3D Or Not 3D, That Is The Question

I have been watching movies for longer than I care to remember and during that time have both enjoyed and endured the various fads foisted upon the medium. I would put the recent resurgance of 3D in the latter bracket. As far as I’m concerned, the supposedly revolutionary tech is merely a gimmick to sell tickets to substandard movies and in turn for the cinemas showing said movies to hike up the prices. Further, any 3D films I have seen, and to be fair I have not seen a whole lot, tend to look poor. The tech has a tendency to either darken the screen print or make the actors and scenery look flat, like cardboard cutouts in a shooting gallery. This is often due to the cinema not having the correct lamps to run the film in question, due largely to the expense of acquiring them. This might  explain why cinemas are so keen to whack on an extra couple of pounds / dollars to “hire” glasses to see a film you have already paid through the nose to see.

True Brit: The Brilliant Danny Boyle

I recently wrote a feature on Danny Boyle’s movies to tie in with the cinematic release of 127 Hours. The article was, for reasons too convoluted and tedious to go into here, was never used. I thought that I would post it here instead. It has its faults, I know: it’s lopsided and does not have enough information on the film where the dude cuts off his arm, as it shall hereafter be known, but I was working to a tight wordcount and had quite a few films to fit in and lots of things I wanted to say. Sometimes you have to cut out material you don’t want to cut out. It’s just the way it goes. Often, it makes for a much better article.

I’ve since seen 127 Hours twice. I’m glad I saw it in the cinema first. Rarely have I been at a screening where there is such a unanimous reaction from the audience. The moment when James Franco finally does the needful was, after such an intensely paced build-up, a wave of sympathetic pain shot through the theatre. There was an audible gasp, a mass clenching of teeth and the whoosh of multiple pairs of feet being lifted off the floor. It was a special moment, one which rarely happens at the cinema, and I’m glad that I was there to experience it.