Life of Pi 3D Movie Review

Just so you know going into this review, there's no question that Life of Pi is a fantastic example of 3D cinema. It won 4 academy awards, including best direction and best cinematography. No small part of that was how the film used 3D. It was even impressive enough that the late Roger Ebert, a long time critic of 3D cinema, praised its use of 3D in his review of Life of Pi.

"What astonishes me is how much I love the use of 3-D in 'Life of Pi.' I've never seen the medium better employed, not even in 'Avatar,' and although I continue to have doubts about it in general, Lee never uses it for surprises or sensations, but only to deepen the film's sense of places and events.

Let me try to describe one point of view. The camera is placed in the sea, looking up at the lifeboat and beyond it. The surface of the sea is like the enchanted membrane upon which it floats. There is nothing in particular to define it; it is just … there. This is not a shot of a boat floating in the ocean. It is a shot of ocean, boat and sky as one glorious place."

One of the impressive things I find about the 3D in Life of Pi is that Ebert is wrong when he says that the film never uses it for surprises or sensations. There's a surprising scene where a tiger leaps out from under a tarp that uses it to provide a jump-scare. There are several scenes where Pi is shoving a stick in your face. There's one within the first minute of the film where a humming bird floats in front of the screen, ludicrously far into the audience, as if to shout, "See this movie here? The art film you're watching? Yeah, this is a 3D movie, too! Surprise!"

Yet despite how often and thoroughly this film can be enjoyed as a gimmicky 3D movie, that's neither the primary draw, nor is it employed in such a way that it's distracting. The tiger jump-scares you because it's appropriate for the tiger to feel threatening. The hummingbird flies in front of the screen because it's using nature to enchant you. The sticks protrude from the screen because they're threatening a tiger, and by sticking uncomfortably into the screen their threat is believable, and therefore the stick is ironically calming. This is why Ebert didn't notice the surprises and sensations. There are ways to use them to enhance a film or story, and Life of Pi hits every single one of them.

This picture is a red-cyan anaglyph.

Another reason the 3D work in this film is how the 3D transforms the images presented on screen. Look back at the first image in this blog post. In the 2D version of that image, the water is still clearly visible (like Ebert said, like a membrane upon which the boat is floating. In the 2D version, he appears to float directly on top of the sky. It's a subtle difference, but it transforms the scene from one where Pi is in heaven (when he's clearly in a dangerous hell) to a scene where Pi is being supported, as the heavens lift him up above the water. They have another scene early in the film where Pi is learning to understand his role in a divinely appointed universe by reading a comic book about Vishnu with the universe in his mouth. In the 3D version, this comic book page transforms from a flat page in the book to a cartoony representation of the universe, separating and filling with actual space. It really drives home the cosmic religious experience this comic book is giving him.

And yet this film still isn't done making 3D beneficial to it! Oddly enough, though, the next scene I like to point to as to how it works is a very empty scene, toward the end when Pi is sitting in a hospital bed. It's a very empty scene, with color composed so that Pi's face is the first thing to draw your attention. With the scene so empty, it may seem like there's nothing there for the 3D to shine through.
Then the scene also slowly zooms in on Pi's face. Toward the end of the scene, it's not noticeably sticking out, but it's just far enough forward that your eyes are incapable of being drawn away from it. It forces you to be captivated with his story. In addition, any time an object protrudes from a scene, the audience will subconsciously believe it is tactile (this is why so many people try to touch objects protruding from a screen when they first see 3D films). This creates pity for the character, by supplanting the idea that, if your hands weren't covered with butter from your popcorn, perhaps you could reach out and physically console poor Pi as his emotions overcome it. It's raw and powerful, and alleviates the moral judgement that you could hypothetically feel when you listen to what he is actually describing.

