Odds & Ends
Monday, January 12, 2009
3-D or not 3-D?
I saw Bolt the other day. I won't get a chance to review it properly, but I will note for the record that it's enjoyable without being especially memorable. It's a testament to the professionalism of the creative people at Pixar / Disney: having torn the film down and rebuilt it halfway through production, they still made it slick and fun and involving. Nevertheless, there's an unmistakable by-the-numbers feel about it: there's not much sense that anyone had any real passion for this story. Toy Story, you sensed, reflected real interests of John Lasseter; The Incredibles unmistakably meant something to Brad Bird; and Finding Nemo's story doubtless had personal meaning to Andrew Stanton. But with Bolt the original director was gone, and it really feels like they only made the film because they didn't want to write off all the story development. So it's fun, but passionless. The most interesting thing about it is actually the 3-D. I have seen a few reviews, like Jim Schembri's and Stuart Wilson's, really complement the process. I'm afraid, however, that I don't buy it. It's true that it's way better than old 1950s red-blue 3-D, but that's faint praise. Beyond the novelty value, does it actually improve the movie experience? Having seen a couple of movies in 3-D in recent years now, I don't think so. I said this when I reviewed Beowulf, and David Bordwell made similar comments in response to that film: I'd go farther and say that 3-D hasn't improved significantly since the 1950s. It ought to work: just replicate the eyes' binocular disparity by setting two cameras at the proper interval or, now, by manipulating perspective with software. Yet in films 3-D has always looked weirdly wrong. It creates a cardboardy effect, capturing surfaces but not volumes. Real objects in depth have bulk, but in these movies, objects are just thin planes, slices of space set at different distances from us. If our ancestors had seen the world the way it looks in these movies, they probably wouldn't have left many descendants. I don't know about the "surfaces" versus "volumes" thing (I've only noticed this as a severe problem on films retrofitted to 3-D, and there seems no theoretical reason why a 3-D animated film couldn't perfectly calculate the required offset for each lens) but otherwise think Bordwell is spot on about the experience of watching 3-D. I'm not aware of any research about the reception to 3-D that looks rigorously at things like audience involvement and immersion when watching 3-D; there surely must be some, but a cursory search didn't reveal any, and Bordwell (a leading cognitive film theorist) seems to have been unaware of any when he wrote the above a year or so ago.
So here's my unscientific assessment of my own response. Obviously, there's a benefit in terms of the gee-whiz factor; and in moments like the big chase that opens Bolt, there's a visceral rush from whizzing between and around buildings and vehicles. At a simple level, restoring dimensionality would seem to make the experience more immersive because it literally is more immersive, and because the 3-D aspect mimics the way we see the real world, where we do get depth cues from our binocular vision. On the other hand, there are other ways in which conventional 2-D cinema better reproduces our everyday viewing experience. We don't have to wear glasses (other than those that we wear every day). We don't have to worry about how we position our head: as I noted in the Beowulf review, if you don't sit with your eyes level, the effect "breaks." I also find that the 3-D glasses darken and discolour the image; Bolt was a computer animated film, and one would normally expect bright primary colours, but I found it looked dark and muddy with the glasses on. (Is this an exhibition problem? Are exhibitors supposed to crank up the light levels to counter for the glasses?) I think these problems actually outweigh the benefits of 3-D, since our eyes are so used to decoding 2-D images, and do so with great ease. More intriguingly though, I think there's something subtly but actively distancing about 3-D. I referred to the excitement of the action scenes, but I think that excitement is akin to being on a ride: you're responding at a base level to the sensation of flight and fast movement. This isn't unique to 3-D of course - action movies do this all the time - but the effect is more pronounced in 3-D. Years ago, in an undergraduate essay, I referred in a different context to the distinction between "digetic [meaning, roughly, story-based] excitement" and "non-diegetic [non-story based] excitement." It's basically the difference between watching a movie and saying Watch Out Bolt! or watching the same scene and saying Wow, That's Cool!. We always tend to experience a bit of both when watching a thrill-ride of a movie. However, I think 3-D, by playing on quite instinctive cues (for example, to duck when something flies towards us) favours non-diegetic excitement at the expense of diegetic excitement. It makes us more aware of our own presence in the theatre, emphasising a first-person perspective and repsonse, where we flinch at what is shooting towards us. 2-D provides a certain "distance" for the viewer, which means we don't become as self-conscious of our own position, and instead respond more purely to the narrative: we worry about what happens to Bolt (or whoever) rather than experience the movie as something happening to us. Paradoxically, I think 3-D may be more distancing and less immersive than 2-D. Comments Comments can be made on the individual post's page. Tuesday, November 04, 2008
ObamaramaI occasionally feel like I should just give up on cinephobia.com and just re-register this site under the domain name www.pointingoutgreatstuffDavidBordwellwrites.com. As I said at the start of October, other writing and projects have been taking me away from the website. But I can still find time to point out something good that Bordwell has written. This time, it's his fantastic post looking at the US election campaign, and the attempts by Republicans and Democrats to shape "narratives" around the candidates, from the point of view of one of our foremost theorisers of cinematic narrative. Head on over: it's a great read.
