The blockbuster 3-D movie Avatar has nine Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture. That’s more Oscar nominations than any 3-D movie in cinematic history.
As a tribute, I made this picture of Neytiri, the blue alien Pochahontas lady, wearing a very stylish pair of horn-rimmed 3-D glasses.
A new CGI animated 3-D movie, Fly Me to the Moon, is playing in select IMAX theaters. The film tells the improbable story of three adventurous flies, who stow away aboard the historic Apollo 11 flight to the moon. (I haven't seen it; it doesn't show in Oklahoma City until November. See the schedule to find out when it's playing near you.) The filmmakers have posted a gallery of 15 scenes from the movie on their website.
You'll notice from the images, that the characters don't look anything like flies. Instead, they look something like green chipmunks with wings. This, I believe, was a wise decision, as nobody could sympathize with realistic fly characters. You would spend the whole movie just hoping they would die.
But they also made some unwise decisions. These stills are just not good stereo images. You will find many of the pictures uncomfortable to look at, kind of difficult to fuse into a 3-D picture, and almost painful to try. What they did wrong was what we call "window violation." Apparently, this problem occurs not just in the stills, but throughout the movie. Stereoscopic expert Daniel Smith has done an excellent analysis of the errors in Fly Me to the Moon; he even fixes some of these stills, to show how they should have been done. Go read his post, and see for yourself how fixing the window violation makes the images much better.
The resurgence of 3-D movies is official now; Time says so.
Rebecca Winters Keegan, reporting in the August 25 issue of Time magazine, says 3-D movies are "Coming Back at You":
The first feature films shot and shown in digital 3-D -- bugs-in-space toon Fly Me to the Moon, Brendan Fraser's volcano-diving Journey to the Center of the Earth and concert movies by U2 and Miley Cyrus -- leaped into moviegoers' laps this year. In 2009 at least 10 more 3-D movies will arrive, including James Cameron's sci-fi epic Avatar, DreamWorks' Monsters vs. Aliens and Pixar's Up."Over the next couple of years, we'll get our Gone With the Wind and our Citizen Kane," says Michael Lewis, CEO of Real D, a company that equips movie theaters with digital 3-D technology.
Well, that's something to look forward to.
The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl in 3-D was released in 2005, and is now available on DVD.
Sharkboy lost his father in a storm at sea, and was raised by sharks. The story was conceived by a seven-year-old boy, and polished into a movie script by grown-ups. It is full of the charming sort of nonsense that only young children can dream up.
I'm warning you, this is scary...
In 1961, the Hollywood thriller fad was long over, and so was the 3-D craze. The Mask represented a reinvention of 3-D horror, the more so because it didn't come from Hollywood. It was the first Canadian-made film widely distributed in the United States, and the only one in 3-D. It tells the story of a psychiatrist who is driven to nightmarish hallucinations by a mysterious mask, which he cannot stop putting on.
The narrative scenes are mostly long stretches of boredom, and the story is frankly rather pointless; but the hallucination sequences are truly, hauntingly, scary. Fire, smoke, skulls, demonic rituals... if you're expecting the standard 1950's horror schlock, perhaps a man in a gorilla suit and some stock orchestral music, you will be surprised by this clip, and maybe terrified. Okay, I warned you. Go ahead and watch, if you dare.
The Mask is available on DVD (and comes with two pairs of 3-D glasses) for $14.99 at Brutallo.com.
Widely praised as the best 3-D movie ever made, House of Wax starred Vincent Price in his first horror role, and also featured Charles Bronson before he was Charles Bronson. (He was credited as "Charles Buchinsky.") But the scene everyone remembers is this bit of comic relief. The 1953 theater audience would have recognized Reggie Rymal from his appearances on TV variety shows. They might not have recalled his name, but they at least would know him as "that stand-up comic who does paddle-ball tricks," because that was who he was. Rymal was a paddle-ball virtuoso, and his act consisted of cracking jokes while shooting that ball at the audience. And that's pretty much what he does here in the movie.
Anaglyphs, or "3-D pictures" to the layman, are most often used for their entertainment value: movies, games, Superman comics, that sort of thing. But their most valuable use is not in entertainment; it is in science. Researchers use anaglyphs to help them prove (or disprove) theories and make discoveries that improve all of our lives, and perhaps may one day save the world.
One such researcher is my friend Jer of Nyquil.org, who used a 3-D anaglyph to prove that the artists responsible for the IMAX posters of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix did not, in fact, artificially enlarge the chest of Emma Watson (who plays Hermione Granger in the movie), as some overexcited bloggers had accused. Thanks to Jer's intrepid analysis, the IMAX poster factors are free of the stain of guilt. And you can't put a price on that.
Jer's proof from the anaglyph involves a lot of math and diagrams, so I am convinced.
Did you miss the "Disney Hannah Montana and Miley Cyrus Best of Both Worlds Concert" when it aired on the Disney Channel? Or did you see it, but now want to see it again and again and again? In either case, there is good news. Disney is releasing the 3-D Hannah Montana concert movie on both DVD and high-definition Blu-ray on Tuesday, August 19, 2008!
HOW TO GET THE VIDEO:
You could wait in line for hours at your local video store on the 18th, until the stroke of midnight, and then buy the movie, at full price, plus tax. Or you could be smart and pre-order the movie at a discount right now, and have it brought to your door as soon as it's released. It's your call, really.
If you pre-order the movie from Amazon, the DVD is only $21.99 instead of $34.99; and the Blu-ray is only $23.95 instead of $34.99.
WATCH CLIPS ON YOUTUBE:
I found ten excerpts from the movie on YouTube. To watch the ten concert clips, just click on the numbers 1 through 10, below. I didn't post these videos, and if the person who posted them did it without permission from Disney (as sometimes happens) then they could be removed from the site. But for now, they are there.
You should know, however, that YouTube compresses all video files, so the quality is nowhere near what you'll see when you get the disc. If you want the movie you'll buy the disc.
Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus is a 2005 animated movie in 3-D, starring the popular doll manufactured by Mattel. If you buy the DVD,
A steep stairway made of ice. No railing, either. That might be dangerous. The characters are Annika (played by Barbie), Aiden, the flying horse Pegasus (who is really Annika's sister Brietta), and Shiver the polar bear cub.
Whoops, there goes Shiver. The film, directed by Greg Richardson, is not entirely in 3-D, but it has several 3-D scenes, during which characters and objects are sometimes thown at the viewer.
I do believe this is the Internet's only 3-D movie still from Journey to the Center of the Earth:
It is the only J.t.t.C.o.t.E. still in 3D on the Internet because I made it myself. Even though the film, which opens tomorrow, is in 3D, the official movie website is not in 3D, and in fact has no 3-D content whatsoever. All of the trailers and games and downloads are in 2D.
I understand the filmmakers' refusal to have a 3-D website. It's because their movie uses a polarized 3D projection, which gives results superior to red/blue anaglyph. But their 3-D method only works on the silver screen, not on computer monitors. If they had put 3D content on their website, it would have to have been in red/blue anaglyph, and they -- quite reasonably, I suppose -- didn't want to create confusion by having two 3D methods associated with their film.
But I am not bound by such restrictions. I thought there should be at least one still from Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3-D, so I made this one, from the theatrical trailer.