I've still only scratched the surface on reasons that Life of Pi works so well in 3D. I could go on forever about the 3D in this movie, because Life of Pi is an emotional (and intentionally contradictory) story about man's relationship with God in the face of tragedy, that uses 3D to drive its points home in ways 2D couldn't adequately express. It's a fantastic triumph in how it captures such a complex and previously believed to be unfilmable story. This film is a must see, especially the 3D version.

Dial M For Murder 3D Movie Review

It's common knowledge that there was a 3D Boom during the 50s. It's not as common knowledge that Alfred Hitchcock's Dial M For Murder was among the movies considered part of that boom. And to be honest, I don't blame people for not knowing that. As a thriller that deals more with the tension between scheming people, it flies in the face of popular Hollywood consensus that you need action to make a good 3D movie, as exemplified in quotes like this one by Carl Mazzocone:

"A lot of producers have exploited 3D unnecessarily to capture that extra little [sur]charge at the box office. Certain movies clearly should not be 3D. ... But, in a horror movie where there's action and you're trying to make it as frightening as possible, and of course you're wielding a three foot chainsaw, you have a situation where you can actually enhance the situation by making a 3D movie."

Now, I probably don't need to say more than "directed by Alfred Hitchcock" for you to know that this is a good film by Hollywood standards (or almost anyone's for that matter). He's one of the directors whose work was used as evidence to form auteur theory, after all. But then how do we account for this gross misstep in use of 3D, as per Hollywood convention? The answer is that Hollywood was wrong and Hitchcock was right. 3D works well (if somewhat unconventionally) in Dial M for Murder.

Before I continue, I should note that this review contains some spoilers. You have been warned.

I've written before about how 3D can be used to draw your attention to certain objects by placing them further in the foreground, thanks to the focus/convergence problem. In the introduction to the film, Hitchcock abuses this power. He uses it to draw your attention away from the people in the scene composition, and toward the plethora of things adorning Tony Wendice's home. It's an odd choice, since those things are not the subject of any of these shots, but mimics Tony's greed addled mindset at the time. Dial M for Murder gains most of its suspense from how unlikely it is for Tony's murder plot to succeed, so by using the 3D composition to throw the audience's attention about, whether it be on his accumulated possessions at the beginning, or the things and people set to unfurl his perfect murder plot as the film progresses, makes the audience absorbed in Tony's hatred (almost feeling he's justified), and then riddled with suspense he feels as the story progresses. It's a perfect and a very creative use of the focus/convergence "problem" that 3D video has, and carries the film well to its intended emotional effect.

The film defies 50's 3D film stereotypes in that it makes most of its use of 3D in positive space (going into the screen) rather than negative space (popping out of the screen). There are 3 exceptions to this rule, two of which carry an impactful emotional effect themselves. The one that doesn't is that all of the titles significantly protruded from the screen.

The second is depicted in the murder scene itself. Tony's wife, the victim, lies down on a desk, her neck constricted by her attacker. The camera is positioned such that her hand protrudes out toward the audience very deeply. To many audiences, the impulse here would be to grab her hand, which is an action akin to attempting to save her. It enhances the disgust the audience members feel with the murder's action. The third is when the police officer presents Tony with a key to his apartment. This key later becomes the means to unravelling his murder plot. Again, as this film is shot from Tony Wendice's point of view, this is insightful and emotionally compelling. At the time, it's obvious his story is being called into question, but the pop out again makes the audience feel compelled to reach out and grab the key. They feel the fear of abandoning logic, while knowing their raw emotion at that point forces them to defy it. Both scenes are beautiful depictions of Tony's conflicting emotions, each of which are lessened in the 2D version of the film.

I can wholeheartedly recommend this film in its 3D version. Hitchcock employs the format masterfully, in ways that greatly improve the film over its 2D release. The 3D Bluray has one scene missing the right frames, so it briefly displays in 2D, but other than that is a fantastic restoration of the original film as well (I wonder, though, why they didn't do a 3D conversion on that scene). If you have access to a 3D TV, and haven't already picked this up, you should definitely add it to your collection. I'm glad I did.

