While some are better than others (The Star Wars one pretty much trumps all) clearly a lot of work went into this, and kudos to the guys for coming up with it.

But let’s be honest, all we give a sh*t about is The Dark Knight Rises. Yes, Joey G (as we close friends of his like to call him) said spoilers are bad. But it’s everywhere and impossible to avoid. So here’s your spoiler for the day: numerous eyewitnesses are confirming that Cillian Murphy has been hanging out on the set and that he’ll be returning for The Dark Knight Rises. After a brief and disappointing cameo as a has-been Scarecrow peddling serum out of the back of a van, hopefully we’ll get something better than just another arrest. Like I said, throw Flass back in the mix and we’ll be perfect. Dammit.

In what has otherwise been pretty dismal vampire movie news (i.e., they keep making vampire movies), there’s two chunks of noteworthy vampire film news this week. The first of them is that a) Alicia Silverstone is planing an official return to the silver screen, and b) that she is reuniting with Clueless director Amy Heckerling. I always had a thing for Silverstone, at least enough to forgive her for Batman and Robin, at least, and the news that these two are getting back together in a possible spoof/satire of vampire flicks is reason to be happy.

In other vampire movie news, meanwhile, Colin Farrell is in the Fright Night remake — as all of you probably know (the trailer debuted about 2 months ago), but early word is that the film is pretty good, if not even remotely faithful remake of the early 80s original.

The only other film really matching Tron 2 as far as hype is, of course, Green Lantern.  And yeah, maybe that new Harry Potter film, which literally sent the girl sitting next to me into orgasmic spasms, clutching herself each time a new trailer scene popped up. And what better place to hold panel conferences for such overly-anticipated films than Magical Hall H, next to which people are known to camp out all night or at least wait in line for a good 4 hours to check out maybe 2 minutes of footage, only to get rejected when you’re about 50 yards from the door? Green Lantern is being helmed by Mask of Zorro/new James Bond director Martin Campbell, and judging by the footage, looks every bit as f&%ing rad as the crowd was hoping it would be, despite Campbell’s insistence that what was being shown was mostly rough and early FX.

It was a precious 30 seconds or so, packed with shots of the cities of Planet Oa, Sarsgaard/Hammond’s head undergoing a massive traumatic expansion, and Ryan Reynolds throwing a, uh, flaming Green punch after getting his ass kicked in an alley. Ryan Reynolds stated that although he wasn’t an aficionado of the comic to begin with, he’s taken time to immerse himself in the GL Universe and grown attached to it. He hasn’t taken off his Green Lantern ring for 3 months, and at one of the panel’s best moments, recited the Green Lantern oath for an 8 year old kid, and made his mouth literally drop open. Pretty cute.

Sarsgaard said what attracted him first and foremost to the character of Hector Hammond was his character arc and how he went from one extreme to the other in the course of the movie. “He seems like he would have been the kind of kid who took a hanger on the top of a building during a thunderstorm”, a kid that was always  just looking to experience such things for the sake of experiencing them. Sarsgaard ‘s interest in the character gives me hope for the film, along with these new scenes.

Then came the new extended Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows trailer, and that girl next to me into cardiac arrest, like one of those Japanese kids having a seizure while watching Pokemon. I kept thinking of what it would be like if Billy Graham or Pat Robertson saw Jesus come back to earth, or Oral Roberts when he saw the 900-foot Jesus in Oklahoma. Yeah, ‘ol Harry is bigger than the Messiah in many ways, and at times it didn’t seem too far off from a Beatles concert, with people looking like they were going to be carried off on stretchers. I still haven’t read/seen one, but in this trailer, Harry looks like he’s getting the sh*t kicked out of him by that Voldemort guy, there’s a bearded dude (Robbie Coltrane maybe?) flying on some steampunkish engine in the sky, and lots of stuff is getting blowed up real good, so I was pretty much hooked.

The two films, along with the hot chicks that came out to support the mind-blowing scenes from Zack Snyder’s new film SuckerPunch, made the Hall H presentation more than worth it: Crashing zeppelins, burlesque dancers, machine guns, trench warfare, dragons, pretty much every piece of eye-candy imaginable you could imagine, all spilled out onto some multi-genre plate of awesome.

The winner here was definitely Harry Potter, and it didn’t hurt that Tom Felton came out to promote it. “This is my first Comic-Con, and I must say it’s definitely lived up to the hype,” Felton announced. He was pretty gracious in the few seconds he was up at the podium. But SuckerPunch looks most promising, if only for its ridiculous-yet-amazing trailer and the fact that it’s Zack Snyder’s first original film, but it’s not out til March as far as I know. Until then I can only wait. And salivate…here’s a peek:

Words by Jeff Nau

Death is the true final frontier… in reality, there is no way to avoid it.  We’re all building up to our inevitable death scene at some point in the future.  But in the world of movies, characters can not only skirt death and return after the funeral, they can have one of the coolest and most memorable deaths ever imagined. There is no better scene than a death scene and actors often will take on a role knowing that their character will die on screen.  Sometimes a death scene is Oscar bait and sometimes it’s to get out of doing a sequel.  Harrison Ford famously wanted Han Solo to die in the “final” film in the Star Wars series, but George Lucas refused.  Too bad.  A badass like Han Solo going down would have been memorable indeed.

