jentleman film journal.

Batman Ends: Taking in Christopher Nolan’s Bat-Saga

WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN THE DARK KNIGHT RISES.

Given the open ending and overwhelming critical and financial success of its predecessor, there may not be a movie in the history of cinema that was more certain to be made than The Dark Knight Rises. And, short, perhaps, of George Lucas’s second Star Wars trilogy, it may be that no previous movie has ever been the subject of such high expectations from its producers and its audience alike. On July 19^th, a day before the movie opened, the possibility for both a Best Picture nomination and the title of highest-grossing film of all time were legitimately in play. And why not? Batman Begins, released in 2005, was by itself one of the best superhero movies that we’d seen to that point. The Dark Knight, three years later, redefined the model of what a superhero movie could be, and even led directly to a change in the structure of the Academy Awards.  Meanwhile, director Christopher Nolan, in his breaks between movies, had directed a well-received Victorian magician drama in The Prestige and a Best Picture-nominated blockbuster in Inception. Reasons for optimism, in other words, were everywhere.

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The Best Lack All Conviction: “The Avengers,” “Snow White and the Huntsman,” and Crafting the Cinematic Villain

Blockbuster season is the time in the cinematic calendar when studios and directors are given the freest license to paint with broad, unsubtle strokes, and 2012, so far, has been no different: if we leave aside the refreshing ambivalence of The Hunger Games, this summer’s fare has offered up plenty of stark, dualistic storylines pitting the forces of good against those of evil. None of them, however, have quite managed to hit. The Avengers, despite its record-shattering march into the rarified air of box office history, relies far more on pageantry and witty squabbling to entertain than on any genuine sense of peril. Snow White and the Huntsman, meanwhile, tries to complicate its fairy tale villain by giving Charlize Theron lots of space to monologue about how men mistreat women, even as the movie sticks to a conventional fairy tale structure of good overcoming evil. Prometheus, out this past weekend, doesn’t even have a recognizable antagonist, unless one wants to shoehorn the huge pale aliens that apparently created its creepy-crawlies into that box.

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The Heroes Walk Among Us: Avengers, Dark Knights, and the Superhero Movie as Modern Western

Back in 2000, 20^th Century Fox took a gamble on the idea that taking Marvel’s campy superhero properties and cinematizing them with high production value and top talent would pay off at the box office. They hired a hot young director, to whom they gave significant creative control, and recruited two highly-acclaimed veteran actors to headline the cast. The result was X-Men, which was critically well-received, which, with a gross of just under $300 million, was one of the top ten earners of the year, and which set off the ongoing trend of giving every possible superhero franchise the screen treatment.

With today’s release of The Avengers and the upcoming July premiere of The Dark Knight Rises – not to mention the surely-misguided reboot of the Spider-Man franchise and February’s superhero-subversive Chronicle – 2012 may well prove to be the pinnacle of that trend. Both movies should finish among the year’s top movies, and if Rises is anywhere near as good as prequel The Dark Knight, it’ll probably have the inside track to the genre’s first Best Picture nomination. While there’s no such thing as a sure bet in this industry, the modern superhero movie may be the closest thing to it; even Bryan Singer’s mediocre Superman Returns made almost $400 million.

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What Hollywood is Doing Right

Apologies for the unintentional hiatus at JFJ. I’ll be posting regularly again starting with this one, though the frequency of posts may be a bit more erratic given my schedule. Thanks as always for reading.

One oft-quoted statistic that I’ve seen tossed around over the past six or seven months is the observation that 2011 saw the release of more sequels, representing a higher proportion of theatrically distributed movies, than any other year on record. Others decry the decline of original cinematic properties, with original releases (especially major releases) being pushed out of the way for adaptations deriving from sources as far-flung and unlikely as games of chance. Collectively, all of this is pointed to as proof of an ongoing decline in American filmmaking, where creativity is being routinely stifled in favor of sucking every last dollar out of whatever odds and ends are lying around. And, to be fair, I myself have been a part of that chorus; one of the earliest articles that was published here at Jentleman Film Journal was an examination of why studios were shying away from original properties.

