Glasses Provided
Just as dwarves have to suffer the indignity of being asked whether they only have sex with other dwarves, and black people are queried as to whether they feel that ‘flesh-coloured’ Band-Aids are somehow racist, we glasses-wearers now find ourselves fielding a regular irritating enquiry of our own:
‘So, when you go to a 3D movie, do you have to wear the glasses over your regular ones?’
Yes, of course we fucking do! Sadly, OPSM are yet to set up a booth down at Greater Union offering prescription 3D glasses, or, for those who prefer them, discreet 3D contacts. Sure, we look ridiculous (I always wait till the lights dim before donning mine), but who doesn’t when sitting through something called Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs?
I have now lived through at least three ‘3D Revolutions’, although this is the first one that’s really caught on, largely due to those blue people with the long arms. I still haven’t seen Avatar; every time I get fired up about going to it, I suddenly remember what it’s about. That and the fact the person I want to see it with says, ‘The only way you’ll get me to sit through that thing is if we go Gold Class and the alcohol never stops coming.’ And at my Gold Class, Avatar in 3D is booked out till 2015.
Obviously, I’m not old enough to recall the original 3D craze in the early fifties; Bwana Devil, Dial M For Murder and House of Wax, the latter directed, in what must have been a sick joke on the studio’s part, by the only person who wasn’t able to experience it in 3D, a one-eyed man. House of Wax used to screen on TV fairly regularly, mystifying viewers with a sequence where a man does nothing but bat a ping-pong ball on a string at the camera for some ninety seconds. I’m hoping that James Cameron has seen fit to do the same in his effort.
But, in the late seventies, a revival of one of that era’s biggest hits, The Creature From the Black Lagoon, came to our town in ‘Genuine 3D’. We were all pretty skeptical, having been bitterly disappointed by previous screen gimmicks such as Sensurround. During Earthquake, we were promised, the theatre itself would rumble and shake as though an actual earthquake were in progress. In fact, nobody felt anything, save for amazement that we were expected to believe that Ava Gardner could be the daughter of Lorne Greene, seven years her senior. The much-vaunted special effects included a photograph of a skyscraper being bent by hand, and a shot where a liftshaft plunge ended in a red ‘Splat’ much like those seen during the fights on TV’s Batman. In the schoolyard, the reviews were brutal.
There was much excitement when we fourteen-year-olds queued up at Creature for the 3D glasses, the lenses the same red and green we knew from Gregg’s jellies. But the screening itself was a debacle. No one experienced anything other than dizziness and blurred vision. Several kids had to dash for the dunnies. There was especially loud booing when a woman in a bikini appeared. ‘How good would they have looked in 3D?’ said my friend Pieter Malkmus, hurling his cardboard glasses to the ground in disgust.
Then, in the early eighties, TV ads started appearing for something called Comin’ at Ya! Unfortunately, it wasn’t comin’ to a cinema anywhere near us. And neither was Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn, which is perhaps a good thing. This film is so poor that even the unique opportunity to see Homicide’s Mike Preston (as the title character) in 3D couldn’t prevent it from suffering perhaps the greatest indignity than can befall any film: in 2009, it was dropped from Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide. It’s like it never existed. I missed Jaws-3D, I missed Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone, I even missed Steve Guttenberg in The Man Who Wasn’t There (it’s sad that there was no role for The Gute when the Coen brothers appropriated that title twenty years later). But I did see Friday the 13th Part 3 in 3D, my first, and until last year, only 3D movie experience. Everyone was talking about the bit where someone inevitably gets shot in the eye with a speargun, but the part I remember is when the camera glides between bedsheets blowing spookily on a clothesline. The sheets really did seem to billow out into the audience and even when someone got chopped clean in half with a machete, I heard a voice say, ‘Not as good as the sheets.’
I guess the main difference with the new 3D films is that some of them are actually good. I can barely remember any 3D effects in Up, my favourite movie of last year. I was too busy worrying about whether the house would crash. But since the figures for Avatar came in, there seems to be a sense that anything will make money if it’s in 3D. Perhaps this could be used to interest the kiddies in the dusty old classics: Richard III-D, for example.
I recently read that Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland was not actually shot in 3D; the effect was created later. This theoretically means that any film ever made, from Un Chien Andalou to 2001 to Caddyshack, could be given the 3D treatment. The possibilities are mind-boggling. Personally, I’d like to see them try it with the movie that gets my vote for the maddest ever made, 1978’s Sextette, featuring an 83-year-old Mae West cantilevered into a series of elaborate bustiers and serenading everyone from Dom DeLuise to Keith Moon. No amount of exclamation marks could ever speak to the result. To me, this is the real test for 3D. If this miracle process can improve, say, Mae West and Timothy Dalton singing the Captain and Tennille’s ‘Love Will Keep Us Together’, then I’ll wear two pairs of glasses for life.
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Most recently, he directed new episodes of ‘The Librarians’, which returns to ABC1 on October 13.
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