow his premiere is going to be and how upset he hopes women’s groups get about his movie. The National Organization for Women said, on the record, that they were not going to protest to give him press.

So, having delved into the issues involved, here is my summary take on it. First, if After Dark Films is looking for a modern audience for their movies, it is a bit antiquated to act like BDSM and tattoos are outrageous fringe culture. I’m sick of this sort of marginalizing nonsense from people who would like to make a dollar off of my scene. Secondly, because of the major studio makeup of the MPAA, I feel it can’t really be objective. I like having ratings on things as a viewing guide, but I dislike the way the ratings system leads to unwarranted limitations on distribution and I particularly dislike the way the current rating system encourages violence against women in place of human sexuality. It will be a chilly day in Hellywood before I deliberately view torture porn like Captivity, but I don’t think a project like that should have its success determined by whether or not its producers can convince a half dozen really biased businesspeople that violence against women is appropriate viewing for teens. Thirdly, although I kind of liked the Captivity billboards, I was personally revolted by the Saw signage at the San Diego Comic Con and I think movie producers, and everyone really, should pay attention to what they put in an advertisement people will not be able to avoid. I do not want strangers telling me what I can see in my media. I deeply believe that that becomes a slippery slope to total destruction of the free speech rights granted to all Americans by the First Amendment, but I also do not want strangers forcing me, or forcing children, to see things they do not wish to see or should not see. This means that adverts, in public places, for potentially upsetting products, should be honest about what the products are, without ramming the product down the throats of the unwilling.

I admit that, although I loved Elisha Cuthbert’s performance and character in the surprisingly awesome The Girl Next Door, I loathed her Kim Bauer character she played on 24. I thought about kicking off this article with a joke about how I thought Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer should have just let her be kept captive and tortured. Heck, that was probably the inspiration for Captivity. For me to want to watch that, however, it would really have to be one of the dungeons on Fucking Machines, where the action is consensual and female pleasure might actually be involved too.

The Friday of the 2006 Comic Con, I only busted out my camera when really motivated because we’d gone on the Superhero and Supervillian-themed party bus the night before and, after a couple of days in the oppressive San Diego heat, I was slowing down. Still managed to shoot a nice little photo gallery for your viewing pleasure.

I was super-excited to get to see the very entertaining horror screenwriter and producer Sean Abley. Oddly enough, although he and I live literally across the street from one another, I met my neighbor online first and neither of us remembers precisely how. At any rate, he is a great wit and his Dark Blue Productions darkly humorous science fiction feature Socket is showing at the Los Angeles Outfest this Friday, so I highly recommend Angelenos stop by and check it out. (More on this later.)

Those of you who have been with us and Blue Blood since before the beginning will of course remember Black Leather Times, my punk humor zine, more affectionately (or hostilely) known as BLT. Drew “Vladimir Drakovich, King of Mars” Boyd wrote and, with Max Glick, co-wrote a number of humorous articles for BLT back in the crew’s DC days. I had the pleasure of running into Andrew Boyd in our booth at Comic Con and he hooked me and Forrest Black up with some kindly personalized Scurvy Dogs. Andrew Boyd’s publisher AiT/Planet Lar classifies Scurvy Dogs as a cult classic on their web site. This tale of pirates gone astray, co-written with Ryan Yount, absolutely deserves the status.

Sometimes I find conventions difficult because my mental Rolodex is kind of full and I always feel awful when I forget people, but I’ve met a heck of a lot of people over the years. Weirdly enough, when Andrew Boyd stopped by the megabooth, I was just like, “yay, hi Drew!” and it didn’t even occur to me until later that it was vaguely odd that I knew him immediately, without having to give placing him any thought at all, when he has, for hell’s sake, grown facial hair since I saw him last. (More on this later too.)

BlueBlood.com hottie Diana Knight was also in the house. I took photos while riding the giant escalator to show how cool some of the architecture of the San Diego Conventions Center actually is. A hot Asian artist stopped by the megabooth and I took a few snapshots of him. When I say hot, in this instance, I mean as in sexy, as opposed to as in warm or popular. He might be super popular, but I was pretty wilted from how hot it was (in temperature in both San Diego in general and the building in specific) so I had more trouble with the language barrier than I generally would. He had a professional illustrator badge, but his name was in (I think) Japanese. Cool costume anyway and getting to know people is harder at West Coast cons than East Coast ones, even under ideal circumstances. Maybe this is why I still have instant recognition for my pals from East Coast punk and fandom misbehavior.

