Any day I get to talk to Guy Pearce, Carey Mulligan, Ron Perlman, get to hear the latest on “Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 1,” and get to hang out with Power Rangers and the Madagascar Penguins is a very fine day indeed.

In case I haven’t mentioned it lately, I love Comic-Con.  Last night, we got to preview the Exhibition Hall and watch episodes of some upcoming television shows, including a story of a community of witches from Kevin Williamson (the “Scream” movies)  called “The Secret Circle” and a thriller with echoes of “Quantum Leap” and “The Bourne Identity” called “Person of Interest,” starring Michael Emerson, Taraji P. Hensen, and James Caviezel.  Today I attended a press conference for the cast of “Twilight: Breaking Dawn, Part 1.”  Fans who had lined up for days to get into the panel discussion in Comic-Con’s largest room, the 6000-person capacity Hall H, hit the jackpot when some of the cast stopped by to say hello.

Elizabeth Reaser (Esme) spoke about the satisfaction of exploring a character over a series of films, and Ashley Greene (Alice) mentioned she had grown up playing her character.  They all said that they enjoyed filming the wedding scene, though it was a challenge due to the level of security necessary to keep the details a secret from the fans.  Kristen Stewart (Bella) said they had “Secret Service-style” protection and that she ended up wearing a Volturi cloak to cover her wedding dress.  They joked about finding an extra in Brazil who looked so much like Lautner they had to move him to the back so that the audience would not get confused and think that Jacob had somehow shown up to spy on Bella and Edward (Robert Pattinson).

When asked about their biggest challenges in this film, Stewart said it was mothering an animatronic baby and Lautner said it was the scene where he had to “walk into the room intent on killing this baby, stop, twist, and imprint, whatever that means.” He said he spent a lot of time talking to author Stephanie Meyer about what she had in mind.  And Pattinson said his biggest challenge was having to take his shirt off.  “In the book, Edward’s body is there every three pages, but I’ve managed to avoid it until this one.”

Ron Perlman and Carey Mulligan spoke to a small group of reporters about their stylish upcoming thriller “Drive,” along with director Nicolas Winding Refn.  Ryan Gosling plays a stunt driver who gets pulled into intrigue and violence to protect a young mother.  Perlman told us that like his character, he is a Jew who always wanted to be an Italian.  Perlman is drawn to the culture and food of Italy, but his character wants to be a powerful criminal.  The character in the original script was not fully described.  Perlman liked the way Refn worked with the actors on “unearthing the world and what our value and function was in the story.”  Mulligan described her relationship with Gosling in the film as the “calm center with chaos all around.”  They are surrounded by “witty, intelligent, terrifying characters” while they are almost silent.  Refn told us that “It came out of my not liking talking.  Silence is the greatest word.”  He also said, “Music gets me going.”  In the film he used 70’s electronic music to match the main character’s vintage car.

More coming soon — stay tuned.

I’m on my way to Comic-Con 2011, this year featuring the first glimpses of Twilight’s “Breaking Dawn — Part 1” along with Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin,” the Colin Farrell remake of “Total Recall” and “In Time,” a thriller with Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seyfried.  You haven’t heard about some of these?  That’s the fun of it; Comic-Con is where it all begins.  It’s not just movies.  “True Blood,” “Lost,” and “Glee” got the word out via Comic-Con and this year we will see get updates on longtime fan favorites like “Buffy” and hear about the new projects from some Comic-Con regulars like Kevin Smith and Joss Whedon.

Entertainment Weekly points out in the current issue that back in 1976 a film no one had ever heard up sent a rep with a card table to sell the Con’s first promotional posters for a movie whose release was still a year away.  Those posters are now sold (if you can find one) for $3000 and this year, that same film will be saluted with an elaborate booth in support of its six-movie Blu-Ray release with never-before-seen footage: Star Wars: The Complete Saga (Episodes I-VI). What will this year’s attendees know about before anyone else?  Stay tuned for my reports — and of course my always-popular pictures of the attendees in costume.

I love this silly number from Easter Parade!

This enigmatic new web series on Hulu raises questions of fate, temptation, sacrifice, and God.  What would you do to get what you want?  What would you give up?  Who would you be if you did?  This episode is called, “What One Begins, One Must Finish.”

MedPage reports that smoking is down in movies rated G, PG, and PG-13.

Overall, there were about 72% fewer on-screen appearances of smoking and tobacco products in G, PG, and PG-13 movies in 2010 than there were in 2005, according to Stanton Glantz, PhD, of the University of California San Francisco, and colleagues…

For the three studios that had actual written policies to reduce tobacco use in their movies, there was an average drop of 95.8% in tobacco appearances, compared with a fall of just 41.7% for the three major studios and some independent film companies that had no such policies.

Among the three with anti-tobacco policies, 88.2% of their top-grossing youth films never featured smoking or tobacco, compared with 57.4% of those from companies without policies.

“This finding indicates that an enforceable policy aimed at reducing tobacco use in youth-rated movies can lead to substantially fewer tobacco incidents in movies and help prevent adolescent initiation of smoking,” Glantz and colleagues wrote.

Advocacy groups have urged film studios not to make smoking look glamorous and sophisticated.  The study relied on scenesmoking.org, which has detailed documentation of  the frequency and context of smoking in movies and the impact it has on young viewers.  The World Health Organization has recommended an automatic R rating for any movie with tobacco smoking, except for those like “Good Night and Good Luck,” where the smoking is included for historical accuracy.