Today, though, I’d like to approach that question from a different angle. Yes, it’s true that 2011 was a mildly dismal year at the movies, offering us nothing great and a pu pu platter of good, unambitious movies mixed in with a few ambitious, deeply flawed ones. Yet audiences more or less rejected that level of mediocrity, and 2012 has already seen a pretty significant bounce back from it, with box office revenues up a very healthy 21% from this point last year and what has been so far been a surprisingly satisfying crop of movies.

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Why The Oscars Matter

Whether it’s the new voting rules, or tastes affected by the dismal state of affairs at home or abroad, or Harvey Weinstein’s best efforts to rig the system, it’s hard to look at this year’s Oscar ballot and not feel like something went horribly wrong somewhere along the line. Drive, the best movie of the year, got almost completely shut out – it was always a hard sell for Best Picture, but omitting Albert Brooks from the list of Supporting Actor nominees amounted to a slap in the face – while War Horse and, most especially (or offensively, if you want to be extreme), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close were tapped for the top prize. Hugo, meanwhile, pulled in eleven nominations, which is pretty significant when you consider, first, the general apathy of the public to a film that should have been a blockbuster, and second, that the movie was merely decent.

Clearly, it wouldn’t be that hard for me to turn this piece into a litany of the Academy’s sins. I don’t want to do that, though, for two main reasons. First of all, to do so would be to overlook the things they did get right: Gary Oldman’s nomination for Best Actor, for instance, was richly deserved and at least a small acknowledgment of a film that, though among the best of the year, was probably a bit too dark and a bit too British to register in a year when voters just wanted to feel good. More importantly, though, it’s because contrary to the reams of paper that will be produced this week on the injustices perpetrated and how AMPAS has lost its way, I believe that the Oscars do matter, more than any of the other awards shows and committees that dot the prestige season landscape.

I don’t mean to say by this that winning an Oscar, or even being nominated, necessarily means that a film or performance or technical achievement is the best of the year, or even among the best: film aficionados can always point to instances where a deserving film or performance was overlooked. Again, we live in a world where Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close could be nominated for Best Picture and where The Artist, this year’s front-runner, was nominated for Best Original Screenplay despite having only two lines of dialogue. Should Roberto Benigni really have won Best Actor in 1998? Of course he shouldn’t. Is it embarrassing that Titanic, Crash, and Chicago are among our recent Best Picture winners? Of course it is. But all of that is beside the point: while it’s nice to see great movies and great performances receive validation in the moment, the stuff that’s really good will still be around in twenty years, when The Artist is a historical footnote. (I’m not sure what the shelf life is of a black-and-white silent made in 2011, but my money is on ‘brief.’)

What I do mean to say is that the existence of AMPAS, and of the Academy Awards that are its calling card, is important in establishing and maintaining the idea of film as an art form, that can be good or bad and that must be addressed on its own merits. In theory, that’s a role that film criticism should play. But criticism, especially in this country, is a marginal and self-marginalizing field, restricted to one of two avenues: either you get the sorts of weekly reviews that emerge in daily papers, where films are broken down into component parts and a verdict is ultimately given (‘the actors are great, I didn’t like the story,’ etc), or one finds highly academic articles that talk about such-and-such director’s importance as an explorer of social themes of the 1970s without any consideration for why or how that director’s films are any good. Critics also sometimes seem to be almost willfully uninterested in film as a storytelling medium: keep in mind, as one friend of mine pointed out, that American film critics thought that Melancholia was the best movie of the year. (Readers of this blog, of course, are aware that it was in fact the worst.)

There is not, in other words, a real and developed dialogue in this country about movies, either as our most significant shared cultural experience or as a legitimate form of art. What the Oscars above all, and the awards season in general, do is to create a context in which people can actually talk about the movies in a context beyond “I liked it.” What else is a statement about what should win Best Picture, or what should have been nominated, or what a travesty it is that such-and-such a picture won some award or another, than a realized aesthetic judgment? We go to movies to be entertained, to be moved, to be told something, to be surprised, but rarely do we have an obvious reason to think about what makes one film better than another.

When Oscar nominations came out on Tuesday, however, the Internet was ablaze with, alternately, rage and delight over how things had gone. If nothing else, the Oscars create a cultural moment in which it is in some way necessary to have an opinion about the movies, in the same way that the Super Bowl creates a moment in which you’re almost not allowed to not have an opinion about football. Even if that opinion doesn’t go beyond, “Oh, I don’t care for it,” you’re still forced to acknowledge what it is and how it’s culturally significant, how you have in some way chosen a point of view that runs counter to the ongoing discourse. Similarly, when my friend tells me that he enjoyed The Artist more than any other movie this year and that it should win Best Picture, the fact that I know that he’s wrong isn’t enough: I have to justify why he’s wrong. By forcing us to compare films against one another, we also have to ask questions about what a movie should do and why one is more successful than another.

