Welp, it's official.

Owen, I'm becoming not an expert on Potter, but a semi-expert on the Potter fandom this week. (I'm hearing all the Big Opinions and Divides from among the hardcore fans in these interviews I'm doin.') OotP comes up a lot as being a book people strongly dislike, and it's usually attributed to Harry being kind of an emo bitch in that book, being all dark and rock-bottom-y.

I don't have an opinion on this myself, I need to re-read it to see how I feel, but that opinion has come up a couple times.

Yeah, old issue. My best solution for it has always been adding a Levels adjustment to my footage, either as an effect or an adjustment layer, and setting the gamma to 0.9. (Instead of 1.)

Does this solve the problem? No, because now your gamma is just wrong twice. But it yields the closest-to-intended results I ever bothered to sit down and figure out.

By the way, thanks for representin,' Fireproof.

Why, of course it is!

I'll still PM the info to anyone who wants it.

The standout episodes I think should be mined for gold are Sucker Punch, Batman Returns, Back to the Future, Legion, and 2010: Moby Dick. After that, I should have enough to get a great hour.

Thanks again, man. Someone else take an episode or two, let Praxus take a load off! 

Just saw it. It did feel... clipped, overall. Rushed. Cursory setups, cursory payoffs. If there won't be an extended cut - or at least not a meaningfully extended cut, like Lord of the Rings - that's a shame. The aesthetic of the translation and many of the performances were fine indeed, so with the exception of an anemic edit, this was damn close to being a great adaptation.

Alas, my assumption is there will be no extended edition - and if not, there was a bit of a failure in the adaptation process here.

Like we talked about most recently on Rosemary's Baby, simply translating all the things that happen in a book into movie scenes and stringing them out in the same order does not an adaptation make. (Though they did cut some memorable stuff with Ender's siblings.) This movie feels very much like one of those adaptations; as if when the first draft was turned in, the writer/director was left with a 220 page script, a note to tighten, and no idea how to streamline it... so he selects half of each scene, hits backspace, and prints.

Resulting in something with all the skeletal structure of the right story, but no space between bones for a bit of living tissue to take hold.

Anyway. I'm tired, so I'm not going to go too much into it right now. On the whole, I did enjoy it, and many of the visuals were really outstanding. (It's odd, but pleasant, to see Digital Domain get a company card at the beginning of the movie.) I agree with Rikki that there's a Hunger Games vibe going on here - and not just in the evident "Hunger Games was successful, bring me the next kid war movie" mentality behind the timing of it all, but in the "y'all need to pick a thing here and tell us a story about it" problem with the movie itself. As it stands, much like Hunger Games, Ender's Game plays like the Wiki summary of the protagonist.

Also, regarding the trailer:

Well aware of Subbable. Doesn't look like that one's gonna happen.