Man of Steel 3D Movie Review

I have a hard time thinking of things to post to this blog. It was originally conceived as a way to collect ideas about 3D film in general that I'd previously been posting to Facebook, which one of my Facebook friends suggested this might be better as a blog. There's only so much I can say about 3D generally though, and that's been starting to show with my utter lack of updates (and when I do update, although honest and not paid posts, sound like they are ads). Recently, though, I had the idea of posting reviews of 3D movies I've watched, but that seemed unnecessary as most of the 3D movies I've seen have been out a while already, and most people should know by now what they think of them. I recently managed to find time to see Man of Steel, however, and that's new enough that I figured I'd try and review how good it was as a 3D movie.

The movie itself doesn't depart dramatically from the normal Superman mythos. The narrative structure actually reminds me a lot of Batman Begins, in that the film constantly jumps back and forth between Superman's youth to provide context for how his origin as an Kryptonian alien shapes the hero he is in this grand battle in which he partakes. Exploring Superman in this light, as a Kryptonian sent to Earth, is an aspect of Superman's character that I've never really seen before. It's an impressive look that I suspect some people will find fascinating, especially those interested in the super hero myths as just that: myths.

They really sell Superman as a mythological, even god-like hero. From his origins on Krypton, where Jor-El is given a visual aesthetic that calls to mind the Roman culture (and the casting Russel Crowe as Jor-El brought to mind images of Maximus from Gladiator as well). Jor-El's confrontation with General Zod feels heavily Roman in style as well, lending a rugged and even god-like military masculinity to all of the Kryptonian interactions (in case the close up on Henry Cavill's abs during heavy lifting didn't do that well enough). Even the cinematography, which abandons panic-driven shaky cameras popular in most modern action scenes in favor of jerky, sweeping movements with each hit, causes this movie to bleed masculinity in ways that impressed me. Still, I never really connected that style with versions of the Superman character in previous iterations I've seen of the character, who always seemed more about a cool head giving him control rather than his raw power.

If I had a really major criticism of the film (other than that I didn't believe Lois Lane and Superman's chemistry for a second), it's that Superman is too out of control of the situations he's in. The film treats Superman's birth as the solution to Kryptonian society's obsessive desire to control the destinies of all Kryptonians. Yet Superman's actions always seem directed by his Kryptonian genesis. He even interprets the "S" on his chest under its Kryptonian meaning rather than the earthly interpretation for which it's colloquially known, and which someone raised on earth would be expected to use. My sister, who watched the film with me, also picked up on the inconsistency, and mockingly mimicked Jor-El saying, "You have the right to be who you want to be, now go do what I tell you!"

But of course, this review wouldn't be on this blog if Man of Steel weren't released in 3D, so with that frame in mind, the question is, "How does the 3D lend itself to this movie?" Unfortunately, it doesn't. While I have no technical qualms with the 3D conversion quality, and some of the individual scenes looked magnificent, the film was obviously shot with the intent that it be viewed in its 2D version, and those decisions made some of the stereo work unsalvageable. Handheld cameras used to make the scenes in Kansas, and other smaller towns in which Clark Kent finds himself, are difficult on the eyes, making this movie somewhat likely than others to induce headaches and nausea. Not only that, but there were constant over-the-shoulder shots that lacked any floating windows to ease the eyestrain caused by window violations. These and other extreme closeups resulted in numerous scenes that lacked any notable depth as well, nor did they exploit convergence tricks to do anything special with the stereo conversion for these extreme closeups directly.

I'm going to be honest here, I didn't like this movie. Most of the movie was admittedly very well done, but not to my tastes at all (I prefer my super heroes to be more human, and this one lays the Kryptonian heritage on too strong for me). It also doesn't help me like it that the 3D in this movie was something I can really point to as an example of what 3D looks like when it actually is a superfluous marketing gimmick. It added less to the film than it detracted from it, so I really suggest, unlike what I did, seeing the 2D version of this movie. It's a good movie, if somewhat niche, but only in 2D.