Even more important than that, though, is the fact that the Oscars – and only the Oscars, since all those other shows only matter because of what they tell us about the shape of the Oscar race – legitimate the pursuit of excellence in filmmaking. For most of the year, the success of a movie is defined not by how good it is but by how much it made: Michael Bay will continue to get work because, no matter how spectacularly uninteresting Transformers 3 might have been, his movies can be relied on to make bucketloads of cash. The Academy Awards, however, are dedicated to recognizing and rewarding excellence in cinema: for one night, at least, cinema culture is centered on the question of what is the best. In making that kind of excellence mean something, the Oscars give filmmakers – producers, directors, writers, actors – legitimacy in pursuing projects not because they think they’ll be big hits but because they want to make good movies.

Cynics will point out that the Oscars are used as another marketing ploy, that the notion of campaigning for awards – as all the studios do – negates the idea that the Academy Awards are really about honoring excellence, and that there is a discernible formula for what an ‘Academy Award nominee’ looks like. But however tempting it is to complain about how out-of-step the Academy is with contemporary taste, it’s worth pointing out that some of the greatest and most commercially successful films of all time were multiple Oscar nominees. Star Wars, The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, Shakespeare in Love – all were big hits, all were great films, and all were Oscar winners (okay, Star Wars only won an Oscar in my revisionist imaginary history, I admit). As much as we like to point to the omission of The Dark Knight from the list of nominees in 2008 as an example of voter snobbery (and justly so – does anyone really believe that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a better movie?), the fact is that the Academy has historically been pretty open to popular movies – really, to movies of all types – as long as they’re actually good. Even Avatar, which I didn’t really like, got a nod back in 2009. Dispiriting as it is that Bridesmaids couldn’t pick up a Best Picture nomination this year, it says something negative about the state of popular filmmaking in this country that, beyond that film, the best blockbuster that anyone could offer up for awards consideration was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2.

There’s no denying, also, that the Oscars are used as a marketing tool, and that one reason that they’re so coveted by studio types is that they bring a certain bump in box office receipts and DVD sales. The only reason that works, though, is that we accept that winning an Oscar means that a movie is good: Oscars and Oscar nominations raise our interest in a movie because we have some voucher for its quality, from people who should know. And while it’s true that the Oscar ‘formula’ exists – it’s the reason that War Horse and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close could be nominated for Best Picture – the Academy also found room on its slate for The Tree of Life, a movie that couldn’t be further from any sort of formula whatsoever.

I didn’t love that film, but for once that’s not the point. The point is that there is a place for movies like it, just as there is a place for movies like The Artist and The Descendants and Drive, and just as there is a place for that enormous, great movie that didn’t get made this year but which we will see again. The point is that it matters whether or not a movie is any good – and that though not every story will be good, there’s a good story to be told in every style and genre. Without the Oscars, we’re a bunch of cinephiles moaning about how no one tries to make good movies anymore. With them, we get to moan instead about how no one’s paying attention to the movies that are actually good. That may not seem like a very significant difference — but it is.

The Week In Review: “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows”

I thought I knew what I was getting myself into with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, which was something along the lines of the first one but with more explosions, bromance, and absurdities. Well, consider those boxes checked. What I wasn’t expecting was that it would be, well, kind of good.

Don’t let me mislead you. This isn’t a searching examination of the human spirit, or even a really good action movie along the lines of The Dark Knight or The Fugitive. Instead, it’s an extremely silly but also entertaining way to spend a couple of hours. Though the explosions and slow-motion actions scenes drag at times, they are, for the most part, judiciously employed, and Robert Downey Jr is as hammy as he was in the first go-‘round. The plot, meanwhile, is ludicrous and often predictable, based on the efforts of Holmes’s archnemesis James Moriarty to set off a world war so that he can sell weapons and other supplies to both sides. The fate of Europe hangs in the balance!

