Plain Old Tele

Ozy hit the nail on the head. IB is half great, half horrible. Horrible. Near unwatchable.

No, c'mon, man. It was a geek having fun with the characters and creatures and weapons he designed. He likes Verhoeven, sure... but I don't think he thinks he is him (or the next generation of him). He's a pretty down-to-earth guy and he's admitted that he gets all caught up in the production design and look of his movies and needs to work on making sure his characters are sound and the story beats are all there.

DIE ANOTHER DAY is just awful.

Indeed.

I don't think ENTOURAGE was a big loss for them.

Emma Stone in a gothic romance? Yikes.

That's a great statement. I love guys who can express exactly what they're trying to do and what genre tradition they're working in. Regardless of whether it makes any money at all (or even whether or not I like it), the movie world is better when movies like this get made.

I think most of his films are good to great, but he had a little run there where I was pretty mixed on 3-4 films in a row.

Baumer is an old geezer, he doesn't get around as fast as he used to.

Final Gross at End of Game: The Martian - $215m Sicario - $56.3m The Walk - $13.8m Pan - $39.7m

That's not even remotely worthy of being considered racist. The whole point of having an opinion is that it's yours. It doesn't matter whether every single critic in the world disagrees with him. You can disagree with it, and even point out why you feel it's not well-thought out, but beyond that, it's just an opinion. I'm not a huge Tarantino fan, but to throw such accusations around is to diminish the fight for equality in general.

Racism? Misogyism? Those're pretty hefty accusations to hurl around, especially without citing incidences. (And just to head things off, the way fictional characters react to each other in movies he wrote or directed don't necessarily qualify as his views).

Sure, if you're a writer/director with enough clout to tell the studio exactly what you want to do and they'll happily give you whatever you want. But even then, while some scenes make it through entirely intact, there are gonna be plenty of others where things changed -- because Cameron realized there was a better/different/neater way to do it.

I wasn't intending to slam them at all. But that explains why the JW trailer filled your screen... because the screen was 1:85:1. That's all, carry on.

Halba is as serious as the night.

I believe the IMAXs in Portugal aren't 15/70 theaters.

It was 1.78:1 for the IMAX-3D scenes and 2.35:1 for the rest. If you don't crop, then you don't fully utilize a native IMAX screen. If you want to keep the aspect ratios the same, then you probably crop both slightly (one on top/bottom, the other on the sides) and present it in something like 1.9:1 or 2:1.

If everyone wrote a script and shared it with someone to get honest feedback, we all would realize 1) how incredibly difficult it is to get the essence of what's in your head down on the page, and 2) how hard it can be to make sure the reader is actually getting what you want them to. When you take a script through development into production, you realize the bizarre fact that many talented and smart people can read exactly the same thing and come away with a different understanding about what it is, and you also realize that there's really only one person who understands the story from absolute beginning to end (and the journeys the various characters undergo): the writer. If you're very lucky you might have a producer and/or director who's worked through the story with you, but that's not a guarantee at all. And most of all, you realize that from a writer's perspective, the most "perfect" form of the story is that final refined draft that you struggled through and slaved over, before you started to deal with notes from producers, execs, actors, directors, etc. Usually it's all downhill from there (the occasional miracle aside), so you'd better make sure it's as damn perfect as it can possibly be, because the very process of grinding through production will force concessions or compromises. We all make the assumption that every facet of a movie is intended to be the exact way it appears on screen... but in fact it could be many things: a fortunate accident, an unfortunate accident, a re-arranging of a shot or scene that was never originally intended, a glimpse of a reaction from before "action" or after "cut". Sometimes it's just an unavoidable bump that the filmmakers try to minimize -- after realizing in post that a moment isn't playing the way they thought it would, and there's no alternative and no money left to try and shoot a replacement. So in an odd way, that script that was sold or greenlit is both vital to the final movie yet probably not that similar to it as well.

If a non-IMAX movie is blown up to fill an IMAX screen, a lot of information is gonna be cropped from the sides. It's just basic geometry.

Maybe filled the screen horizontally but didn't utilize the full top-to-bottom of the screen?

Eh, let the man push for technology that he prefers to use.

For a second, I thought I was in Tree's "funniest movies ever" thread, and I was all "Oh, that's kinda a clever, goofy choice" and then I realized.

Because China plays a key and positive role in the story.