The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex

by Mark Kermode

  Not everyone fell in line, thank God. Christopher Nolan was an outspoken critic of the dimness and colour desaturation caused by wearing 3-D glasses, complaining in particularly erudite terms about the loss of ‘foot lamberts’ (a measurement of light used in relation to the projected image). ‘On a technical level it’s fascinating,’ he explained, ‘but on an experiential level I find the dimness of the image extremely alienating.’ Nolan’s long-time cinematographer Wally Pfister (more of whom in Chapter Five) was rather more blunt, calling 3-D ‘a fad’ – go Wally! Despite huge industry pressure, Nolan insisted on shooting Inception in 2-D rather than throwing his hat in with the stereoscopic mob, thereby scoring (as we have seen) one of the biggest hits of the year. In the autumn of 2010, Nolan confirmed that his third Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, would also be a 2-D production with key sequences shot in the IMAX format (the modern equivalent of Cinerama), which, he argued, offered the most immersive experience available. Yet even Nolan sounded a note of caution, pointing out that he couldn’t fight the market pressures if audiences demanded 3-D in future. ‘There’s no question that if audiences want to watch films in stereoscopic imaging,’ he confessed, ‘then that’s what the studios will be doing, and that’s what I’ll be doing …’

  The unanswered question behind this carefully worded statement is whether or not audiences really do want to watch films in ‘stereoscopic imaging’, or whether they are merely doing what they’ve been told to do by studios attempting to squeeze the maximum amount of profit out of the minimum amount of artistic effort. John Boorman once said that movie-making was essentially a process of turning money into light and then back into money again, but in the age of 3-D it seems to have become a process of turning money into less light and then back into more money – whether the audience like it or not.

  The nadir of the dimness issue came in May 2011, when it was revealed that a multiplex chain in the Boston area of America had been projecting 2-D movies through 3-D lenses, causing light loss of up to a staggering 85 per cent! According to a report in the Boston Globe, the Sony digital projectors used by AMC (and others) require the attachment of a special lens, which alternates rapidly between two polarised images in order to project movies in 3-D. Unfortunately, this lens was being left on the projectors even when 2-D films were being shown, resulting in a dramatic darkening of the image. ‘A walk through the AMC Loews Boston Common on Tremont Street one evening in mid-April illustrates the problem,’ wrote journalist Ty Burr. ‘Gloomy, underlit images on eight of the multiplex’s 19 screens (theaters 5, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, and 18, to be specific). These are the auditoriums using new digital projectors that are transforming the movie exhibition business, machines that entirely do away with celluloid … A visit to the Regal Fenway two weeks later turned up similar issues: “Water for Elephants” and “Madea’s Big Happy Family” were playing in brightly lit 35mm prints and, across the hall, in drastically darker digital versions.’

  Such 2-D darkening was drastic enough for director Peter Farrelly (helmsman of Hall Pass) to ‘complain loudly’ about the lousy presentation of promo screenings for his film. ‘Farrelly went from one screening where the 3-D lens had been removed,’ reported the Globe, ‘to a second in which the lens was still on, and he couldn’t believe his eyes. “I walked into the room and I could barely see, and my stomach dropped,” the film-maker said. “The first screening looked spectacular and the second was so dark, it was daytime versus nighttime. If they’re doing this for a big screening, I can’t imagine what they do for regular customers. That’s no way to see a movie.”’

  According to the paper, the reason 3-D lenses were being left on for the screening of 2-D films was that removing them required the attention of someone qualified to do so – i.e. a trained projectionist, of whom (as we have previously noted) there are so few left nowadays. Moreover, thanks to the insane levels of anti-piracy software now built into digital projectors, cinemas have become scared of messing with the machinery at all for fear that it will simply shut down and lock them out, thereby effectively closing one of their screens. Faced with the choice between allowing an unqualified staff member to fiddle around with a projector they didn’t really understand or simply letting the audience suffer up to 85 per cent light loss, cinema managers apparently opted for the latter. And, as ever, the customer pays the price.