How is this different from The Three Musketeers, one of the year’s most abominable films? Even the plots are similar: essentially, we’re given the fact that there’s going to be a big war unless our heroes sort things out. Both are steampunk period pieces, and both want us to take the respective protagonists as major ass-kickers. Yet for some reason it all works much better in Sherlock, and for two primary reasons that I can see: the villain is a match for the protagonists, and the rapport between the characters actually has some kind of weight. Sure, Noomi Rapace is entirely disposable (it’s not clear why she had to be in this movie at all), and director Guy Ritchie, for whom the concept of subtlety has about the same level of importance that it does to Lady Gaga, never shies away from pointing out that Sherlock and Watson are all-caps BEST FRIENDS even when they proclaim their annoyance. For all that, though, there’s a real sense of camaraderie between them, a sense that they have each other’s back.

Perhaps what really makes the movie tick is the way that the heroes are juxtaposed with Moriarty, played with silky malevolence by Jared Harris. Where Watson and Holmes will risk everything to save each other’s lives, Moriarty will risk nothing for anyone but himself, killing off his lieutenants when they fail him and promising Holmes early on that continued pursuit will result in collateral damage. And, though the film leans a bit too much on its chess metaphor, he’s made to be an equal match for Holmes, which gives the climactic meeting between them a dramatic tension that you’d be hard-pressed to find in most contemporary blockbusters. In the first film, it seemed inevitable that Holmes and Watson would win through. In this film, things don’t seem so certain, and that makes it that much more interesting.

This is, in other words, a satisfying popcorn movie, good for a couple of laughs, a couple of groans, and enough entertainment to make it worth the price of the ticket. If you manage your expectations, you won’t be disappointed. There are no revelations about friendship or love or any of that nonsense to be had — only a bunch of explosions, and some share of fun.

Changes in the Nest

Or, The AFI List Project #33: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Milos Forman may be one of the most obscure of all our directors: despite a career stretching from 1965 to today (his next film, The Ghosts of Munich, is expected in 2012), he has made only ten movies and is one of the great examples of the ‘oh, didn’t he direct…’ school. (Other notable members: Peter Weir, Wolfgang Petersen.) Yet he is also arguably one of our greatest filmmakers. He made two highly-acclaimed and culturally significant movies, Hair and The People vs. Larry Flint, in addition to two of the undisputed cinematic masterpieces of the twentieth century in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus. Those films, however, are more highly regarded than the man who made them.

Whatever the reasons for that, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is certainly deserving of all the praise that it receives: it’s one of only a very few movies about mental illness that successfully avoids turning mental illness into a gimmick, and it turns out that its setting in a mental hospital is, somehow surprisingly, an ideal laboratory for making a film about power. Why surprising? Well, I suppose because it takes advantage of our prejudices as an audience: it’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that, because these characters are in the loony bin, they really need to have someone else taking care of them and telling them what to do. Not to take anything away from The Shawshank Redemption, but when we see prison guards abusing prisoners in that movie, it is – like too many movies set in prisons – driving home a point we have already seen so many times before. Cuckoo’s Nest, by contrast, is more of a challenge. Of course, we’ve all heard countless times about how the mentally ill were mistreated in the days before their ailments were understood to be what they were, but the subtle dynamics of power between Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) and McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) are a different kind of battle, and one uniquely suited to the film’s setting.

What really got me about the movie, though, was its understanding of the cinematic imperative of change in its characters. It is a commonplace of the creation of stories that your characters must change over the course of whatever story you are telling: that audiences will never care about a character who stays static over the course of a movie. (On a side note, this was the great sin of The Fighter, David O. Russell’s boxing flick released last year: Mark Wahlberg’s was the only character who had no noticeable character change from beginning to end.) Usually, this takes the form of a character struggling with some concept or skill, not being able to overcome, going through the various obstacles presented to him or her, and then finally breaking through in an ‘aha!’ moment in the climax. You know the sort: Luke Skywalker using the Force to guide his missiles down the shaft in Star Wars is an obvious example, as is Batman’s newfound resolution to become ‘whatever Gotham needs me to be’ at the end of The Dark Knight. For a less modern example, look no further than The Grapes of Wrath, which I wrote about a couple of months ago. In that movie, Tom Joad’s change comes when he breaks through and – basically – becomes a communist.