A far less intellectually rigorous link between the election and films was offered by the inimitable Shaun Micallef on Newstopia: Watching it all unfold over the last twelve to eighteen months, it struck me how similar it is to the film Trading Places. An elaborate social experiment with Barak Obama in the Eddie Murphy role, elevated to a position of great power and influence in a normally Anglo-Saxon world. John McCain is the Dan Aykroyd character: moneyed, born to rule, and forced to work with a woman he normally wouldn't be seen dead with. In the end, the combined efforts of Obama / Murphy and McCain / Aykroyd wipe out the share value of all the stocks owned by the people who put them where they are.  But the final word on this election (and this, my most instantly out-of-date post ever) will always go to Jon Stewart. Labels: bordwell, commentary, humour, politics, theory Comments Comments can be made on the individual post's page. Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Iron Man 2: Early Review
I saw Iron Man the other day. I enjoyed it, but don't have enough to say about it to warrant a full review. Suffice to say it reminded me a lot of the first Spider-man film; well-written, with good characters and performances and a healthy sense of conviction in the exercise by all involved, but at the same time lacking the really big show-stopping scenes that would have made it more memorable (the climax is really just two guys in metal suits punching each other.) It made me think of these comments by Paul Rameker in an article I've linked to before, over at David Bordwell's page:
I would second all that and also add that these days, the sequel will get more money spent on it than the original; this and the more straightforward stories allowed once the "origin" story is out of the way means the second film in a series can usually be more action-focused. (Yes, this is a good thing.) The old idea that sequels gradually fade away in terms of quality should be considered completely dead, at least as far as first sequels go; third films in series remain much dodgier propositions. Another example: the Bourne series, which - whatever you think of it's hyperkinetic style - really only emerged as the default reference points for action filmmaking when the sequels appeared. Thus I'm excited about Iron Man 2 (Iron Men?), assuming the first film does well enough to warrant a sequel, and that they can keep Robert Downey Jr interested and out of jail. I fully expect to better than Iron Man, just as I'm looking forward to The Dark Knight (despite not being amongst those who consider Batman Begins a gold standard for comic book blockbusters) and Quantum of Solace (which is very much a first sequel in the reborn Bond series that began with Casino Royale). Speaking of which, here's the new trailer for The Dark Knight, featuring lots of the late Heath Ledger. His performance looks incredible, and surely show-offy enough to get a posthumous supporting actor Oscar. Labels: batman, bordwell, commentary, sequels, snobbery, superheroes, trailers Comments Comments can be made on the individual post's page. Friday, March 14, 2008
Round-Up of the Frivolous Things
The site has had, until yesterday, another quiet few weeks, what with one thing another. Whenever I go through one of these periods where I don't have time to get something substantial up (or where, as was the was the case over the last week or so, I'm labouring over something that starts as a short post and ends as a great big one) the temptation is always to keep the page ticking over by posting the various silly things and rumours on this page. But then I get self-conscious about how lightweight some of this stuff is. After I've just published a "proper" article or post, though, I've got no such qualms. So on the coat-tails of my piece on Film Theory, it's time to catch up on the frivolous stuff from the internet. Bees! Bees! Millions of Bees! This one came from Jaime J. Weinman's Something Old, Nothing New, where Weinman was taking about Irwin Allen's The Swarm. A very dumb clip, but it gets me every time: as a commenter over at Weinman's blog put it, the way the guys says "Millions of bees!" makes it sound like he's selling them, not getting killed by them. Bosko Says What? Everyone loves it when a cartoon character swears. Via Cartoon Brew. Clampett Update There's been some good stuff on the internet about Bob Clampett over the last few eeeks: this post by Kristin Thompson looks at some freeze frames from his work and Michael Barrier talks about the cult of Clampett. The latter follows a debate that had played out following Barrier's earlier comments about the merits of Clampett's Buckaroo Bugs; you can follow that earlier debate through links from the more recent piece. If you're not that familiar with Clampett, I would humbly point you towards my earlier essay on him, which was intended as introduction for the uninitiated.  