  So, is 3-D here to stay this time? Ask anyone within the industry and they’ll tell you that too much money has been spent to turn back now. Experiments are currently afoot to develop projection systems that will allow 3-D movies to be viewed without glasses (the holy grail) while home-viewing systems employing various forms of ‘autostereoscopy’ are already on the market. Yet so far the outlook remains distinctly dodgy, despite the vast amount of money that has been spent. Take-up on 3-D televisions has been at best sluggish, and game-makers Nintendo have already had to issue health warnings about their new 3DS handheld consoles, stating that the autostereo (or ‘glasses free’) effect may damage the eye development of the young and produce nausea and headaches amongst adults. (Some sales pitch, huh?) Meanwhile, despite the best efforts of Hollywood, cinema-goers have been steadily losing interest in 3-D in exactly the same way that they did in the twenties, the fifties and the eighties. While James Cameron may have told Entertainment Weekly in 2010 that ‘3-D movies are still performing well above their 2-D versions’, more viewers chose to watch Despicable Me in 2-D than 3-D that year, despite the fact that kid-friendly digital animation is considered to be the one genre for which audience enthusiasm is most fervent. (When even the kids don’t care about 3-D, the end is most definitely in sight.) The trend continued in the summer of 2011 with Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, the first stereoscopic instalment in the series, for which 2-D screenings accounted for around 60 per cent of audience figures in the all-important opening weekend – a whopping slap in the face for 3-D. A few weeks later, only 45 per cent of Kung Fu Panda 2’s opening weekend business was for 3-D screenings, with 2-D once again winning the popular vote.

  Nor did the so-called ‘stereoscopic revolution’ stop audience attendance figures plunging to their lowest level in 15 years in 2010, marking a major drop from 2009 and strongly suggesting that 3-D might not be the answer after all. In an article unambiguously headlined ‘Attendance Crumbles in 2010’, Box Office Mojo scribe Brandon Gray pointed out that, although ‘the industry shoved 3D down people’s throats in the wake of Avatar’s success’, the apparently impressive sales figures these films racked up in 2010 ‘boiled down to more money from fewer people. The 3D premiums alone (the differences between 3D and regular ticket prices) accounted for an estimated $600 million of the total box office’. Or, to put it another way, fewer people ended up paying more money for less entertainment. Whichever way you spin it, that’s not a success story in the making.

  The real bombshell, of course, came early in 2011 when (as noted in Chapter Two) the 3-D motion-capture digimation Mars Needs Moms took an intergalactic bath of the highest order. Costing somewhere between $150 and $175 million (depending, as ever, on your sources) and taking a measly $35 million worldwide, this otherwise unremarkable fantasy made headlines by flopping in the way that really big movies just don’t do any more. Attempting to explain this astonishing anomaly, The New York Times concluded that Mars Needs Moms had become the focus of ‘a consumer referendum for 3D ticket pricing for children’, the public voting with their feet by staying away in droves. Writing in the Independent, Geoffrey Macnab claimed that ‘a simmering backlash’ against overpriced 3-D had finally ‘reached boiling point’, and quoted Belgian film producer/director Ben Stassen’s suggestion that ‘People might reject 3-D as a whole and say the hell with that.’ The article was headlined ‘The $175m flop so bad it could end the 3D boom.’ Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, the plugs were being pulled on producer Robert Zemeckis’s long-planned 3-D remake of Yellow Submarine, and Disney shut the doors on his ImageMovers Digital studio.

  It was
a proper old-fashioned disaster – cinema’s first fully fledged 21st-century train wreck – in 3-D!

  Whether or not this all adds up to audiences throwing off the stereoscopic shackles is still a subject for debate. Like the banks that we all paid to bail out after they destroyed our economy, 3-D may simply be considered too big to fail. And no matter how lousy the movies are or how much we may hate them, they’re certainly not going to disappear overnight; the studios and multiplexes have too much invested in the format to let it die without a fight. As I write, Jeffrey Katzenberg is complaining that Hollywood has simply let viewers down with a slew of inferior 3-D fare, but he remains confident that films like Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn will reinvigorate waning audience enthusiasm. And, of course, we all have Titanic 3-D to look forward to in 2012. But will 3-D be dead in the water by then – again?

