Comic-Con: “Iron Man 2″ and Other Funny Business

War Machine blows the roof off as Mike Judge, Kevin Smith and "Zombieland" keep them laughing.

The other comedy that built big buzz Saturday afternoon was “Zombieland” (though in a Sony Pictures panel that included “2012″ — with a scene of John Cusack driving a limo through Los Angeles as the entire city, including its freeways and buildings, crumbles behind his car — it might not have been the funniest.) Originally written as a TV pilot that grew into a feature starring Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin (the only cast member to miss the panel), the film centers on the foursome as a group of human survivors in a world overrun by the living dead. Besides an exclusive trailer, director Ruben Fleischer presented a scene with the introspective Eisenberg taking a flustered Amber Heard into his apartment with a yearning to comb her hair when she turns into a zombie that he must fend off with a toilet seat top. (That wasn’t the end of the toilet humor — while a potential Bill Murray cameo was neither confirmed nor denied by Fleischer, “Nacho Libre” screenwriter Mike White showed up in the footage as an unlucky Joe sitting on the can when a zombie reaches under the stall.)

Harrelson also had a unique way of killing the flesh-eating foes in a later scene, drawing them out in an abandoned supermarket by strumming a banjo and then bashing in their heads with the steel side down. At the panel, Harrelson also had his way with the fans’ questions, explaining how “zombie movies really scare the shit out of me,” to a question about his love of the genre and when one audience member posed the question to the cast, “if I was bitten in a zombie apocalypse, would you kill me?”, pondering “Even if you weren’t bitten…”

Things were all set to calm down by Sunday, the last day of the Con, with panels for the comparably low-key indies “Paper Heart” and “Mystery Team.” With the sleeves of her bright red San Diego lifeguard t-shirt rolled up, Charlyne Yi appeared to be all business when she stepped out on stage to tout “Paper Heart,” the documentary/narrative hybrid that intertwines Yi’s skepticism about finding love through a series of interviews with people as she begins to date her real-life boyfriend Michael Cera. As recently as the L.A. Film Festival, it’s been hard to nail down a persona for Yi, who walked out of the Q&A at LAFF and replaced herself with a man dressed as her and then came back without mentioning it again, so when she started answering questions as herself at Comic-Con, it was nearly as surprising. She explained the genesis of the film came from when she dropped out of college at 19 and “started hanging out with 40-year-old men” and feared that she would become one. With only a five-page outline, she and partners-in-crime director Nicholas Jasenovec and Jake Johnson (who plays Jasenovec in the film) would log over 300 hours of footage, including a scene that didn’t make the film but became a Comic-Con exclusive because there was no way it would make the film’s PG-13 rating. In it, Yi interviews “Human Giant”‘s Rob Huebel, who gives some graphic definitions of his notion of love before the conversation deteriorates into Huebel’s questioning whether Yi is actually a woman after knowing her for two years, ending with him yelling at Yi, “you have one last chance, show them your dick!”

While Yi was on her best behavior through the first 15 minutes of the panel, when a man who was later identified as Huebel’s “Human Giant” co-star Paul Scheer started off the audience Q&A by attempting to lead a chant of “show us your dick” (and was promptly booed down by a largely unsuspecting crowd), Yi jumped up on a table and threatened to show her vagina, but instead revealed a big black dildo as Jasenovec and Johnson looked on in silence. The dildo remained on the table through the rest of the panel, which led Johnson to remark “I can’t wait for my mom to see these photos.” (For her part, Yi concurred, admitting that her mom Googles her all the time.) Still, the trio announced they would be working together again on a TV show “about storytelling” with a similar whimsical tone as “Paper Heart” — which wasn’t exactly the impression one would get from watching the raunchy panel, though take our word and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Prize Yi that Jasenovec won at Sundance as proof. Yi talked up the comic book she’s penning for Oni Press about a girl like herself who goes up against the devil. The panel ended with one lucky attendee catching Yi’s dildo after she threw it into the audience.

The stage was then set for the NYU-bred comedy troupe Derrick Comedy, who were onhand to promote their feature “Mystery Team,” but stayed true to their short film roots by showing a brand new five-minute adventure of the titular crime-solves, a group in the tradition of Encyclopedia Brown and the Hardy Boys who’ve passed puberty, but refused to let it stand in the way of solving mysteries with the same approach they had when they were seven. This is how the threesome of Jason (the master of disguises, played by Donald Glover), Duncan (the smart one, played by D.C. Pierson) and Charlie (the strong one, played by Dominic Dierkes) can innocently and enthusiastically stumble in on a governor and one of their scantily-clad high school classmates in a hotel room and wonder why there are “white plastic balloons” laying around the room, as they did in the short.

After showing the new adventure, which one can only assume will appear online shortly (and they’ll be touring with the release of “Mystery Team” beginning in late August), Pierson, Dierkes, director Dan Eckman and co-writer/producer Meggie McFadden came out to greet the crowd, followed by an irate Glover, who appeared in a Confederate headband and a ripped wife beater, complaining that he had been excluded from the group. Although the ensuing fake dispute took up most of the panel, the group talked about the making of the movie, which involved “so little time and so little money” that there was very little improv and that they appreciated the idea of having character development that couldn’t have in one of their popular online shorts. Pierson also got serious near the end when a fan asked about the influence of the Kids in the Hall on their own off-kilter humor, to which Pierson said the group admired the Kids’ “willingness to do what’s weird and in your heart” — both a nice hat tip to the past innovators of comedy from a group that seems certain to be a part of the genre’s future, and also to a convention where many seemed more than happy to let their freak flag fly.

[Additional photos: "Extract," Miramax Films, 2009; "Paper Heart," Overture Films, 2009]

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