Is The 3D Price Hike Justifiable?

Before I go into this question, I have to get some things out of the way. I am not an economist. All I really know about economics is the basic supply vs demand rule. Hence, you will need to take what I'm saying here with a grain of salt. I'm just reacting to what I hear the market saying, and wondering out loud if there's a way to appease these oftentimes inconsistent potential consumers of 3D content. This isn't a researched marketing advice column.

That said, the loudest and most valid complaint I hear about 3D content is that it's too expensive, and that potential consumers can't justify the extra price for a 3D version of a show. Admittedly, if I wasn't trying to understand every failure and success that the 3D film medium has to offer by consuming every iota of it that I can, I would take the same approach. Most 3D films (e.g. Wreck-It-Ralph, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Hotel Transylvania) are not actually made to be viewed as 3D content. When a filmmaker makes their film with the 3D version intended as the foremost (e.g. Avatar, Hugo, Life of Pi, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey), they can accomplish wonderful things with the format. But if 3D is an afterthought, as it so often is, there is no advantage whatsoever to seeing the film that way, and you're usually wasting your money spending extra on the surcharge.

Maybe there's some chicken and the egg business going on here. The 2D version gets the most attention because that's how the grand majority of the audience is going to see the movie, and the audience goes to see the 2D version because that's obviously the one getting the most attention. But we're getting into my "why 3D content should be shown exclusively in 3D" argument, which I'm not on topic, so back we go to the original topic.

But while the surcharge pushes audiences away, I also understand how cinemas and executives justify the price hike. If you're not going the conversion route that most filmmakers are using these days, you're looking at buying twice as many cameras as an equivalently scoped 2D movie, buying rigs in which to store both of these cameras together, hiring a team of stereographers to keep the 3D from going wrong, and will require twice as much rendering time when you go to put the movie in post-production. Even if you're post-converting to 3D (which is relatively less expensive), you're still looking at delayed rendering, and hiring a (usually outside) company of hundreds of VFX artists rotoscoping objects and filling in black holes created by having to create stereo parallax where it doesn't actually exist. More effort to make the movie means more people to pay, and a greater risk in making the movie. If 3D won't pull extra people into the theaters, you're going to need to surcharge in order to make that money back.

I think that's the problem with their reasoning, though, and the lesson executives didn't learn from Avatar even though it was plainly obvious. Everyone was talking about the 3D film experience when Avatar came out. It was something unique that you had to experience. And 3D was the primary draw of the film, despite the surcharge. Yet Hollywood seems to believe that it's the Ferngully meets Pocahontas plot and characters that drove that movie to success, and that the 3D was just there to draw a few more dollars out of a standard audience.

My position is that 3D can carry itself, and that therefore they shouldn't charge more for it. It helped draw people in to see Life of Pi and Avatar, two films interesting for how they utilized their 3D techniques. That should be enough to justify the increased cost to production. 3D shouldn't be added to a movie if it's not going to help it tell the story it's trying to tell, but more movies can and should use it in their storytelling. This will draw in audiences, increasing income without increasing the ticket price of a 3D film. 3D ticket prices should be the same as their 2D equivalent to draw more people in.

Again, I'm not an economist, and given the 15-20% increase in 3D movie production costs, and the need for theaters to create 3D compatible screens, train employees in 3D exhibition (though that doesn't always work), and buy extra digital storage, I can really see why they feel they need a 30% increase in price vs. a 2D ticket. But the first theater to do away with the 3D surcharge I think will make that money back by seeing an increase in movie attendance, which is what Hollywood really needs right now. Despite a 30% increase in average movie ticket prices overall over the last decade, they've only seen a 17% increase in income (and that's with the boost 3D gave, according to MPAA statistics). This means Hollywood is making less money because of lesser attendance. They need a way to draw people back into theaters, and they're killing their first good answer to this problem by pricing people out of it!