  In 2010, after spending millions of dollars attempting to convert Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 into 3-D, Warner Bros. finally got wind of public dissatisfaction with the process and decided to release it in 2-D instead, with record breaking results. At the time of writing, advanced ticket sales for the 2-D version of Deathly Hallows: Part 2 are outstripping their 3-D counterparts. You don’t have to be a wizard to figure that the writing is on the wall …

  Meanwhile, a string of ‘respectable’ directors such as Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog and, of course, Martin Scorsese have all dabbled in 3-D, and although Wenders has declared himself wedded to the format, others are less evangelical. We have yet to see how Scorsese’s Hugo Cabret fares with critics and audiences, but the slate of projects he has lined up to follow it is notably lacking in 3-D outings. As for Herzog, he’s declared that having made Cave of Forgotten Dreams in 3-D, he has no intention to use the format again and remains every bit as sceptical about its unsuitability for narrative cinema as he was before. When I told him that I saw Cave in both 2-D and 3-D and much preferred the former, initially he replied that I was ‘intellectually warped’, which I took as a compliment. Later he conceded that stereoscopy was inherently non-cinematic, and promised not to do it again.

  If 3-D has a creative future, it seems more likely to be in the arena of home entertainment than in expensively refitted cinemas. And it’s probably not sports coverage but computer gaming, with its key facet of interactivity, which is most perfectly poised to explore the virtual-reality capabilities of 3-D.

  As for 3-D movies, other than Flesh for Frankenstein I’ve only seen two stereoscopic productions that didn’t leave me feeling underwhelmed. One was a spin-off of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids; the other was Terminator 2: 3-D, Cameron’s dry run for Avatar. Crucially, both were short films, projected on to screens vast enough to (almost) overcome 3-D’s bizarre propensity for miniaturisation. More importantly, neither were ‘films’ in the classic sense; they were in fact part of theme-park rides – short thrill trips displayed in amusement parks, accompanied by vibrating seats, steam showers, laser shows, blasts of hot and cold air, and live actors running around the auditorium. They were fun, a reminder that cinema started life as a carnival sideshow. But that’s all they were.

  Today, studio executives are attempting to drag us all back to the fairground, to take the Pirates of the Caribbean formula to its logical conclusion and simply replace art with the roll-on, roll-off mechanics of the critic-proof theme-park ride. There’s nothing new about this – in fact it’s the oldest trick in the book. But then 3-D has never been the future of cinema.

  It is, was and always will be the past.

  Chapter Four

  WHAT ARE FILM CRITICS FOR?

  ‘They neither reap, nor sow, nor harvest.

  They are malignant lilies of the field.’

  William Peter Blatty

  WHAT ARE FILM critics for?

  No, really, what purpose do they serve?

  In a review of my previous book, It’s Only a Movie, Empire magazine stated that ‘critics watch all the movies so that we don’t have to’. I disagree. I don’t think critics should do the job of watching movies for you. I don’t even think they should do the job of telling you which movies to watch. Or what you should think about them. No, I think critics should do the job of watching all the movies and then telling you what they think about them in a way which is honest, engaging, erudite and (if you’re lucky) entertaining.

  Beyond that, you’re on your own.

  When I first started reviewing movies, it never occurred to me that anyone else would care what I thought of a film. As a schoolkid, I went to the pictures as often as possible, saw everything I was allowed to see, and then kept notebooks in which I would scribble reactions to each week’s screenings. Back then, in the age before video and DVD, ‘reviewing’ was a way of preserving the movie – however good or bad – for my own future entertainment, writing reminders to myself which would allow me to ‘re-view’ films I had seen only once in the cinema. I was writing for no one’s benefit but my own, and felt no sense of responsibility toward readers (of which there were none), film companies, movie-makers or cinema chains in my praise or damnation of a particular film. After all, it wasn’t as if my opinions could have any effect upon the film or its potential audience, was it? The only person I had to be true to was me, and my job was to describe accurately the experience of watching a film in a manner vivid enough to make it come to life once more – for better or worse.

