I got back from the UK yesterday afternoon. For the first time in my life, I slept through almost an entire flight – between take-off and the final descent into JFK I think I was awake for about 20 minutes. This means I don’t have much more by way of critique of A Game of Thrones for you, and my Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories prostitution ring didn’t quite advance much, but I did start on the defining aspect of my Thursday: sleep.
I didn’t sleep Wednesday night. The evening started at the Soho Hotel bar with Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost and friends, and then moved to the bar at the Park Lane Sheraton, where I saw some of my fellow journalists engage in high school-level debauchery, which was still hilarious nonetheless. More on how the UGO reporter ended up making out with a permmed and frosted New Jersey mortician later.
The rest of the travel journal will hopefully be up later today or over the weekend. In the meantime I want to give thanks to some people, including the Hot Fuzz team; Giles, aka Strax, for beind so charming, so funny and so smart and really enhancing our first night with Edgar; Jennifer from MTV for giving me rides to and from the airport and saving me about 700 American dollars (which translates to 15 British pounds); everybody at New Line who was so great about setting this up and dealing with us in London (especially Samantha Shuman, who dealt with some minor advance hotel hassles with grace, and Nicole Butte, who spent time hanging out with the Back of the Bus Boys and putting up with our puerile sense of humor and even more puerile topics of movie nerd conversation – and mostly for reading us the Oscar noms from her BlackBerry!); the owner of the web’s #1 site for His Dark Materials for bending me over a chair and rubbing his boner on my buttocks; Drew McWeeny for being a terrific travel companion – I look forward to hanging with Drew more in the future; and Andre Dellamorte for being the breath of familiarity that helps a neurotic like me deal with new people and places. Also, a special thanks to Brendan Fraser for mumbling so unintelligibly that I can’t even transcribe what he said. Thanks for saving me the time!
Also, a big thanks to the growing team of people here at CHUD who stepped up while I was away. I feared that I would be in London and forced to sit in my hotel room when not on set, updating the latest casting rumors, but the great work of Dan, Micah, Brendan, Eileen and some jerk named Nick Nunziata really helped me get the most out of my first trip to Old Blighty.
Next time: Drew McWeeny disappears, the MTV reporter pays men to make out with each other, and Simon Pegg invents the word “brapper.” And plenty of Downies.