That is an awesome question and I look forward to the answer. If it’s Avatar though, I am going to pull my hair out. Never has a movie actually made me more furious as I watched it.
Larry Mudd can choose his own, but I’ve already advocated The Creature from the Black Lagoon and Dial “M” for Murder upstream.
(post #58)
Two 1954 productions are the best showcase? That doesn’t exactly bode well for the future of the concept.
What can I say? recent practitioners haven’t been the best.
The recent 3D animated films and, yes, avatar are probably the best of the recent crop.
Does that mean that those other versions of 3D would have taken more or less than two minutes to start giving me a headache?
I’d say the best use has been in **Avatar **and Up. I don’t know why you’d be annoyed to hear that. Even those who disliked the storyline pretty much all praised the look & effects of the film.
I like “deep” 3d, like when there’s a shadowbox effect, but nothing breaks the plane of the movie screen. “Despicable Me” mostly followed this rule.
I don’t like things popping out toward me - it gives me a headache.
That could be why everything (in the few minutes before I gave up and left the theater) appeared to be either ten millimeters or ten parsecs from my eyeballs, with nothing in between.
Nobody in their right mind is going to invest in special glasses that are guaranteed to become obsolete in a few years (even if the 3D fad in general survives, the current specific implementation thereof surely will not).
I can’t say I disagree on that one, but then, there are a lot of folks out there not in their right mind.
And I’m not sure I buy the argument about focus: It is true that everything in a 3D movie is at the same focal plane, but unless you’ve got extremely sharp vision and are seated in the front row, everything on the screen is going to be at an effectively infinite distance, as far as your eyes are concerned. The distance from your eyes to the screen is much, much greater than the focal length of your cornea.
Because I hated every bit of the storyline and all of the characters in Avatar, barring 1? To watch it again, even in 3D would mean I’d have to put up with all of those people again.
If the best technical examples also happened to be ones where other values, other filmic qualities that made the greatest films of the past endure, were lacking, that would appear to support the suggestions that technique is replacing those values, not enhancing them. And if we think “storyline” is more important to making a great film than “effects,” that means that Avatar (or whatever example) is worse for being “3D,” not better.
Thank you for saying it better than me.
3D porn has some major obstacles to overcome. The first one being that people don’t go to “adult theatres” downtown to watch porn anymore. Pornography is now experienced withing the privacy of the home. So it’s not going to become popular until 3D televisions do.
Fashion will drive people to change their glasses before they become obsolete. Don’t expect the glasses themselves to change for some time - there isn’t a lot of room for advancement there; circular polarization seems to be about as good as it’s going to get. Market forces will ensure that some form of circularly polarized system is standard for many years to come. (Dolby 3D is a great technology, but the dichroic filters are prohibitively expensive and easily damaged, and it seems unlikely that it will ever get a toehold for this reason.)
Expect advances in projection and reflection to improve the tech overall, but it’s a safe bet that circularly polarized filters are with us for a bit, and handedness is already standardized across platforms.
That’s personal, of course - but in the most general terms I think any huge spectacle movie is a good candidate, and animated features are way better in 3D. (Sorry, 'mika, I think Avatar is pretty much the gold standard, technically.)
I saw Inception this week-end and found myself frequently distracted by the thought, “This should definitely be in 3D.” Nolan has been very tactful when explaining his decision to eschew 3D, but I think “3D is just a gimmick” is writ small between the lines. Too bad. (Still a great movie, of course… but darn it…)
What can it add? It makes it feel bigger, and it makes it feel more tangible. Despicable Me was an okay feature, and I like Steve Carrall in just about anything - but some sequences stood out more for the use of 3D. (The roller coaster scene was actually pretty exhilarating.) I don’t generally approve of “This bit is to capitalize on the 3D effect” scenes, but if you’re going to have an action sequence like that, it’s a lot more fun in 3D.
Then if you would please start a thread when a really really good movie gets made in 3D and I promise you, I will watch it with an open mind, in exchange for absolutely refusing to watch that pile of dreck called Avatar again. Really, I will.
One of the more upscale shopping centers in Bangkok, The Emporium, a couple of years ago installed 3 TV screens all throughout the place to play ads. It looked awful, positively tripe. The technology would have to improve A LOT before we’d even consider getting one.
Beggin’ your pardon, but seeing Avatar without 3D is kind of like watching 2001 with “SCENE MISSING” cards in place of all the effects shots.
Actually, I think you could turn that around—“seeing 3D without Avatar” might be more apt.
Ha. I am a little surprised by the vitriol, there. For sure, I don’t think anyone was betting on Avatar for the Best Original Screenplay category, but it didn’t really have pretensions in that direction. It was a lot like Star Wars in that the story was a pastiche of things borrowed from earlier films, the characters were paper thin and the performances matched, and no one would ever mistake it for a deep movie, but the technical work was so far above what had ever been done for that sort of film before that it was exhilarating to see.
You don’t use the same metric to evaluate Star Wars that you would for Network. How does it hold up against The Planet of the Apes?
Avatar was gorgeous, mindless fun - but man, was it ever fun. 
I only see out of one eye so it would make movies unwatchable for me so no…
I can guess some of the scenes that gave you that thought… but I don’t perceive anything missing. If the film is just really well-made, my imagination is plenty good enough to take over the job of immersion. I get deep into movies, if they can accommodate it. Assuming the director’s accurate in his comments about image quality,
I feel confident saying that I’d enjoy a fabulous 2D image much more than a merely very good 3D one. (Perhaps analogously, I’m devoted to terrific stereo sound–great equipment, never lossy formats–but I don’t find much value in “surround.”)