I think DIF should make their own Twilight Zone/Outer Limits/One Step Beyond short film, complete with absurdist horror. Here's my effort...

A lowlife man murders a girl, then gets drunk and sees a shooting star in the night sky. When he awakens, the paperboy demanding payment attacks him with a knife. He fights back and the kid flees. The man shakes it off and goes to the corner market, where the grocer accuses him of stealing and tries to kill him. He flags down a beat cop, and the cop shoots the grocer, then turns on the man, saying "And now you've seen too much." And tries to shoot the guy.... He runs away in a panic. He's trapped in a world of murderers!

Voiceover blah blah blah own private hell blah blah blah.

Word nerd note: "short-shrifted" is the term, from "given short shrift" from "shrive" meaning to take confession and give absolution as a priest, the implication being that a priest who rushes the process may nullify it.

Now go forth and sin no more.

Nobody risks $200 M of their own money. But regardless, if Emmerich is in deep for his films, then the day will be all the sweeter when audiences get wise.

When people who spent good money on Godzilla and The Patriot and The Day After Tomorrow realize they were made my the same guy, they'll opt out of his new project, and it will be a mega-flop.

But movies like 2012 are huge gambles, not guaranteed money-makers. Carolco tried to make mostly blockbuster films and collapsed after Showgirls and Cutthroat Island drained them.

So it's not like stripping, where you sacrifice your humanity because you know you'll make great money, especially on those little side jobs doing a "private party" for one lonely divorcee, but it's okay because you can feed your little girl, and as long as she's still too young to know what daddy is doing to pay the bills it's not so hard to sleep at night, but as soon as she's old enough for school you are definitely going to quit stripping and get a normal job.

Or perhaps I have personalized the metaphor too much.

The point is, blockbusters need to be good or they can destroy the studio, so people should stop giving Roland Emmerich money. He only makes dumb mega-films, and audiences are slowly wising up, and it's just a matter of time before he makes a mega-flop.

That is, unless he reads this and wants to produce my idea for a blockbuster movie about a team of young time traveling adventurers kept in seclusion by their mysterious leaders so their knowledge doesn't taint their ability to change the past....

Plan Nine from Outer Space. Aliens try to take over Earth by raising the dead, and a ragged band of humans discover the secret and try to stop the aliens? Sign me up.

Noted

It's just an old joke about a nameless sculptor. You can find a thousand variations of it on something called the InterGoogle.

"I'm the doctor, and you're dysentery." [raises pistol] "And you've just run thru all my patients...."

But who is it a "thing" with? Do you mean reviewers? You say that for Cameron it's a gimmick, but look at the countless others who can only write for male leads. Would you call that a gimmick for them?

What I don't understand is how anyone can make The Town or National Treasure or Star Trek or Transformers or the Batman films or any of the Marvel movies and not have them full of strong women, but they do. In fact, in a lot of genre films, it would be trivial to write the female lead completely out of the story.

I hate Avatar, but at least it gave Zoe Saldana something more to do than run a switchboard and nuzzle Emo Spock.

"You drink my Yoohoo?! I drink your Yoohoo!" ptow! ptow!

There are loads of cool effects, but I had to watch it a couple of times just to pay attention to them. The direction and performance are pretty compelling.

• "Last" or "latest"?

• Was any of this shot upside down and backwards in a water tank?

• Is Matt the bald douchebag in the spangled shades?

• Is Cage from Jersey? Or does he talk that way on purpose?

Uhhh [looks upward and to the left] Deleted scenes Easter egg. [shifts eyes]