As this year’s Comic Con looms near, it is time to take a look back at last year’s event. Looking at the gallery of snapshots from the Blue Blood crew’s Thursday at the show reminded me of some of the fun we had.

I was excited to pick up entertaining stuff from Shannon Wheeler of Too Much Coffee Man fame. I loved all the crazy Lego, including Lego Batman and Lego robots. Actually, all robots are cool, not just those made out of plastic bricks for kids. BlueBlood.com hottie Yolanda was in the house as well. The lovely blonde, Em, is almost my namesake and is a real mail order Russian bride. Special thanks to The Brotherhood for sponsoring the megabooth and making sure it came complete with a beautiful and personable mail order bride.

I was pleased to be able to literally buy a shirt off the back of the very kind Gwen from Sighco. Gwen and I are around the same size and she was wearing a shirt which read, “Guns don’t kill people. Supervillains kill people.” Everyone from our spooky ookie artistic folks megabooth was going on a Superhero and Supervillain-themed party bus that night. A bus complete with stripper pole, I might add. Oddly, the booth with the Simpsons costumes and various supergear was just displaying and was not renting or selling them at the convention. I kinda think they left some money on the table there. This meant I really did need that Supervillain shirt right away then and Sighco’s Gwen actually took her own shirt off, right on the Comic Con show floor, let me try it on, and then selected another shirt for herself. Yes, I do always have a +20 on any roll involving people around me getting naked.

Actually, we had more fun than you can see here because it was really freaking hot in San Diego. I mean hot in the sense of excessively high temperature, as opposed to merely exciting hot. So I was a little off and actually shot snaps of the first half of the day with nothing in the camera. Oops. The awesome purple superheroine with the secret identity actually fights crime with a blue-clad male partner, but, alas, I was not actually taking pictures of them, when I thought I was taking pictures of them. I’m a polar bear and the heat can be a tad difficult for me.

Universal’s Accepted Keg Party Photo Gallery

Estimated opening weekend gross for Accepted is around $10 million, which is hunky-dorey for a movie with a production budget of only around $23 million. I don’t know what percentage of those movie-goers also attended Comic Con or talked to someone who did, but Accepted did the most brilliant promotion at the convention.

Comic Con is the largest convention of its type in the U.S. This year, significantly more than a hundred thousand people showed up. Which is significantly more than the forty thousand or so the city of San Diego could probably handle. It was impossible to park anywhere near the convention center and it was approximately one billion degrees and the food in the convention center concessions started tasting kinda rancid by the second day. And, even for pretty literally nauseating food, the lines were likely to take an hour or so. Which cuts down on one’s collectible-browsing time. So, by the end of the day, everyone was sort of running on empty, streaming out of the San Diego Convention Center en masse, hungry and a long way, under a hot sun, from their transportation.

So the promoters of the Accepted movie threw a collegiate-style beer blast and barbeque across the street. The basic concept of the flick is that an enterprising young man is rejected from every college he applies to, so he creates his own institution of higher learning called South Harmon Institute of Technology. Yes, that acronym is what you think it is. The star-studded event featured a skateboard ramp and a giant banner reading “Welcome SHITheads” with the San Diego Gaslamp district as a backdrop. While waiting in a refreshingly fast-moving line for food, I was standing a couple of feet from James Duvall. While I wouldn’t talk to someone at my local supermarket, I’m generally in outgoing and friendly mode at a show like that. So I’d normally have told him that I like his work, but all of a sudden I got this horrible mental flash of the appalling scene where he’s castrated in Gregg Araki’s Doom Generation and I didn’t want to encourage my brain to keep going in that direction when I was about to eat.

The burgers and hot dogs were shockingly good and generously handed out. There was water and soda, in addition to beer, despite the kegger theme, but I think vegetarians might have been stuck with cheese and toppings. There might have been veggie burgers too, as I admit I was pretty transfixed by the yumminess of my own carnivorous fare.

The party had a fun and light-hearted vibe. A nicely straight-up rock band, called The Ringers, with a pleasingly sleazy sound kept the energy level up. I got bashed in the head when some of the actors from the movie got up on the stage and started throwing free T-shirts into the crowd. The gentleman who hit my noggin gave me the T-shirt he’d just caught, though, so it was all good. It says, “Ask me about my wiener.” Because I didn’t have enough lewd shirts already.

The trailer for the movie looks humorously promising and Lewis Black who I love from Comedy Central’s Daily Show is in it. If Universal knows how to throw a fun keg party, odds are good that they know how to make a fun movie. Best theatrical release promo ever.