Speaking for the splatter: the other possibility is that for promotional material which is going to be widely accessible, they may have replaced the gorier elements with more PG-13ish effects, while the movie itself will have effects more like the original.

Disclaimer: if you dislike the tone of a post I make, re-read it in a North/East London accent until it sounds sufficiently playful

Oh, also, they're releasing  this one in 3D -- and as far as I can tell, they shot it that way natively rather than converting. So I guess instead of doing two times the work, they're doing half the work twice.

I will always be grateful to Rodriguez in the way I will always be grateful to Kevin Smith for inspiring me to try this shit.  That said, neither filmmaker lived up to the promise of the premises of their personal narratives.  Same goes for Matty Rich.  It kinda goes back to that gag from Garth Merenghi's Darkplace where he says, "I've actually written more books than I've read."  All three filmmakers got shot into public consciousness long before they had finished maturing in their craft.  In the end, you're left with serious arrested development in terms of sensibilities.  I kinda feel bad for Rodriguez because he did the noble thing by essentially creating a cottage film industry in Austin (along with Linklater) and is personally responsible for a lot of people's careers.  The drawback is, he's gotta keep making films in order to support them, and not to satisfy his own artistic rhythms.  Hence, all three Spy Kod movies, The Spirit, Machete's 1 through however many, and now Sin Coty 2.

Ya, Rodriguez's career is depressing as hell. To have a "big budget" debut with something as awesome and passionate as Desperado, and then with each successive movie embracing the worst elements of the previous movie and just getting gradually and gradually shittier, instead of the opposite. If his takeaway from his first 2 films had been a greater sense of restraint and better focus on story, he could've turned into a filmmaker on the level of Tarantino, but he went the exact opposite route. Much as I like From Dusk Till Dawn, it's blindingly apparent with those 2 halves why Tarantino became a great and why Rodriguez didn't. I can't think of another case of a successful, exciting genre filmmaker devolving over the course of a decade to making essentially shitty youtube fan-films.

Ridley Scott, George Lucas, Peter Jackson, Martin Scorsese. Love ya early work dudes.

The usual trajectory is a bell curve - start off small, work your way up to greatness, and then decline as the brain's creativity ossifies. Prediction: Fincher, Nolan, and Aronofsky will follow this path too (some would say they already have).

The average director has about 10 good years in him (where budget and peak creativity intersect). Anything longer is a bonus. There are exceptions (e.g. Kubrick, Spielberg), but I'm talking about the majority.

Yeah... tossing Scorsese into the category of directors who "started great and got worse" is odd.

Lucas definitely goes in the category, and Ridley Scott is arguable*, but Scorsese's career has been, like, one of the best possible career arcs any director could hope for:

He's been directing features since 1967. His third movie was one of his masterpieces, and so was his twentieth movie, with masterpieces scattered in between. He's had big hits, been nominated for oodles of awards, and received rapturous critical acclaim multiple times in every decade he's worked except the '60s (during which he made just one feature). And it's inarguable that he's done some of his most interesting stuff 20, 30, 35 years into his career (GoodFellas, Hugo, The Departed, TWOWS--not exactly bland, creatively bankrupt movies). Plus, if you're labeling Taxi Driver as "early stuff," it's worth pointing out that that's not early stuff. Scorsese had been making features (six of 'em) for over a decade when Taxi Driver comes out. He's literally one of the last directors on Earth I'd ever think to label as "started strong, petered-out."

* Ridley Scott started out of the gate with great acclaim---The Duelists, Alien, Blade Runner--then things got iffy, but he did win Best Picture in 2000--that can't just be brushed aside; Black Hawk Down and Thelma & Louise are in there too. This is a different trajectory than, say, Shamaylan--where it's just been just a steady descent into mediocrity.

There's also a difference between a talented person who rests on laurels and/or gets lazy (Kevin Smith) and someone who never had it to begin with. Shamaylan, to me, is the latter. The fact that The Sixth Sense is such a good movie seems almost like an accident when you look (if you dare) at everything else he's done.

http://io9.com/how-badly-will-sin-city- … 1621451688