I don’t want to give too much away about One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but it’s probably the first movie I’ve ever seen with a more realistic and honest understanding of change. For one, it rejects the idea of change that these other films represent – what we may term an ‘serpentine’ view of change, because it has characters who have had enough happen shedding their previous selves in the way a snake might shed its skin. There is a moment, in Cuckoo’s Nest, where it appears that this will happen – and then we find that the weight of history is too much, that change is not so easy. That moment is depressing, but also remarkably true. Moments and events can affect the lives of characters, just as they can affect us; but moments must be reinforced and cultivated and nurtured to truly change who a person or character is.

That kind of change – a truer vision of change, I would argue – forms an integral part of the story of another character in Cuckoo’s Nest, and culminates in a scene that somehow accomplishes the near-impossible task of being triumphant at the same moment that it is impossibly sad.

Intellectually, then, this treatment of change is impressive and rarely seen, a major accomplishment by Forman. But the more important fact is this: that One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is a genuinely moving film, and there are very few of those.

‘Inception’ and a Moratorium on Comic Book Adaptations

I just read Mark Harris’s article over at GQ on the state of the American film industry and it seems like a good place to start on topic that I’ve had in mind for a while but haven’t quite figured out how to tackle.

For those who don’t want to take the time to read the full article, Harris essentially reviews the current state of the American film industry and points out (not for the first time) the fact that the industry seems increasingly inimical to new, original work:

‘With that in mind, let’s look ahead to what’s on the menu for this year: four adaptations of comic books. One prequel to an adaptation of a comic book. One sequel to a sequel to a movie based on a toy. One sequel to a sequel to a sequel to a movie based on an amusement-park ride. One prequel to a remake. Two sequels to cartoons. One sequel to a comedy. An adaptation of a children’s book. An adaptation of a Saturday-morning cartoon. One sequel with a 4 in the title. Two sequels with a 5 in the title. One sequel that, if it were inclined to use numbers, would have to have a 7 1/2 in the title.’

All this, as Harris points out, despite the phenomenal success of Inception, the year’s fourth top-grossing movie internationally and an entirely original story, not based on a comic book, novel, story, or another film. In fact, Harris argues, Inception has been consistently marginalized at the studio level as an anomaly, to be heralded and lauded but not to be imitated.

This is, from one point of view, extremely puzzling, for two reasons that are immediately obvious. First, when we look just at the case of Inception, that movie successfully demonstrated the power of cinema in the cultural imagination. Toy Story 3, Alice in Wonderland, and the newest Harry Potter movie all earned more money than Inception, but – as I touched on in my post on Psycho – no movie quite became the sort of pervasive cultural artifact that Inception was. It was a movie that you had to have seen and be able to talk about to successfully take part in cultural discourse. As such, it provided a template for how movies could still be relevant within American culture as a whole, rather than simple commercial objects – something which nonetheless would seem to be attractive to studios seeking to bolster their commercial success.

Inception was not the only movie to do this successfully in the last two years, however. Another entirely original film, which has incidentally become the highest-grossing movie of all time, similarly was able to forge itself into a cultural artifact and entered the communal consciousness. I am speaking, of course, of Avatar, which – whatever my personal feelings may be – was an original story, in the sense that it had no base material, and which similarly captured people’s imaginations.

Retroactively iterating this examination over the course of history, this genuine appreciation for original material – much of it admittedly high-concept – is clearly something that has characterized cinema for decades. Indeed, the careers of Cameron, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas would in themselves seem to be ample evidence that there is a genuine and underserved taste for original material. Cameron created the Terminator franchise and Avatar; Spielberg E.T. and Saving Private Ryan; Lucas, the grand master, originated both Star Wars and Indiana Jones, two of the most significant cultural monuments of the 20^th century. If we expand our scope out of the confines of entirely original work to include movies like Nolan’s The Dark Knight or, to use a much earlier example, Spielberg’s Jaws, we can extend this conclusion to say that, generally, audiences are enthusiastic about excellent, intelligent, well-crafted movies that tell an interesting story.

Why, then, are studios so eager to dismiss Inception’s success? Why is there no apparent effort to create a product to meet this apparently unfulfilled need?