Wall-E.T. The main trailer for Pixar's Wall-E is out. YouTube below, but the much nicer HD version is here. People are really flipping out over this movie. I don't know - I don't find the trailer as completely convincing as others do, and Pixar have lost that aura of invincibility. But here's hoping. Speed Racer Trailer Now here's one that redefines the term "garish." YouTube below but this one you really need to see in HD (here). Who knows what to make of this. It kind of looks hideous and badly shot, but then I've commented just recently on what good action directors the Wachowskis are. Harry Potter and the Multiple Films And apparently Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is to be two movies. Given the really good bits of the last book are in the second half (see here for my comments when the book came out) this strikes me as unwise. Perhaps they can give the first half of the book, where the kinds are wandering the country, an epic Lord of the Rings-ish scope. But I think they risk getting a real dud out of this. Labels: animation, bordwell, clampett, harry potter, humour, pixar, rumours, trailers Comments Comments can be made on the individual post's page. Monday, May 28, 2007
An Article So Good You'll Want a Sequel
One of my happy discoveries of the last few months has been that David Bordwell has his own website (with longtime writing partner Kristin Thompson); Bordwell is one of the best film academics around, and his writing is always stimulating. (I also have his latest book The Way Hollywood Tells It on my shelf waiting to be read - only the fact that it arrived with Michael Barriers' The Animated Man and J.W. Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars has kept me from it). One thing I enjoy about his writing is that he avoids the same complacent narratives you hear all the time. He knows his film history and film art better than anybody - he's co-author of Film Art and Film History: An Introduction, the books from which just about everybody else learnt what they know - and he doesn't just settle for the simple familiar story we always hear. So, for example he and some similarly minded colleagues have responded in this article here to the common refrain that sequels are the ultimate creative cop-out, that Hollywood just wants to sell us the same idea over and over again, blah blah blah. (Bordwell is too polite to put it quite this way, but for my own money the way the film press tediously recycles this basic premise every American summer is as good an example of autopilot as the summer sequel season itself). To give you just a sample, here's Paul Ramaekar quoted in the above linked piece: I have a theory. In the contemporary comic-book blockbuster, the sequels will always be better than the first entries. Spider-Man 2 is better than Spider-Man, X-Men 2 is better than X-Men, and I will bet that The Dark Knight will be better than Batman Begins, just as Batman Returns was better than Batman. The pattern seems to me to be that the first film in the series is relatively impersonal - the franchise must be established as a franchise, meaning that few boats will be rocked, and the director must prove that they can handle both a film on that scale, and can be trusted with the property with all the investment it represents. I just wish a few more of the film academia or general press could bring themselves to move past their preconceived notions of creative bankruptcy into this kind of engagement with what Hollywood actually does. Labels: bordwell, commentary, sequels Comments Comments can be made on the individual post's page. |
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