  One of the first films I remember reviewing in this way was Dougal and the Blue Cat, the feature-length animated spin-off from the TV show The Magic Roundabout, which remains a touchstone text to this day. I was about eight years old and the film had such a powerful effect on me that I felt positively compelled to commit my thoughts to paper, for fear of losing the strange tingle of its eerie spell. I wrote down everything I could remember: snippets of dialogue (‘What a place; worse than Barnsley’); freeze-framed images (Buxton, the blue cat, trapped in the terrifying Room of Dreams); even the tune of ‘Florence’s Sad Song’ (which I attempted to work out on the piano), a few notes of which would send me off into a world of cinematic rapture. Some months later, I was with my mum in Woolworths in North Finchley, where we found a cut-price soundtrack album for Dougal and the Blue Cat that included most of Eric Thompson’s brilliant narration and all of the songs. I begged mum to shell out the 99 pence it cost to buy that LP, then took it home and played it to death. Every time the record hit the turntable, the movie would start to play in my head and I would feel compelled to write about it once again. I ended up filling almost an entire notebook with my quasi-critical responses to this film, discovering new depths in each subsequent replaying. It wasn’t until 1989, when Dougal and the Blue Cat was finally released on newfangled video, that I actually got to watch the movie again in real life, as opposed to in my head. What was surprising was just how much the genuine article departed from my carefully constructed memory. For one thing, there were chunks of dialogue that had been trimmed from the record for reasons of time and which now seemed to have no right to be in the film at all. More bizarrely, I had completely re-imagined a couple of key sequences on the basis of my first hastily scribbled notes, and therefore for almost 20 years I had been effectively watching a version of the film that didn’t actually exist. The film was still brilliantly strange and bafflingly inexplicable, but not in quite the way I had imagined.

  Lesson number one: the way anyone experiences and remembers a film may bear only a passing relation to the movie itself.

  Other movies I saw as a child might have been less rewarding, but that didn’t dampen my fervour in wanting to write about them. I remember spending hours trying to capture in words exactly what was wrong with The Odessa File (the short answer was that it wasn’t anything like as exciting as the trailer, which featured a man being pushed under a train – an image which still haunts me) and why Earthquake sagged in all the sequences when the ‘Sensurround’ was switched off (which was most of the movie). In
each case, I was trying to describe not only the movie but my reaction to it, as if those palpable immediate responses could be bottled, corked and kept like a fine wine, to be sipped from at will in the future.

  Soon I needed to broaden my horizons and to review films that were technically off-limits to someone of my tender age. I was 11 years old when I saw my first ‘AA’ movie, a classification that forbade entry to anyone under the age of 14. The film was Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, about which I knew almost nothing (other than the fact that I wasn’t allowed to see it). One Saturday afternoon, a schoolfriend called Nick Kennedy and I decided to try and blag our way into a screening at the Classic Hendon, a three-screen cinema which (we had been reliably informed) had a somewhat lax door policy with regard to the age of its patrons. We agreed to meet at Hendon Central Tube station at 1 p.m. with a view to catching the 1.30 p.m. performance in Screen One, on the understanding that if we were refused entry because we looked too young then we could go and see The Paper Chase, starring Timothy Bottoms, in Screen Three instead. I’d already seen The Paper Chase and didn’t think much of it (although I did fall a little bit in love with Lindsay Wagner), but seeing a movie was always preferable to not seeing a movie and I was quite happy to sit through it again because I knew I would enjoy writing about it afterwards. But what we really wanted to watch was Blazing Saddles, and to this end we had both agreed that we would do our best to ‘look older’.

  For reasons which frankly now fail me, I decided that the best way to ‘look older’ was to wear a cravat. And so it was that I arrived at Hendon Central station wearing white and blue training shoes, thick burgundy cords, a denim jacket that I had borrowed from my sister and a bright yellow T-shirt with some appropriately scruffy motif ironed on to the front, all topped off with a paisley cravat recklessly thrown around my neck at what I considered to be a maturely cavalier angle. In my head at the time, this combination made me look like a grown-up. Looking back, I realise that it probably made me look like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver.