Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

[samvara]

Fun and silly with good pacing. Neil Patrick Harris voiced Steve and Bryce Campbell did the Mayor - both made me laugh.

I do find myself musing on the 3D 'experience', I don't think it added very much to the overall production. It's kind of like a new toy they don't know how to wield yet so it's there and shiny but not very useful. I want it to be integrated into the actual work more.

I also find myself irritated yet again by the assumption that males get to issue approval on female attractiveness. The question of Flint's physical attractiveness is never raised, but he gets to tell Sam she is beautiful as defined by him and this is somehow important...

Comments

[angriest.livejournal.com]

I have two reactions to 3D cinema, which were pretty much resolved by watching a media screening of Avatar on Friday:

1. My eyes can't handle it. After about 40 minutes my eyes start to hurt. After an hour and a half I'm in quite a bit of pain. By the end of Avatar's 160 minutes my eyeballs were bleeding out of their sockets. So given I adore cinema and don't adore being in pain, I don't think 3D is a good idea.

2. I think culturally we're still lacking a visual language for 3D cinema. In much the same way filmmakers had to play around sound and colour to work out exactly how to use them as a tool to better express story, they've now got the lengthy task of fooling around with 3D and discovering what is and isn't effective and/or appropriate. Avatar would appear to be a quantum leap in that process - it really was the best 3D I've ever seen - but it still falls into the standard traps of changing focal lengths too much from shot to shot (which makes the eyes refocus unexpectedly, causing eye strain), and objects close to the camera getting cut off by the edge of the screen - causing visual confusion.

[samvara]

1. I hear you on the strain, I'm sitting further back in the theatre and having to pay attention to my eyes and choose to relax them. I've got excellent vision and consciously choosing what to focus on is taking up a certain amount of my movie-watching energy.

2. culturally we're still lacking a visual language for 3D cinema... thanks, I think that's what I was trying to articulate. I'm looking forward to Avatar a bit more now that you've said that. I felt Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs didn't really need to be 3D. It was fun, but it felt like showing off a clever trick and I wanted something more.