Okay, I admit – that’s a straw-man question. Sure, film is art, but more than any other art form it’s also a business. The amount of money it takes to put together a film makes it a necessarily commercial enterprise. Sequels, films based on comic books, and many adaptations of novels rely on existing franchises with existing followers – that is to say, the brand already exists. Even if the fan base of a franchise like Fantastic Four is relatively small, the brand is present in the popular mind: we have some familiarity with the source material and we sort of know what we’re getting. Original material, on the other hand, has to build interest from scratch, making it that much more difficult to attract an audience. Studios invest billions every year in sequels and adaptations of familiar source material (be they comic books, toys, children’s novels, or theme park rides) because the formula works. Other than Inception, the six highest-grossing films of 2010 were this sort of work, and only one (Alice in Wonderland) wasn’t a sequel.

We have, then, the following unfortunate situation: there is an appetite for excellent, original work, but it’s a much safer investment to pursue projects that are familiar to an audience, which have built-in brand recognition, which have already-developed plotlines and characters, and – crucially – which don’t need to be good to make money, and which are therefore much easier to make.

Is there any solution to this problem? (Indeed, one may ask, to what degree is this actually a problem?) The best answer that I can think of is counterintuitive, because it suggests that studio practices are the solution, not the problem.

What I mean by this is that, when it comes to original work, there is a fundamental branding problem. The solution to that is to make the brand of the studio bigger than the brand of the movie or any of its constituent parts. The closest analogue is to think of what HBO is to television: despite some mediocre work (Hung, anyone?), the channel consistently puts out an excellent product. You know that tagline, ‘It’s not TV, it’s HBO?’ It’s a testament to HBO’s success that that tagline means something real.

Admittedly, it’s easier for a channel like HBO to gamble on something new because it, too, has its own franchises, in the form of the recurring seasons of its successful shows. A single disaster, coming at the wrong price and at the wrong time, can cripple a studio, as happened to United Artists after the flop of Heaven’s Gate in 1980. That being so, it might be that this approach to branding can’t work beyond the small-scale prestige subsidiaries that all the majors have, like Fox Searchlight or Sony Pictures Classics. Nor have prestige-oriented independent production companies like The Film Department been particularly successful in building a name for themselves.

Still, the fact that it hasn’t worked yet doesn’t mean that it can’t work, and it seems like a studio that was able to tap into the popular appetite for original material would be positioning itself for long-term success. So, film-loving entrepreneurs… this might be your chance.

On 3-D Filmmaking.

Lately, every preview I watch seems to end by informing me that the film advertised will be shown ‘in glorious 3-D.’ Some movies even work the extra dimension into the title – Spy Kids 3-D, My Bloody Valentine 3D, Piranha 3-D, and Jackass 3D are among these unfortunates. (The latter two of these have yet to be released, by way of absolute journalistic integrity.) 3-D is not a new technology. I remember my father reporting a vivid memory of seeing Kiss Me Kate in 3-D when he was very young. Kiss Me Kate was released in 1953.

Of course, 3-D technology has improved vastly in the last 60-odd years; I doubt that anyone working at Paramount or Universal in the early 50s could have imagined anything remotely like the spectacle of Avatar. Still, though 3-D filmmaking is nothing new, why is it suddenly being presented to us as such? And, more importantly, how much of a fundamental shift in filmmaking does this new fad represent, anyway? Studio heads supposedly condemned sound as a gimmick and a fad when The Jazz Singer was released in 1927, and were wrong; sound was here to stay. Conversely, Cinerama was supposed to revolutionize the way movies were made when it was introduced in the ‘50s, but had for all intents and purposes vanished by the mid-60s.

The first movie I saw in 3-D wasn’t properly a 3-D movie at all. Some may remember Bryan Singer’s 2006 supposed reboot of the Superman franchise. Superman Returns was shot and released in 2-D, but Singer and co. decided that they would use some technological wizardry to release it on some screens with 20 minutes or so in 3-D. The experience was interesting, but the effect wasn’t convincing and it didn’t look like it was ‘real’ 3-D. Objects and people had no actual depth, but appeared to be on different planes – sort of like the ‘magic eye’ puzzles that used to show up on the back on cereal boxes when I was a kid. The 3-D made things pop out, but there was no idea of an actual 3-D environment.

