You're making a mighty big assumption thinking anybody watched Wrath of the Titans in the first place.

This is all the movies I saw in 2012 that were listed on the Box Office Mojo 2012 list, which apparently includes some movies that were released in 2011, but still made money in theaters in 2012 or something? I don't get it, but that's what I went with.

1. Moonrise Kingdom
- I'm a Wes Anderson guy. All felt right with the world for like a week after seeing this.
2. The Raid
3. The Avengers
4. The Innkeepers
- A warm blanket of a film, and maybe the best skeptic's ghost movie ever.
5. Killing Them Softly
- Not as viscerally entertaining as I thought it would be, but the tone of this is SO my thing. I still can't get it out my head.
6. Cabin in the Woods
7. Skyfall
8. Cloud Atlas
9. The Dark Knight Rises
10. Killer Joe
11. Looper
- This is a Wild at Heart situation. If it ran with its original premise it might be one of my favorites of all time, instead it gets edged out of the top 10.
12. Argo
13. The Master
14. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning
15. Ted
16. Kill List
- I might have liked this better on DVD. Missed at least 60% of the dialogue to the accents.
17. Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance
18. The Hunger Games
19. We Need to Talk About Kevin
- Might have rated higher, but I saw it with a friend who hated it.
20. Safe
21. Sinister
22. Battleship
23. The Watch
24. The Lorax
25. Chernobyl Diaries
26. The Amazing Spider-Man
27. Man on a Ledge
28. Taken 2
- the most technically incompetent movie I saw in theaters this year.
29. Prometheus
- should probably rate higher due to the sheer joy I've gotten from bitching about it.
30. Savages
- There was no way I was going to walk out of Prometheus due to franchise loyalty, but this is probably the closest I've ever come to walking out of a theater on a movie. Not even the fun kind of bad, just horrible and simultaneously trashy and pretentious while wasting a few honestly good concepts.

Ah, haven't seen In the Mouth of Madness. In that case, good point and this is going to the top of my queue.

Diff'rent Strokes for different folks, I guess. But I'm sure if you guys DiF it you'll get an earful.

If I had a movie discussion podcast I'd go through it shot-by-shot, explaining how each one builds tension with extreme economy, how the script makes the interesting and influential decision to have Michael be pure, unexplainable evil rather than a simple murderer while effectively riding the line between plausible and fully supernatural - Freddy turning into a phone isn't scary, but Michael Myers getting stabbed, shot, falling out of a window, then disappearing is - and actually fleshes out the characters on a human level (Laurie is responsible, but that isolates her. She's conflicted about being a prude vs going out with whatshisface. She's stuck babysitting, but she's good with the kids and even seems to take solace in retreating to something safe that she's good at instead of  risking embarrassment by going out - okay, the other characters aren't nearly as well defined but this is Laurie's story so that shouldn't matter much, and we do get the flavor of small town family life in scenes with the parents/cops.), etc... But then, I don't have a movie discussion podcast and all this stuff has been said a million times before and way better than I can say it here. You can even buy books on the subject ( http://goo.gl/TuONJ , http://goo.gl/qCdKP , http://goo.gl/VXcoa )

I think you could be misreading the fact that Halloween was made in the 70s on a low budget and isn't production designed, color timed, and retouched within an inch of its life like basically all modern movies as poor quality.

Of course the fact that every single beat of the movie has been ripped off so many times that it's nearly reached the level of ritual performance (as Cabin in the Woods made its thing) probably doesn't help a first-time viewer in 2012, but I first saw Halloween in 2011 and was completely engrossed. In fact it was one of the films in a class I was taking at the time, so I had to rewatch it in that class less than a week later and it pulled me in again. (For some reason, I never checked the schedule to see what we were watching so - like an idiot - I'd watched it independently without realizing that we'd be forced to watch it later. I did the same thing with Rosemary's Baby the next week.)

I guess ultimately I don't need to tell you why Halloween is good, the world at large does that already and you can find those arguments elsewhere. Since you're the one with the minority opinion it probably falls to you to explain it:

Why you don't like this masterpiece and all-around beloved horror classic, Teague?

Seems unfair to use a parody, but Wet Hot American Summer's "Higher and Higher" montage will always be what I think of when talking about training montages:

EDIT: Now with embedded video thanks to JimmyB

The motivation behind a typical sponsorship is that the product/company in question needs to spread information about itself out to a wide audience. While there may be a few listeners with their own websites/Twitter/shows/etc... who would have that need, I doubt it's enough for a real sponsorship-type deal from the listeners alone. I.e. it would be cool to have my name mentioned, but it wouldn't gain me anything. Sure, I'd probably do it, but that's probably not a good business model.

What Teague's suggesting would function more like an incentive to donate to the show.  So maybe we shouldn't think of this in terms of "sponsorship" as a normal radio show would, but rather as a set of increasing-in-value incentives for donation like Kickstarter does. Possibly a pay structure like:

• get your name mentioned as a sponsor of an episode

• have your name and Twitter/website/whatever pimped

• you get to "Turner Classic Movies" an episode, introducing the movie and giving your own thoughts on it either by either sending in a recording of yourself or writing your thoughts in for Teague to read if you can't/don't want to

• Pick a movie for DiF to commentate

• Pick a movie and "TCM" it

• Skype in and guest commentate for a whole movie

• Pick a movie and guest commentate on it with DiF

If too many people are willing to pay for the high-value selections - or you find them too much hassle - you could say you're only doing a limited number of those and auction them off. Or maybe you could make more by using Alison/avatar's plan and crowdsourcing the film selections, and then selling the other "incentives" on top of that.

