3D: Changing the Face of Cinema

3D is fucking rad. This is an objective statement, like “water is wet”, or “Nickelback are evidence of Satan’s reign on Earth”. What’s not there for a filmmaker to love? You get to make the audience feel like shit coming from the screen will hit them in the head, and they just sit there with their glasses on, covering their face from nothing! It’s enough to give any director a boner or, in the case of Jane Campion, a lady-boner.

The My Bloody Valentine remake proves just how fucking rad 3D is. There are pickaxes coming through the screen, an eyeball popping out, and titties with nipples that would damn near take your eye out were it not for the glasses.

So “fucking rad” does not always equal “good”, then.

My trusty associate Sam and I rented out My Bloody Valentine: 3D on DVD for a shittastic film experience. We put on our 3D glasses – one lens red, one cyan, and with an ad for Saw motherfucking VI on the side – put in the disc, and prepared to have our minds blown.

My Bloody Valentine: Sort of Blurry would be a more accurate title. The 3D used in cinemas today involves polarising glasses; none of that two-colour crap. This 3D can’t be recreated on a home system because most people don’t own two projectors capable of playing films at forty eight frames per second synced up and aimed at a special polarising screen. And if anyone does, I hate them. Therefore, 3D on any DVDs they release today have to use to the old two-colour system, so even if the effect works, the film looks terrible and washed out. Also the effect doesn’t work. It’s two-and-a-half dimensions, at best. Perhaps even less. I’m starting to doubt even the film’s second dimension.

If you check out the IMDb Message Boards – always a fun place to go if you feel like losing all faith in humanity and can’t get Fox News – you’ll see people confused that the 3D glasses they stole from the cinema aren’t working on their DVD. Why? The same reason they won’t make a book magically leap off the page and act itself out in front of you if you read it with them on: they’re not made of fucking fairy dust.

We lasted fifteen minutes before flipping the disc over to watch the 2D version. Sam actually only lasted a couple of minutes before removing her glasses, but I was in the mood for a headache so kept them on until we changed it. What happens to a 3D movie when you watch it in 2D?

This does:

Every part that’s intended to be in 3D yells at you: “LOOK I’M COMING OUT OF THE SCREEN!!! OOOOH SCARY! BOO! BOO!!!!”.

Here’s some more, but these are from Friday the 13th Part III and Jaws 3, because they’re funnier. They have the red/green effect on them, but you get the point.

Go out and see Friday the 13th Part III if you haven’t already: it’s the greatest bad movie of all time.

So the film calls attention to itself for all the wrong reasons. In a hilarious way, but this still wasn’t the intention.

Coraline is a film that does 3D right. How? It doesn’t draw attention to itself. It’s a great film, but not because of the 3D effect. It’s great in a way that works no matter how it is viewed. There’s not a beat in it that won’t work if watched on a regular DVD on a small screen. So for all this talk that 3D is going to change the way we watch movies, the only way it can be done without making it feel a total and complete gimmick is to make it invisible. That somehow doesn’t sound like changing the face of cinema to me.

The fun of seeing all the shitty 3D is reflected in the rest of the content of the film. It’s the most violent American slasher film in quite a while where the violence is of the fun variety, where a girl gets a pickaxe through the skull rather than being tied to a chair and tortured with it for twenty minutes. The body count is intense; so many people die or are found dead in the first fifteen minutes it feels like you’ve been dumped in right at the climax of a bad eighties slasher. The whole film feels out of the eighties, except this one has the dude from Supernatural in it. Advantage: eighties.

Hopefully director Patrick Lussier is a complete imbecile with no idea how to make a film – it’s more enjoyable to laugh at that way – but he probably intended to make it as ridiculous as it is. There’s a ten minute chase scene with a completely nude, just-fucked girl, which also involves the slaughter of a big-titted midget, and it’s even funnier if the man behind the camera thought he was making cinema, not schlock. I have a bad feeling that the fucker knew all along, though. A shame.

There is still joy to be found in the film. It has a flimsy mystery that ends when – spoiler! – the fucker from Supernatural, heretofore the hero, is revealed to be evil because he’s got some multiple personality shit going on, and then, even better, attempts to play evil, despite being about as threatening as a hungry Labrador puppy. And by the way, writers: multiple personality disorder twist? Really? We’re still not fucking past that? That’s over, guys, stop the fuck using it. There’s also the most ineffectual final girl in the history of horror cinema, essayed by Jaime King, who enjoys staring at a door where a killer just was rather than running; who, while running, will run into a freezer; and who thinks a good way to save your husband from a madman who she has witnessed kill a whole bunch of people is to stand pointing a gun and crying at it. Your husband is from Dawson’s Creek, so I understand her desire to see him die, but it’s still weak. Kudos, Ms King.

So, if you watch the film, skip the glasses, even though you’ll still get a kick out of the 3D. And don’t do it alone. Not because it’s scary. It’s less scary than Hotel for Dogs, or an episode of Supernatural. It’s just a lot more fun if you’ve got someone with whom to wallow in the spectacular mediocrity that is My Bloody Valentine.