It might actually be too late. So many people have derided 3D for the marketing gimmick Hollywood wanted it to be that audiences may be unable to accept that 3D can be used for non-manipulative purposes. Hollywood may have killed their chance. But there's so much untapped potential to 3D, I seriously hope not.

ESPN 3D Dying Doesn't Mean 3D is Dead

Check out these headlines:

Was 3-D TV a failure? ESPN to end broadcasts
Is 3D TV dead? ESPN 3D to shut down by end of 2013
3DTV Is Officially Never Going To Happen

I keep a newsfeed about 3D film and 3D movies on Google News, and this story has been popping up repeatedly this morning. ESPN 3D has decided they can't continue broadcasting because there's not enough demand for their channel. To be honest, from what I've seen of ESPN 3D in Best Buy 3D TV demos, it doesn't surprise me at all. Their broadcasts consist largely of sports commentary, and one to five grown men talking to you while sitting in an otherwise empty room hardly makes for compelling stereography. Not to mention, many their advertisers really cheaped out on their ads' 3D conversions, resulting in ad time that's a physically painful experience. Some of the sports footage looked kind of neat in 3D, but on active sets you're also halving the frame-rate of broadcasted content, which is going to be very obvious in the fast paced action of sports. The unpredictability of sports also means you're going to be running into uncorrectable problems with the focus/convergence issue. Basically, anybody with any sense in stereographic broadcasting could have told you long before ESPN 3D went live that live sports with 3D ads was going to be a colossal failure.

The problem is that, apart from a promotional channel that Comcast runs to promote their 3D package, ESPN 3D was the only 3D television channel that exists in the United States. Because that effectively killed 3D broadcast stateside, news commentators have jumped to the conclusion that 3D content is unmarketable, and so 3D TV is going to die on the vine in favor of 4K content. Here's why the doomsayers are wrong about 3D TV dying.

I readily admit ESPN was a terrible fit for 3D, but TV is in a situation where they more or less need 3D to work. TV viewership is down generally, especially among younger generations, which projects poorly for the future of broadcast television vs their primary competitor, Internet content (Netflix, YouTube, etc.). One need only look at things like Google Fiber vs Comcast net speeds to see that ISPs can match broadcasters tit for tat in anything that's simply about the amount of information sent (like the resolution increment to 4K). Instead of pushing through a different quantity of data, making 3D content available changes the type of data they're pushing through to something competitors will require time adjusting to. It's like how Apple made a huge dent into the computer market with the iPhone. There was no way into the traditional computing market, so Apple created their own markets in the mobile space and dominated them. 3D is an unclaimed market, while 4K is just an iteration on the same market cable is losing to the Internet.

Some will argue with that by saying that there's no point in creating a market if there's no demand for that market once created. But we don't have enough evidence to say 3D is a low-demand market. For one, 3D TVs haven't fully matured yet. Glasses free lenticular 3D TVs are set to premiere in the near future, which is a technical achievement that will rejuvenate the 3D market if it debuts at a reasonable price. Another point is that 3D content has been proven to have a sizable market interested in the 3D aspect, as evidenced by Avatar, The Avengers, and Life of Pi (all of which did tremendously well in their 3D exhibitions). The problem is not a lack of demand, rather the immaturity of the market.

Perhaps someone will argue that we've spent too long in the infancy of 3D, that the market has been ruined, and will never come back. These people haven't seen Nintendo's market take technology out of infancy to great market appeal. They'll know about the Wii, but they won't connect that it's an iteration on the technology of the Power Glove. The Power Glove was a failure critically and commercially. The Wii wowed the world at its release. Yet both were motion based controls for video games using infrared sensors to detect the controller in space. The Wii just had improved technology. 3D currently suffers from a lot of incompetency in its production, as Clash of the Titans or ESPN 3D's ads could easily prove. What we're seeing is too often like somebody pretending student films represent a permissible standard for film or television in general. It's simply put an immature market full of people learning the ropes of 3D video.

