The Movie Evangelist

Movie Con III, Chapter II: A Dedicated Follower Of Fashion

Posted on July 23, 2010 Updated on August 7, 2010

Well, my three stage plan to take my movie obsession to the next level this summer hits stage 1 tomorrow, with my first ever IMAX double bill. Inception (my new movie of the year, as I couldn’t risk being spoiled any longer), followed by Toy Story 3. Later, in September I have a week off work where I intend to hit the Cambridge Film Festival hard, but in the middle will be the shiny, geek-infested glory that is sure to be Movie-Con III.

After the almost-debacle of getting a ticket I regaled you with in Chapter I, I thought it would then be all quiet until the day itself. However, never knowingly underobsessed and apparently not alone in that, I have been enjoying the community that has developed out of the thread on the Empire forum, where the struggle just to be there seems to have instilled a real sense of closeness among those lucky enough to have made the cut.

And boy, do people take it seriously. When the tickets started arriving, it was great; when the custom printed T-shirts that people have ordered started arriving, it was somewhere between intimidating and terrifying. I’d been looking at some of the other forumites, and it seems from those willing to share their personal details that most are in their twenties or early thirties. I am 36; thankfully never knowing when to grow up, but also starting to become the living embodiment of the phrase “I’m too old for this shit.”

I abandoned T-shirts with logos and the like many years ago, partly because I felt the advancing of years but mainly because I am to fashion what George Clooney is to being hideously ugly. As anyone who watched my draw video in part one will attest, fashion doesn’t so much pass me by as see me coming and run in the opposite direction, screaming “Oh, the humanity! My beautiful, beautiful eyes!” However, one thing is certain – if I am to gain the full experience from this event, it’s time to cast off my inhibitions and take the sartorial plunge.

I am well aware that the internet is swarming in movie goodness; I was unaware quite how much the same seems to go for T-shirts. I happened to see a tweet from Graham Linehan, writer of The IT Crowd, where someone blogs about the T-shirts worn by Roy in that programme, most of which are very, very cool and the kind of thing I think I might just about pull off.

But then, like descending through the levels of Inception’s dream world, visiting those links took me on further and deeper T-shirt tangents. The amount of choice is bewildering, even before you get to sites like Zazzle, where people can create T-shirts and share them for others to wear. A search for an eighties staple such as Ferris Bueller brings back 259 results from that site alone. (And you would think that, with that many people wearing “Save Ferris” T-shirts in this world, that goal would have been accomplished by now.)

To make this even harder, I am commuting up and down from where I live, but on the Friday, the first day of the con, the event starts in the evening and I will be working in London that day to accommodate this. So I may have to pull off a Superman-style change in a phone booth (presuming I can find one, of course) to reveal whatever I’ve settled on for the first day. You can be sure of one thing, though – sitting on the back row of a darkened room for large parts of the weekend will be in the best interests of all concerned, so that my crimes against fashion may go largely unreported.

Right, off to see if I can find that Earth Girls Are Easy limited edition purple one again…

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