Ebert on why you should hate 3D.
From one of the most respected voices in the movie industry, Roger Ebert, comes a balanced assessment on the 3D craze that Hollywood is currently going through.
That’s my position. I know it’s heresy to the biz side of show business. After all, 3-D has not only given Hollywood its biggest payday ($2.7 billion and counting for Avatar), but a slew of other hits. The year’s top three films—Alice in Wonderland, How to Train Your Dragon, and Clash of the Titans—were all projected in 3-D, and they’re only the beginning. The very notion of Jackass in 3-D may induce a wave of hysterical blindness, to avoid seeing Steve-O’s you-know-what in that way. But many directors, editors, and cinematographers agree with me about the shortcomings of 3-D. So do many movie lovers—even executives who feel stampeded by another Hollywood infatuation with a technology that was already pointless when their grandfathers played with stereoscopes. The heretics’ case, point by point:
To his point, when I saw Alice in Wonderland I loved every bit of that movie except for the fact that I felt like I was watching it with my eyes half closed because the image on the screen was darkish. It didn’t seem like a style choice by Burton, because he does well lit dark really well. It kills me to find out that it was a marketing choice to make the film look like that.
Read the full Ebert article here.
