Zarban for president

High Res version of the awesome season poster: http://www.comingsoon.net/nextraimages/bigwho.jpg

I am so fucking psyched for this season, I have a feeling they're going all out while they still have the current cast all together.

Ya, fingers crossed china absolutely kicks our ass in the space-tech department, kicking off another space race.

Speaking of trying to be The Fountain: http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/wb/cloudatlas/

This could either be the awesomeness of The Matrix, or it could be the pretentious boredom of Matrix Reloaded.
Only time will tell.

Ya, while I think the movie has problems on a detail level (it's apparent to me that this was a 3+ hour movie that Nolan had to painfully cut 20 minutes out of to fit the maximum IMAX runtime), I think it completely succeeds on all the important, overarching character and thematic payoffs, to where as a whole I love the damned thing.

I think the people that came out disappointed wanted to see Dark Knight 2, and were sad that this movie trends way more comic-booky than that. The thing is, he already made Dark Knight, the Heat remake with Batman in it, you can't just redo that same formula. The logical thing is to up the stakes and do a big blow-out finish  for the final conclusion,and I have no problem with that.

Ironically enough, the plot elements in this movie bug me less than they did in the Dark Knight, because that movie was staying so grounded all the way through that things like big Explosive Barrels on the Ferries looked silly and out of place. This final movie feels more comic-booky to me from the get-go, and so the more outlandish elements gel for me and I don't question them.

I also think that structurally this final installment just feels more satisfying on the whole, because they save the big blow-out action sequences for the ending, instead of the middle (as in Dark Knight). You get all this awesome build-up and one of my favorite movie tropes, the training montage, and then what feels like a 40 minute-long continuous action packed climax.

I do still wish we could get an extended cut to iron out the issues that are there and make it perfect, but for me this is easily one of the best trilogies ever at this point, and this last installment shits all over Return of the Jedi as far as I'm concerned.

Actually, I think I saw the theatrical. I have the original series movie collection on blu-ray, and I believe they are all the theatrical versions (My understanding is that the director's cut is only available on dvd).

This one has me worried. Dave Chen is usually on the mark with his reviews. Really hope Nolan didn't blow the story, I don't know if I could take another dissapointment this summer:

"The Dark Knight Rises is a mess of a film. If The Dark Knight was filled to the brim with weighty ideas, then The Dark Knight Rises‘ cup overfloweth. Director Christopher Nolan, whose previous films have frequently dealt with the darkness of human nature, was not content with creating a light and fun summer actioner. Instead, he has packed his trilogy-concluding film so full of ideas, plot points, characters, emotional arcs, and set pieces that even with a 2 hour 45 minute runtime, none of them has any room to breathe."

http://www.slashfilm.com/dave-chen-dark … ore-131629

Ugh, it's over as far as I see it. With Incredibles to Ratatouille to Wall-E it seemed like Pixar was really reaching out of the "kid's movie" game and were going to tackle more intelligent, adult stories. In retrospect Wall-E really was the peak of that kind of risk taking (or maybe the first 15 minutes of UP), and now it really is a steady fall back to known properties targeted at kids who will buy toys. I was really holding out hope for a kickass PG-13 pixar movie, but that hope is basically dead now.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that's going to be amazing.

Ya, I booked over a month in advance and the first two days were already completely sold out at my local IMAX. Going to be awful waiting till Sunday to see it as the reviews start coming in.

I think it's going to absolutely deliver, I just love practical fx so much and the fact that he's shooting in full-frame IMAX. Not that it matters, but I really hope it beats Avengers box-office, if only to make a point about analog vs digital film-making.

Also makes you wonder what Nolan will do next. I think it'd be nice to see him do something more smaller-scale, something like The Prestige.

I whole-heartedly agree with you about the cost === value misconception in audiences. The problem with your alternative of leveraging smaller online communities in a broader sense is that these communities are far smaller than you would think, and they're also the kind of communities that are hesitant to spend money.

Point in case I always bring up is something like Attack the Block, which got a US release after being a hit on the festival circuit. Now this thing was being pimped like crazy by pretty much every major movie website on the internet, everyone was posting rave reviews for it, URGING people to watch this movie, and this went on for probabaly a month of more. And the end result? 1 million box-office domestic. That right there is near the top-end of the amount of money you can get from word-of-mouth online if you're a relative unknown (which Joe Cornish was largely in the US, as were the actors).

Anytime you see a huge "breakout" hit like Paranormal Activity, that didn't happen through online buzz. That happened through an extensive and very smart marketing campaign by Paramount, a marketing campaign that probably cost 10-15 million dollars at the least.

So while the community-targeted approach can work, the amount of money you can realistically get that way is very small, so the scale of the projects is destined to be tiny.

And the sad thing is they're right. I really don't see this changing anytime soon. If anything, there's constantly more and more theaters worldwide, which just makes the audience bigger and bigger. Why WOULDN'T you continue doing what you're doing if it's working. If I was in their shoes I would objectively have to make the same call.