Premiere of ‘Sex Drive’ and seeing ‘Twilight’ stars

On Wednesday night, I was planning on attending the World Premiere of Sex Drive with my friend Dylan at the Mann Theater in Westwood. Earlier in the day, Dylan told me that he was going to be stuck in a late edit session and wasn't going to be able to make it.

I couldn't invite Laura. John's in Berlin, so I had planned for my daughter to sleepover with my friend Laura and it was too late to ask any of the babysitters I trust.

I didn't even know if the movie would be all that great. It's been getting mixed reviews, but I was up for a romantic and raunchy comedy, so I decided to go alone. Even if the movie sucked, I love going to premieres for mainstream movies. There's an excitement in the theater. People clap for the lights going down, for the production company logos, for the first time each main character appears on screen. People laugh harder, groan louder and the movie ends up being more enjoyable.

Traffic was pretty bad because of the fires, so I arrived shortly before the scheduled start time. There were still stars going down the red carpet, but the security was telling people to hurry up and get their passes and go inside to their seats.

I saw James Marsden as I was sitting down. Also saw a tall, lean black guy who looked familiar to me, but I wasn't confident enough about it to say his name out loud. The movie started almost 20 minutes late, which meant I spent time texting on my phone and fiddling with my ticket. I finally noticed the Summit Entertainment logo on the premiere ticket. Summit is a production company and fairly recently a distribution studio. They've produced movies such as In the Valley of Elah, Step Up, Memento and American Pie. But the reason I was so intrigued to see their logo is because they are the production company and distributor of Twilight which releases on November 21. Twilight is based on the first book of a vampire series by Stephanie Meyer. When book 4 was released earlier this year, bookstores were open at midnight and had release parties.

Seeing the Summit logo made me think I was right about the tall guy. I was pretty sure it was Edi Gathegi, who is playing Laurent in the upcoming movie Twilight. It would make sense for stars from Twilight to be attending a premiere for another Summit movie. I looked around a little more to see if I could spot anyone else from Twilight, especially Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson. It killed the time until the lights finally went down.

Sex Drive was pretty funny at points. It was about as raunchy as I expected. It will end up being compared to American Pie quite often. I don't think it was as good, but it had a lot of great moments.

James Marsden never ceases to impress me. As Cyclops in X-Men, he was a cute superhero who did a passable acting job. However, it was in roles in later movies where he showed a wider range. He played TV host Corny Collins in Hairspray and the gorgeous but dim prince in Enchanted. In each, he showed an adeptness for comedy that I wouldn't have expected based on X-Men. In Sex Drive, he got huge laughs from me as the hunky but stupid older brother who constantly tortures his kind of dorky little brother. It's just ridiculous how gorgeous he is and his smile is one of the best in Hollywood right now. And talent on top of that? *sigh*

After the movie, I saw the tall guy again, and was even more sure that he was Edi Gathegi, who is playing Laurent in the upcoming movie Twilight. When I heard some fans call his name, I got over my nervousness and asked him for his picture. Because of the no-camera rule all of my pictures were just with my cell phone.  Right after Edi walked out, I recognized Kellan Lutz from Twilight.  Respectively, they play bad and good vampires in the movie.

The next morning, Laura gave me a really hard time because she had been checking out pictures from the premiere online, and she told me that I missed Robert Pattinson, Nikki Reed and director Catherine Hardwicke of Twilight. Pictures from the premiere that show them and non-blurry shots of the stars of Sex Drive are here.

I really need to work on my celebrity spotting skills. I'll write more about Twilight later, and there's a good chance that if Laura and I don't officially go to the premiere of Twilight, we'll be unofficially checking out the red carpet.

- October 17, 2008