Will 3D TV make a comeback? Only time will tell for certain. But it's certainly foolhardy to declare it dead just because a single channel couldn't forge a new market with a bad entry to it.

Equipment Plug

This is just a quick little blurb because I've seen way too many anti-3D people complaining about wearing 3D glasses on top of 3D glasses. That's not a problem, and the reason why is these little guys right here:

These things are the CinePro Clip-on 3D Glasses. I don't personally need glasses, but I bought a pair anyway so I could watch 3D movies with family and friends. But once I recieved them, I actually started wishing that I did wear glasses! These are incredibly comfortable and lightweight, yet sturdy, so that they fit on glasses without much issue. That's not what impressed me, though. Out of curiosity, I tested them out on my 3D TV at home, and to my surprise discovered that they let in an impressive amount of light, addressing the sense of dimness and color fade that 3D glasses are infamous for bringing. If you use glasses, these things will probably put you about $6 in the hole one time, and then 3D movies will be instantly better for you bespeckled folks.

The one downside I can say about these glasses is that one time that I used them, the clip on the top of them snapped. It was possible to fix (without tools), but it was an annoyance that probably should have been avoidable. It's a minor nuisance though, and one that you'll likely not even run into it yourself.

So if you for any reason want or need to see a 3D version of a movie and wear glasses, do yourself a favor and buy these. They're cheap, and they'll make life easier for you.

Background

You know, it occurs to me that you can't see the image I use for my background very well when you use the image in the context of a background. So I figured I'd provide the picture in a post itself for people to look at, without content redirecting your eye (since the image was a background, I converged so the entire image falls into the screen rather than anything popping out, which you'll recall from my focus/convergence post means the blog content forcefully draws your eye away from the background when you're wearing 3D glasses).

Here's the picture. I took it myself from a park not far from where I live.

As I'm presenting it for closer inspection than as my background, though, I'm starting to get self-concious about the quality of the shot. The only non-cell phone / tablet camera (meaning the only camera I can mount on a tripod) that I own is a Fujifilm W3 Real 3D camera. It's a consumer camera, which unfortunately means a fixed interocular distance at roughly the same distance apart as the human eyes. Unfortunately, that distance tends to de-emphasize depth in landscape shots over miles of distance like we see in this picture. Consequently, I did not rely on the camera's built in 3D capabilities.

What I did was bring my camera and my tripod, set it up to snap the left frame, and then move it around a foot to the right to snap the right frame. I used the tripod to allow for a fixed height of the images so try and combat mismatching images. The ground isn't completely level, as you can tell looking at especially the pipe or the lamp post. It's not a huge violation, and shouldn't be off enough to hurt your eyes too much, but it is something that embarasses me.

Another thing I failed to consider when taking the photo was the moving objects in the frame, specifically the clouds and the smoke coming from the smokestack off in the difference (look closely, and you'll see that especially the smokestack is a different shape between the red and cyan frames). While this makes the smoke look really weird, it kind of worked with the clouds. This shot is facing west, and the clouds were moving north that day, or to the right of this picture. Consequently, the clouds aren't as far apart from each other than the more static objects in the picture, and therefore in the final 3D picture have their depth accentuated more than anything else in the picture. This is definitely an unintended stereoscopic mistake, but I consider it an improvement on the picture rather than an embarrassment like the smokestack, pipe, or lamppost. In this picture, the clouds having unrealistic depth makes them feel like they're not clouds at all, but rather a blanket covering the sky. It's not something I've ever literally seen in life, but it gives the heavens a sense of magic. The fact that it was an accidental only emphasizes that, (although the smokestack cutting into them highlights the fact that this was an error).

All in all, I'm not proud of this picture thanks to all the errors that I know should have been fixable. But they're small, and I appreciate the accidental majesty of the picture. Even so, I'm thinking it might be time to find another picture and switch them up. We'll see what I can do. I'm not making any promises.