Man, Memento is the one Nolan movie that I just cannot get on board with. Great little film-school concept, but it sooo does not hold up to feature length. I always start out really liking it, and by the 40 minute mark I cannot wait for that thing to be over. I don't know whether it's just too inherently gimmicky of a concept, or whether the actual story in Memento when played forward linearly is just extremely boring. I think that idea could maybe work great for a spy thriller or a phillip k. dick-type sci-fi story, but maybe it really is something that should just be a short-film.

By the way, Trey keeps saying it cost 40 million, but its actually way cheaper than that.
According to boxofficemojo....25 million.

Which is nuts considering the scale and quality of vfx

Ya, at this point my first 3 video-related projects completely failed to get off the ground, and I've learned more and more on each one. There is an exceptional amount of planning that needs to go into doing this sort of thing right, so while it's learning the hard way, I think you're learning important lessons.

In defense of the King Kong extended cut, I find the movie flows a bit better with the extra stuff and I prefer having it in there. It helps that there's like an entire giant monster battle sequence that was cut out, and it's one that I happen to like quite a bit.

NO idea wtf he's thinking with the Hobbit though. The fact that there's only 13 extra minutes speaks volumes, when the original extended editions would easily get into 40+ extra minute territory. You can basically imagine that a solid 30 min in the theatrical cut should really have been in the extended, and would've been if Peter Jackson made this movie 10 years ago.

Yeah, I actually quite like the ending and the fakeout. Unfortunately, I had never realized that the guy Tom Hanks sets free is the bad-guy german at the end. When WYDM pointed that out on their first recording of this, that basically broke the movie for me, because that to me is just a PROFOUNDLY awful decision. Having a blatantly bad-guy villain for the final battle is already really questionable and bothers me, but then tying it in the way they do just adds a whole level of awful subtext to it.

One of the many reasons Band of Brothers is an outstanding series (and probably the definitive film depiction of WW2) is that it doesn't stoop to the level of vilifying german soldiers, and in fact goes out of its way to show how they were in just as awful of a situation as everyone else. Possibly my favorite scene out of that whole series is when the german general addresses his men before officially surrendering to the americans, and they basically have that exact realization:

Yep, the key to making it work is keeping Bruce as the protagonist and the insane fans as the bad guys. We learn early on that Bruce is just doing these sequels for the money and hates them creatively, but maybe add a bunch of ex-wives he has to make payments to to help justify why he's doing these movies and keep him sympathetic. I think JCVD is a really good template for how you would do this movie (in that case Jean Claude is doing movies he hates so he can fund his divorce lawyer to try to keep custody of his daughter): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z_6UfkQ-c0

Along the lines of Doc Subs point, the fans would intentionally dress up as the various different henchmen from die hard to mimic the scenario, so you'd have the german brothers, the token asian dude, and their lead doing an Alan Rickman imitation. They let Bruce escape initially to follow the setup of the movie, but their plan is to kill off the fiction of Die Hard once and for all by forcing the ending to play out different, namely Bruce failing and getting killed, aka Dieing Hardest.

Of course Bruce the actor ends up being more resourceful than they predicted, hence Act 2.

A crazy talented composer friend of mine composed/recorded music/songs for a cg musical short. It's quite good and won him a couple composing awards at the Cordoba film fest:

That never makes sense to me either. If you're trying to build tension and suspense, you have the heroes lead with their best weapon, then get it immediately destroyed or be ineffective. Now the audience is thinking 'well shit how are they gonna get out of this now?". Like how in Predator, the team starts off using miniguns and grenade launchers and are barely able to scratch the Predator. So then when Arnie is going up against it with just a bow and arrow at the end, he feels completely outmatched, and you're actually questioning if he's going to be able to survive this. Imagine how lame that movie would be if he pulled out some secret rocket launcher at the end to save the day.

Ya, it won't be as straightforward as Kickstarter, but there's a lot of potential. Basically, this is the kind of thing where there is likely to be a minimum investment limit of like $1000 or more, because there is a ton of paperwork involved once you have real investors. However, since there's the potential for return on investment, people would be much more likely to chip in these larger amounts.

I agree BDA, this was a bad idea.

Watched Blowout for the first time (shiny Criterion bluray), and fucking christ is De Palma the man. The framing and cinematography is amazing, Travolta is awesome, John Lithgow is a scary fucking bad-guy. One of the more fucked up endings I've seen (goes without saying that something like this would never get released today), and the climax has one of the most striking shots I've seen in a long time(rotating around Travolta with fireworks going off in the background).