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Big Budget movie: The Last Airbender. If you had asked me a few years ago I probably would have said Battlefield Earth or Pluto Nash.
Little Budget movie: Infection/Invasion
If you think Manos is boring, well... at least there's stuff happening on the screen. Invasion's footage comes solely from a police dash cam. That in itself is a neat idea, but the whole movie is set out in the middle of nowhere, so you rarely see anything more than woods and dirt road. The car gets parked for long stretches with nothing going on in front of it. It's more like a radio play than a movie, and the 'acting' is either hysterical teenage girl screaming or stoic police officer or 1950's era cheesy voice effect. There are maybe 4 major speaking roles, but the screaming teenage girl is the main star and thus receives the bulk of the dialogue.
Directed by the guy who directed Captain America. No, no... the first one. With Reb Brown.
mur... I think the big tent pole movies are much more likely to be the ones where only a small percentage of the profits come from the theatrical release, mainly due to the ridiculous amounts of merchandising that goes on for big blockbuster movies. You don't see McDonald's putting "The King's Speech" images on their plastic cups. They probably lose a lot of product placement money on period dramas as well.
I often wonder what would happen if the studios dumped one of their hundred-million dollar marketing campaigns on some little indie drama like "Take Shelter". They have a trailer that 99% of the population probably will never see and that's about it. Would people go to see "The Land Of Blood And Honey" if there were billboards and TV commercials hyping it up all over the place?
When a diamond heist goes south, one of the robbers, Mr. Pink, manages to get away with the diamonds, stashes them and then goes to the prearranged meeting place to wait for the other crooks. Will they show? Will they not show? The tension mounts as Mr. Pink waits patiently in the warehouse for the others to arrive.
Or if you're watching the DVD on your computer. I usually just open up the browser, drag the window to my second monitor, get the movie started on the main monitor and do DiF that way. On the occasions where I don't have the movie I either fire it up on netflix or take a trip to walmart where I can either purchase the movie outright or rent it through the redbox there. If that doesn't work then I do download it, because - frankly - if the studios really wanted me to watch the movie through more legal channels, they had several opportunities there to get the movie into my hands in a legit fashion.
If it were as easy as going to amazon.com and buying a DVD that I could then instantly download and burn on my own, then I'd do that with pretty much every movie. Studios would never do that because they assume that I'd just upload the movie to other people via some torrent site or usenet. Unfortunately for them, people do that regardless. I will not ever purchase a movie or music for download with any sort of DRM going on. There have already been several instances where consumers have been screwed when the DRM servers got shut down due to lack of profit or whatever.
If Warner Bros were to start a site that let me stream their entire backlog of films for $10 a month or something, and purchase downloadable / burnable DVD's of any of those movies for a further $5 or so each, I would sign up in a heartbeat and they would most likely make a lot of money. Movie and music studios still operate under the false impression that they control the means by which people consume their media, and thus have an effect on what becomes popular or not. This is still somewhat true, but all those garage bands and indie films they've turned down now have a variety of avenues to promote and distribute their wares and are becoming successful.
I have long since switched all of my music purchasing to bandcamp, amazon.com and other instant-access digital distribution methods. If the same sort of services were available for movies, I would gladly switch to that. The only reason those services don't exist is because anyone with a cheap PC and some cheap instruments / software / hardware can produce music and get pretty good quality. It is prohibitively expensive to produce a feature-length film, but given another decade or so you can probably assume that the costs will continue to drop dramatically and that indie films will start to rival their big studio counterparts in terms of effects and quality of product, not to mention the plausibility of creating successful product for niche markets that big studios just can't afford to go after.
I prefer when movies just kinda stop and don't tie up all the loose ends. I thought the ending of this movie was particularly great. I only got about halfway through before my tired brain felt like it was going to have a meltdown trying to keep up with the movie and the commentary at the same time, so I dunno if you guys took issue with the ending or not, though judging by the intros, I'll guess that you all liked it?
Sorkin, tho... Man, I dunno about that guy. I've liked all of his movies that I've watched so far, and I like that he writes characters so well, but there are times when people will be talking and talking and talking and I'll kinda zone out, and then they'll suddenly all stop talking and be looking at each other with that "wow, that line was really important" look on their faces and I'll snap out of my trance and think "oh god, I just missed something I shouldn't have missed..." It happened in this movie right at the beginning when that girl got pissed off. I'm so glad she explained why she was pissed, cause I was lost for a second there.
I honestly don't know if there's a good way to build an audience for a show before you actually make the show. The best you can hope for is to have a good teaser and a good website for people to get information from. I think this might be something that would be easier to figure out with more info about the show, rather than just generic ideas that might work for any sort of show.
The guy who does "... The Works" compilation videos for directors made a trailer for the original Alien in the style of the Prometheus trailer, and it kicks ass
The only thing about the second one that really bothers me is how the main story arc starts. Old biff steals the DeLorean and goes back to give himself the almanac, then returns to the future so Doc and Marty can go back to 1985. The movie gives an explanation about the time divergence, but the fact that old biff gets back to the old future contradicts that explanation. I also don't like that they cut out the bit where old Biff vanishes. As a kid I thought he had accidentally stabbed himself with his cane as he was trying to pull it out of the car. Turns out he was in the process of vanishing.
And why would he vanish? Does Biff die before 2015 in the new future? Maybe that's why they cut it out? But then... so are we supposed to think he stabbed himself with the cane?
Also, they should have called back to the whole "Those boards don't work on water!" thing. They made too big a deal out of it for it to not get called back later in the film or the third.
