I am the king of all douches. I make douchebaggery happen. I allow it to happen.

I breed douchebags.

I shall forever be known as King Douche.

Huh. So it does.

I think it's wonderful that Rob Schneider's Wikipedia page has an extensive section called "Criticism and Controversies".

People who aren't 'into' movies will often get offended or not understand when you start pointing out the flaws in a movie they like. I talk about movies a lot at work with people and I'll get into some of the story / character problems I have and they'll say something like "Well, I liked it a lot" and I'll say "I liked it, too", and they'll give me a weird look, like "How could you like something that you just ragged on for five minutes about the story flaws and the plotholes and stuff...?"

The answer to that is simple and complex and if you're into movies, you get it. I just watched "The Grey", and it's got about a thousand problems that I could go through and point out, but I enjoyed watching it and I'd watch it again, if for nothing else than to try to understand why certain things were done. Can't really turn that part of my brain off unless the movie is something that connects with me so well that I stop doing that. If I don't absolutely love a movie within ten or fifteen minutes, I spend the next hour and a half analyzing it.

"The Grey" is kinda depressing and silly, btw.

I have become the same way with analysis. Its not that I don't want to be entertained-I can be entertained just find by things like "The Grey" and as you said watch it and enjoy it. But I love background information, things that give details and life to the characters, Things like plot holes, and inconsistencies bother me now that I am more analytical.

People who just want to be mindlessly entertained don't get that wanting depth is not film school snobbery-its wanting something to think about after the popcorn is gone and you've gone home.

I loved the first 20 minutes or so until the very first wolf attack after the crash. I kept getting more and more pissed off at it up until the... eating scene. At that point the movie goes from "jump scare every five minutes" to having really suspenseful scenes created by the characters active attempts to escape the wolves. So... First 20 minutes are great, last half hour or 45 mins is great, the middle half hour or 45 mins kept punching me in the face and screaming "I'M A MOVIE LOL!" It was also during this period that the worst couple of wolf effects are shown, and where the wolves suddenly no longer growl like animals and instead sound like someone left their lawnmower idling. I think one of the wolves may have been operating a dump truck somewhere in the darkness as well. The sound design in the middle bit of that movie is really odd.

^^^ I think we can discuss this later at some point in a different thread, but I thoroughly disagree with you guys. I think The Grey is the closest movie I've seen to having the awesome character dynamics of Jaws in a survival type situation. I felt all the survivors were both realistic and likable, and I really liked that the movie never really fell into typical jump-scarey horror movie territory (it does for maybe 15 minutes after the crash, after that it goes back to being an absolutely brutal character drama).

As above. I think many of us mentally put you into the "Internet Friend" zone, and would feel pretty awful if DiF was becoming more of an obligation than a fun thing to do.

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.

I remember months ago thinking that perhaps you'd burn out on doing all the double bill commentaries for so long, as that's pretty intensive to go through every Sunday (and then you added the intermission as well!). Sure, LOTR was an especially long haul but what you'd done previously up to then was pretty exhausting (give or take about 5 hours) and shouldn't be discounted.

It's no surprise to me that you'd want to scale back - though I'm a bit curious as to what the ultimate goal of all this is and what is hoped to be accomplished by moving up the tail. Does DiF want to become a business?

For the record, I'd like very much for DIF to become a profitable enterprise if it could, but nothing we've talked about trying to do to that end has ever materialized in any meaningful way. But if it meant changing the show purely to kowtow to audience demand I wouldn't be down with that. If a change we want to make anyway could work in our favor where audience share is concerned -- like the shift in format -- then that's a point in the plus column when we're considering it but not a trump card.