Avatar (only the second 3-D movie I’ve seen) represented a great leap forward for the technology, but it still wasn’t an immersive experience, which is I think what the 3-D phenomenon is supposed to replicate. Things in the foreground were in three dimensions and appeared to have some level of depth, while much in the background was still flat. I tested this at a couple of different points during the movie by taking off the 3-D glasses to see that, yes, that was indeed a flat image of Sigourney Weaver behind the apparently three-dimensional holographic head floating in front of her. Visually, it worked; I wouldn’t say that I was bothered by the integration of the flat with the ‘deep’ image, and after a certain point I stopped really taking note of the 3-D anyway. And the movie, terrible though it was, looked great. As far as studio executives are concerned, it also provided the greatest argument imaginable for continuing to produce movies in 3-D, which is that it made a whole boatload of money.

As I see it, at this point, there are essentially three possibilities for things to go with 3-D:

1. 3-D could become for all intents and purposes a standard part of the filmgoing experience, like sound or color.

2. 3-D could prove to be a short-lived gimmick that vanishes by the end of this decade.

3. 3-D movies could continue to be made on a limited basis indefinitely – probably on the scale on which they’re produced now.

Of the three, I think the third is the most likely, followed by the second. Barring a major technological shift,  I would almost (but not quite!) be willing to issue a guarantee that the first will not come to pass.

In my lead-up to writing this, I searched out  Roger Ebert’s condemnation of 3-D filmmaking in the pages of Newsweek (http://www.newsweek.com/2010/04/30/why-i-hate-3-d-and-you-should-too.html). Ebert’s take is more strident than what I would take (generally, I’m ambivalent about 3-D) but he raises some interesting points. The most important one – at least, the only one that seemed to mirror my thoughts – is his eighth point, that ‘cannot imagine a serious drama, such as Up in the Air or The Hurt Locker, in 3-D,’ which he qualifies by noting that ‘the medium seems suited for children’s films, animation, and films such as James Cameron’s Avatar, which are largely made on computers.’ In other words, he sees 3-D as being fundamentally limited to the kinds of movies that it’s already usually used for.

This is pretty much why I don’t see 3-D ever dying out, but I also don’t see it taking over, either. 3-D technology only adds something to the sort of movie that has visual tricks as part of its appeal, anyway, which makes it great for (most) big budget action movies and CGI-produced animation. It seems like it would be redundant or worse, however, for smaller, plot-driven films like romantic comedies or dramas. Ebert’s example is Casablanca, and it is a good one, I think; I’m getting a brain cramp typing this as I’m trying to imagine what it would look like to have Ingrid Bergman’s head popping out of the screen in the final scene. This extends even to some movies that might otherwise seem to be ideal candidates for the 3-D treatment. Some parts of The Dark Knight – notably where Batman is haunting the Hong Kong skyline – would have looked gorgeous in three dimensions, but most of it would, I think, have been cheapened by the technology. Perhaps ‘cheapened’ is too strong a word. But The Dark Knight is, at its heart, driven by plot, character, and dialogue, not by its action, and that makes it hard to imagine seeing much of it in more than two dimensions.

The obvious counterargument to this is that it’s simply a new technology that we’re not used to yet, and once we are it won’t be possible to see it as distracting – and didn’t I say that I stopped noticing it at some point during Avatar, anyways? That may be true, but I don’t think it is. The fact is that, as more than a visually interesting flexing of technological muscle, 3-D won’t be able to be an effective – or, at least, a successful – storytelling technique barring some major leaps forward. The appeal of 3-D lies in its promise of immersion in the story, of bringing us closer to the action and making it more real. Achieving this as real option for telling stories visually will require a major leap forward, not just in the technology available to filmmakers, but also in the way we think about what a movie is. As incredible as it is to see one of Cameron’s Pandoran flying creatures swoop at us, movies are still fundamentally constrained by the screen. When we watch a movie in 3-D, we’re still looking at a frame on a wall which we look through, as through a window, into another reality. 3-D pushes the action towards us and tries to pull us through the window into that world; maybe we could extend the metaphor and charitably say that it breaks the window to some extent. But it isn’t enough to simply blur the separation between us on one side and the cinematic world on the other. If we’re really going to be immersed in that world, we need the window to not exist; we need the wall it’s set in to be torn down; we need the movie to expand out beyond the edges of the screen and obtain the immediacy of real life.

But, then, we have something like that already. It’s called a play.

Gentleman of the Day:

For Independence Day weekend, not for 3-D.