Most intense line of dialogue ever: Willem Dafoe screaming "Who the fuck are they!?" while attacking hedges and throwing himself on the ground in Boondock Saints.
I know it's a terrible movie, but at least Willem Dafoe is good in it.
And I didn't wanna use a Sam Jackson line, cause everything he says is intense.
Hey, you guys haven't done Boondock Saints, yet...
I never heard of that draft, but I can sorta understand why the movie studio wouldn't be too thrilled about a movie that portrays a couple of movie bootleggers as the sympathetic protagonists in their film.
I used to work at Universal Studios. My dad worked there as well at the BTTF ride. Next to the ride is a store where you could buy all kinds of BTTF stuff and a bunch of random weird crap that didn't really have much to do with BTTF beyond the fact that some of it kinda looked futuristic or westerny or whatever and had some BTTF quote or photo or something on it. You know, mostly just cheap crap and shirts and stuff.
However, one thing they didn't sell were the movies themselves. They sold all the other movies at all the other attractions, and in the main store at the front of the park you could buy tons of universal movies and gift sets and what-not, but nowhere in the park could you find BTTF movies. I always thought that was weird.
Of course, now there's no BTTF presence in the park at all. They replaced the ride with MIB or something.
They have a fantastic show, they play amazingly well live, it's loud, they know that fans like their older stuff, so that's what they play the most of, etc. The concert I went to was after reloaded came out, but 90% of the show was music from the Black album or earlier. They only played a couple songs off Load and one or two of their newest songs. The 'encore' for the show was them in the middle of an arena full of people playing in total darkness with a single spotlight while they played a couple of songs from their first album on regular old amps. This was after the entire stage had collapsed and burst into flames and shit.
The reason it was a particularly great show, tho, was the fact that I went with a friend, and the person taking our tickets accidentally swapped us when they handed us our stubs. I was sitting in the seat my buddy was supposed to be sitting in, my buddy was sitting in the seat I was supposed to be sitting in.
I was sitting next to two hot chicks who kept having wardrobe malfunctions and were passing joints around for the entire concert. My buddy ended up sitting next to a couple of fat, hairy, drunk redneck guys who smelled like poo. Five minutes into the concert, the fat drunk chick sitting behind us puked all over what was supposed to have been my seat.
After the concert we went to the local dive we all used to hang at about a month before it burned to the ground and discovered that our stubs had been switched. He was so pissed off, and never let me live it down. I was supposed to have the smelly puke-covered seat and he was supposed to get the hot half-naked stoner chicks.
Good times.
Have you ever come that close to getting arrested but somehow managed to avoid it?
I've seen the original trilogy as well, and I hope Fincher plans to remake all three of them, cause Lisbeth's storyline is pretty great throughout, but the original versions of "fire" and "hornet's nest" felt a lot cheaper and rushed compared to the first one.
I'll probably see it at some point before christmas. I've been pretty excited about it.
I look at trailers in a way that is possibly different from other people. I don't actually care much about the specific stuff happening in the trailer, cause that stuff is taken out of context. Something that looks like it would be an awesome, epic moment or scene in the trailer could be very underwhelming and dumb in the movie, and stuff that looks dumb in the trailer could end up being brilliant in the film.
What I generally tend to look for is the ratio of stuff they're putting in there. Look at the trailer for Wrath of the Titans:
The whole trailer is made up of shots of action sequences or over-the-top dramatic shots of a single character doing something 'bad-ass' in slow motion, usually with a lower angle. It looks like they came up with stuff that would look sweet in a trailer and then wrote around that to kinda cram a plot into the movie somewhere. It looks like the story part of the movie was secondary to getting awesome trailer shots.
The same thing holds true for GI Joe: Retaliation and Battleship, the transformers movies, etc. You can tell those movies are going to suck balls because the trailer is nothing but epic slow-motion shots all quick-cut together to some slick music and none of those shots show any real character or plot going on. It's trailers with nothing but stuff happening. "Stuff Happens: The Movie", as I call them.
This trailer, and, say, the trailer for The Dark Knight Rises have a lot of shots of people kinda talking to each other and more of a sense that there's a story going on, and that the story is more than an excuse to have people fight giant robots or giant monsters or whatever. The draw of the movie is going to be the story and the characters and not, for instance, the one shot where Bane blows up the football field, or the shot here where the dwarves fight the trolls.
Probably could have cut together a better trailer, tonally, but I don't think this one is particularly bad. It gives me more hope for this film than, say, the trailer for Wrath of the Titans gives me for that film.
While I was quite underwhelmed by the first one, I can't help but be happy about getting to see Arnold shoot stuff again in a movie. May he shoot things in movies for years to come.
A while back I was looking into cameras and I came to the conclusion that unless you were willing to spend upward of $4K or so, there wasn't much better you could do than a 7D. The camera I'm most impressed with right now is the Panasonic AF100. Micro 4/3 lens system, the ability to capture to RAW and low-light / high ISO performance that's only slightly worse than the 7D. Unfortunately those things are hovering between $4K and 5K with a lens or two and some kind of data storage.
For $2K I'm not sure you could do better than a 7D to be honest. I can do some digging through some of my old bookmarks to see if I'm forgetting anything.
The VG20 seems to have more pronounced rolling shutter than the 7D, but I'm just basing that on whatever test footage of the two cameras I could find. I honestly hadn't looked too closely at it before, since I have an aversion to Sony's cameras in general. Is there a particular reason you'd prefer not to get a DSLR? Just curious, as I'll probably be back in the market for a camera once my financial situation recovers from it's most recent cataclysm.
