BREAKING NEWS: Captain Cameron goes down with the ship again — Titanic to get 3D rerelease on April 6, 2012
I get it. Everybody wants to live forever. If you create art, then you want your creation to live forever. The estate of George Lucas will be releasing new home video editions of Star Wars after I'm not even around to tell my grandkids that the prequels never happened. (What prequels? Who Who Binks? I have no idea what you're talking about.) Also, money makes the world go 'round, especially in Hollywood. So of course James Cameron wants to shove that gigantic ship of dreams into the ocean, float it for a couple of hours and then watch it go down one. more. time.
I get it. Everybody wants to live forever. If you create art, then you want your creation to live forever. The estate of George Lucas will be releasing new home video editions of Star Wars after I'm not even around to tell my grandkids that the prequels never happened. (What prequels? Who Who Binks? I have no idea what you're talking about.) Also, money makes the world go 'round, especially in Hollywood. So of course James Cameron wants to shove that gigantic ship of dreams into the ocean, float it for a couple of hours and then watch it go down one. more. time.
And of course 20th Century Fox, Paramount and everyone else with a finger in the pie wants to get one more taste of the public's money. Are you kidding? The movie's already been made. We barely have to crack the checkbook. We can do this for less than Charlie Sheen Ashton Kutcher gets for a single episode of 'Two and a Half Men'. For nothing, practically!
So fine, if you gotta do, do it. Just don't do it in 3D. Please. Not just please, actually. For the love of Jack Dawson, man, don't do it in 3D! I know, I know. It's cheap and easy. These days there might as well be a corporation called Fifty Guys in India that does nothing but slap a little 3D on your sure-to-be-epic blockbuster. And yeah, 3D tickets are more expensive, ergo more money for everyone.
On the other hand, have a little artistic dignity, J.C. Deep down in that king-of-the-world heart, even you know that 3D is just a gimmick. Not only that, it's a bad gimmick. It works OK with animated movies. With live action, the most you can hope for is seamlessness — 3D that adds a little depth of field, makes the picture slightly more immersive and doesn't call attention to itself. And if 3D wasn't part of the original production process ... forget it. 3D retrofitting does. not. work. I mean, sure it "works." Once every five or six minutes something pops out at you, sort of, and for the rest of the time the audience gets a headache from the reduction in light levels caused by watching the film through those ear-mounted torture devices they pass out when they rip your ticket.
Look, go dig up 20 minutes of lost footage, slap it in there, and call it the Director's Cut. Or use the George Lucas Digital Editing Suite (TM) to add a lot of pointless clutter in the background of every wide shot. Everyone who would have gone to see the 3D rerelease will still show up anyway. I promise.
So, still lost your heart to the movies,eh? Well, frankly, I don't care if Jimbo does muck up the Titanic with threedy extra footage. That talkie sunk for me about halfway through its first run, which, as I recall, was just about when Kate Winslet slapped the fogged-up rear window in her daddy's car. {Why did the audience not laugh with me?} Or was that her fiancé's car? See, right about then my mind started wandering to how fiancé is from the French, from the past participle of fiancer, to betroth, itself from Old French fiancier, from fiance, trust, from fier, to trust, from Vulgar Latin *fīdāre, when suddenly my mind reminded me that vulgar really only means "Of or associated with the great masses of people; common" and I wondered how many of those great masses Kate would associate with and sort of began free-associating masses with asses and there I was back with Jimbo and I couldn't take the pic seriously, so....well, you get the picture. I’ll take the book.
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of wienies does this blog attract, anyway? If I were anonymous, I still wouldn't feel that that kind of blather was all that relevant. But I do want to echo the old keyboarder's objection to 3-D, and going back to 3-Dify the old pix. Or worse, remake them in 3-D so flat that the 2-D version seems better. . . .
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