Reading, Watching, Listening 8/30/2024
A few words about 3D
Friday is here again, which means more recommendations from my week of consuming media. I’ll share some of those down below, but I’ll start off here by saying I’ve been watching 3D movies again. Remember 3D? Movies still play in 3D theatrically, and sometimes that’s actually notable, like when James Cameron releases an Avatar sequel, or Wim Wenders films a documentary about an artist. For the most part, though, the format is dead. People don’t care for the 3D experience all that much, and they certainly don’t care to pay the extra surcharge on tickets if they don’t have to. I’ve known people to skip going to the movies entirely because then one thing they wanted to see was only available in 3D during convenient times.
I don’t go to 3D movies very often, mostly because the projection tends to be bad, and the movies presented in 3D are blockbuster nonsense I barely want to see to begin with. Last weekend, though, I biked out to the Fox Theatre, a wonderful, old single-screen cinema out in Toronto’s east end Beaches community. They were showing the newly remastered Coraline in 3D. A fantastic stop-motion animated film, featuring some of the best use of 3D in movie history. The depth and dimentionality actually serve an aesthetic, emotional function in the film, with the 3D feeling more… well, 3D whenever Coraline enters her alternate reality. It was spectacular getting to see that effect on the big screen again.
That adventure inspired me to bust out some 3D at home. Several years back, I decided to buy an OLED TV. I got one second hand, an LG E6. It was essentially a top-of-the-line model when it came out in 2016, but I got it for cheap from an international student who’d flunked out of school and was being sent to Montreal to work for his uncle. I got lucky on the price, but also on the model itself. Though OLED TVs have improved in significant ways I wish I could have for myself, the E6 also happens to be the last TV the company produced that can do 3D. In fact, it’s one of the last 3D TVs ever, period. That has its advantages, though. Specifically, the quality of the 3D, at that point, had reached quite high quality. It’s passive, polarized 3D, like those RealD glasses you use at the cinema. In fact, you can literally use those glasses to watch the TV. It’s also a 4K TV, which, given the way the polarization system on these TVs works, actually means you get the full 1080p resolution for each eye when watching 3D (previous iterations, on HD TVs, cut the horizontal resolution in half, skipping every other line, and it was kina noticeable).
All of that is to say, my 3D TV is really good, and in fact is often a more pleasurable experience than 3D at the cinema. It’s easier on the eyes, and given the way 3D works as an illusion, actually gives a stronger feeling of depth than you’ll often get on the big screen. Inspired by the Coraline screening, I went home and put on Tron: Legacy in 3D. A deeply flawed film, but one that looks incredible and has some incredible 3D work. I then put on Prometheus in 3D, and Dredd in 3D, and Avatar: The Way of Water in 3D, sampling them all. Damn, they looked cool.
While 3D may be mostly dead, I’ve managed to build a nice colleciton of 3D Blu-rays. Specifically, classic 3D titles, from the ‘50s, and into the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s. Those films often have more problematic 3D work—issues that digital technology would help to solve decades later—but they are also more often creative with their use of depth compared to the average modern post-convered blockbuster. Movies like Dial M for Murder and The Mad Magician are a great watch. Inferno is a kind of survival western noir directed by Roy Ward Baker that makes the desert feel like an endless death trap in 3D. Interestingly, despite 3D TVs no longer being a thing, there has been a solid uptick in these classic 3D releases, thanks to the work of Bob Furmanek over at the 3D Film Archive. For most people, the only option for watching 3D content at home is using VR devices (for which you’d need to rip those blu-rays), or projectors, which many homes can’t accomodate. It’s unfortunate. I’ll be holding onto my 3D TV for dear life, though. Watching Coraline in 2D just isn’t the same.
Reading, Watching, Listening
Courage Under Fire was on my list as a potential five-star three-star movie column entry. I’m still working through exactly how to approach that column, including rethinking the “Big Mac Cinema” title, and whether I should even write about films (like The Siege, the first entry) that don’t end up qualifying. Either way, I decided Courage Under Fire wouldn’t fit, and wasn’t worth going on about at length. It’s a solid enough movie, and Denzel Washington is stellar, but as with The Siege, there’s just a little too much on director Ed Zwick’s mind, and the result is a movie that’s more self-serious than it is entertaining. Yet, I’m recommending it here because of precicely how alien it feels, in the year 2024, to watch an earnest 1996 war drama all about valourizing “the troops.” It’s a real trip back to a mindset that we’re still trying to overcome 20 years after Bush started the Iraq War. Watch Courage Under Fire, and then listen to the new season of the In the Dark podcast, about the Haditha massacre in Iraq. The whiplash is incredible.
Inland Empire by Melissa Anderson is a monograph about David Lynch’s Inland Empire. I read it earlier this year, but I’ve been flipping through it again. Anderson is, to my mind, the very best film critic working today. In this little book, she takes a unique approach to the film, positing star Laura Dern as the auteur behind the work, rather than Lynch. It’s a brilliant idea, using Dern’s career to inform the work she did on Inland Empire, but also using that to understand the craft of acting, and the art of performance. It’s one of the best works of arts criticism I’ve read in years, and I will surely return to it often.