Plus, there's nothing stopping you from selling multiple incentives on a single episode - I'd imagine plenty of people would want to give their two cents on a marathon of the Harry Potter series and you could get a rolling LOTR-style roster of guest hosts pitching in throughout the day, for example.

Sounds cool. I think motivation can be the biggest problem for a lot of creative types (myself included) and having a constant list of low-stakes creative challenges could get the juices flowing.

Not that I'm necessarily going to go first, but what's the first task?

EDIT: Nice cover, btw! Musical typing is really weird so if you were playing that live with no experience that's pretty impressive.

Oh, definitely agreed that one needs a fanbase to effectively pull off a Kickstarter campaign. But there's no reason you (or me, or any nobody indie filmmaker) couldn't start with smaller projects, build a fanbase, and leverage that to bigger and bigger projects/fanbases - pretty much like Rob Schrab and Dan Harmon did with Channel 101, though leading to something like The Guild funded through Kickstarter rather than TV writing/directing.

I disagree with the concept that word of mouth is different than regular advertising. One way to look at advertising is as a guaranteed way to generate word of mouth - after all, no one is going to see a movie without that last step of saying to somebody "Hey did you hear about movie x? We should go see that.". Advertising is just a way of forcing something to be a large enough part of popular culture for a time that people pretty much have to talk about it.

Additionally, you can't present word of mouth as an alternative to traditional advertising because there's no way to reliably generate word of mouth other than advertising. Plenty of great movies get great reviews and have people in-the-know talking about them, and wind up failing financially (see the Attack the Block example). A movie/game/song/whatever needs to capture the zeitgeist in order to receive the level of word of mouth in order to be successful and there's just no way to guarantee that even if your movie is 50 Shades of Sparkly Vampire Avengers starring Carly Rae Jepsen.

Maybe 50 million (or whatever is the average hollywood advertising budget) is the price you have to pay to be a part of the conversation. In which case, does it really not make sense to spend 50 million marketing a 2 million dollar film? The audience doesn't care how much the movie cost, they just care that it's the hot movie of the moment that everybody else wants to go see. It could be Avatar or it could be Paranormal Activity.

I guess my point is that if they can make Lord of the Rings for 90 million per movie, then there's no reason for any movie to cost more than 90 million (before marketing). Two of the most visually stunning movies I've ever seen (The Fountain and The Fall) cost around 30 million. And if John Carter had only cost 50 million, it would have been a financial success - even assuming a 150 million marketing budget. Making the seemingly reasonable assumption that marketing should cost less than the product itself probably causes the massive spectacle-driven film trend we've seen recently moreso than "dumbing it down for a larger audience".

The thing is Kaufman and CK became famous through the old system because they're old. That's the system that was in place for acquiring fame at the time. However, the gap between "internet famous" and "actually famous"  is getting slimmer every day. There's theoretically no reason that someone couldn't build up a level of fame through a YouTube, a blog, a podcast, or something that would give them enough fans to self-finance through KickStarter at the level Kaufman or Amanda Palmer are - or even to start with smaller KickStarter projects and build to larger ones.

This topic made me sad. Once I got thinking about it, I realized that a lot of things I used to consider bulletproof examples of excellence in their field have recently faltered:

• Pixar doesn't automatically make great movies anymore.

• After Steve Jobs died, I was concerned that Apple may fall into the same business patterns as most tech companies - which seems likely if rumors of a mini iPad are true. http://mashable.com/2012/07/05/ipad-min-bad/

• Dan Harmon was fired from Community.

• Breaking Bad appears to be maintaining quality for their fifth season, but even then that's the final season.

• They're replacing The Office's cast instead of just ending the damned thing already.

• Eastbound & Down has confirmed seasons beyond the story they'd wanted to tell, presumably just for the money.

• Prometheus sucked - though that's hardly fair to group in with this list since it wasn't the first disappointing Alien movie or even representative of a shift in Ridley Scott's current quality, but fuck you I'm including it anyway.

Pretty much the only thing in the entertainment world that I still trust blindly and completely is Mad Men.

Obviously one can't and shouldn't tie their happiness into the actions of people (or even worse, corporations) they are totally unrelated to, but thinking about that all at once was certainly enough to make for a mildly disheartening morning.

I'd like to pre-emptively apologize for the inherently gossipy and speculative nature of the following post:

I also got a sense of things cooling down leading up to the format switch - a settling down into something a bit easier to manage every week. However, I don't see it as a matter of disliking doing commentaries as much as a risk/reward thing.

I think that the commentary format was both DiF's biggest advantage and its biggest (only?) weakness. Few enough people listen to official commentary tracks, and the number interested in sitting down for an unofficial track has to be even lower - so you've got a self-limiting concept at the heart of the commentary format. However, switching to a more normal podcast format has its own set of issues - DiF is naturally going to be starting with a smaller slice of a much bigger pie and there's the possibility of getting lost in the static.

That said, switching is a better bet. They can either continue dedicating a ludicrous amount of time to a podcast that's as successful as it possibly can be within its format, while still not nearly successful enough to treat it like a full-time job. Or they can change and dedicate less time to a podcast that has the potential to succeed at a much larger level.

Since most listeners didn't bother to sync with the movie and treated it like a more normal podcast anyway, it's reasonable to assume that most of those listeners just liked hearing the DiF crew talk about movies and might barely notice the change. So the risk of losing existing listeners is fairly low (I know I'll keep listening). Losing the intimidating instructions at the beginning of each podcast reduces the risk of scaring away possible new listeners.

It's a win/win, even if they don't gain any new listeners at least it's not as difficult.

However, while I understand the impetus for the change I agree with Zarban. I'm a podcast junkie and I already have plenty of general movie discussion podcasts, so I'm gonna miss weekly commentaries.