The Best Five…
Here’s a round up of five of the most gut-wrenching, tear-jerking, awesometacular best movie death scenes…

5. Exploding Head from Dawn of the Dead
Sure, this dope had about a half second of screen time before he was blown away and maybe it was human or zombie but we’ll never know because the officer responsible had such an itchy trigger finger.  One important fact remains: that exploding head from the original 1978 version of Dawn of the Dead changed everything.  It meant that you could show heads blowing up in movies. David Cronenberg would have never been able to make Scanners without George Romero giving this gift to the world of film and altering the course of cinematic history.

4. Spock* from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn
Not only did Spock (Leonard Nimoy) save the starship Enterprise and provide a tearful farewell, he out-acted William Shatner. (Honorable mention must go to Ricardo Montalban as Kahn… in the face of death he was bloody and hobbled yet still spitting in the face of Kirk.)
* Fortunately or unfortunately, Spock also had time to save the essence of his brain within McCoy’s gray matter hard drive so that he could return in the very next movie in which the title kind of gives everything away: Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.  No one really dies in the world of science fiction.

3. Sonny Corleone from The Godfather
You would never expect a mafia crime lord like Sonny (James Caan) to go out without a fight.  And even though he was not armed, Sonny stood there and took machine gun fire like a man.  The Don would be proud.

2. Indiana Jones Three-way Tie!
Steven Spielberg films have always had particularly good death scenes with Jaws providing Quint a shocking end inside the mouth of that wretched shark.  But the trio of baddies from Raiders of the Lost Ark go out in a blaze of glory in which one melts, one bursts into flames and another explodes.  It’s extremely difficult to top a threesome ending with flaming, oozing and blowing up.

1. Taylor from Beneath the Planet of the Apes
In Beneath the Planet of the Apes, astronaut from the past Taylor (Charlton Heston) brings it to this upside down world of the apes.  Riddled with machine gun fire, Taylor gives the middle finger to the world by detonating a nuclear device that blows up the entire earth killing everyone.  And in case you didn’t catch it, the film closes with voiceover narrated by Orson Welles himself informing the audience that this world has come to an end.  Brutal.

The Worst Five…
There’s nothing worse than dying except for failing to die well.  There are no “do-overs” when it comes to death.  Here’s a round-up of five of the lamest, weakest, most disappointing, just simply the worst death scenes in movie history…

5. James T. Kirk from Star Trek: Generations
The very first film from the Next Generation Star Trek crew was supposed to be a smooth transition original series crew.  Kirk does his best to kick some ass, but is defeated by falling off some bridge or something?  Laying on the ground, Kirk utters these memorable final words, “It was fun.”  Not really.  Hey new Kirk, Chris Pine, we’re counting on you to die cooler when it’s your turn!

4. T-800 from Terminator 2: Judgment Day
After winning the day and defeating the T-1000, the T-800 version of Arnold commits suicide by lowering himself into a vat of molten metal.  And this final act of self-sacrifice is punctuated by Arnold giving a thumbs up. A thumbs up? Really? Roger Ebert must not have been pleased.

3. Leo from Titanic
Okay, it’s not that Leonardo DiCaprio’s character from Titanic dies, every man who saw that movie wanted to see him die, it’s that it happens in such an uneventful way.  Rose (Kate Winslet) wakes up to find him frozen to death.  Would it have been too much to ask to see him freeze to death in real time with a final satisfying death rattle?

2. Star Wars Three-way Tie!
Boba Fett and Yoda and the Emperor are among the most powerful characters in all of Star Wars.  And they all die in horribly disappointing ways in Return of the Jedi.  Let’s see, Boba falls into a Sarlacc pit, the Emperor is thrown down a bottomless Death Star chasm by Vader and Yoda is so old that he just fades away.  Proving that in the world of Star Wars, the cause of death is usually from old age, falling into a bottomless chasm or an explosion if you happen to be one of the nameless drones working on one of the Death Stars.  Tough break workers.

1. Dumbledore from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
It should not be considered a spoiler to learn that Dumbledore “dies” at the end of the latest Harry Potter movie.  (Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock or not been using the internet, Dumbledore’s death was widely reported more than three years ago when the book came out.  I mean, there are Facebook groups dedicated to this.)  But it’s the way that Dumbledore meets his demise that is so disheartening… the powerful wizard is taken down with the flick of a wand.  Put up a fight next time old man!  While I have not read the books, one can suspect looking at his Lord of the Rings doppelganger Gandalf that the white bearded one will be making a return.  If there is a do-over, die better the second time.