REVIEW: CLASH OF THE TITANS
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Lately, more often than not, when I've gone to a theater to see a movie, I've been handed a pair of glasses. Not the kind to help me see better (although my eyesight has been questioned by concerned haberdashers), but the kind to help me see deeper.
If you've seen any movie ads, you're probably aware that the latest advance in cinematic presentation is 3D. Over the course of the last few months, we've seen A Christmas Carol; Monsters Vs. Aliens; Avatar; How To Train Your Dragon; and most recently Clash of the Titans. And there were lots of others that we could have seen, if at the time we had felt wild and crazy and 3-dimensional.
The 3d movie phenomenon started in the 1950's, and has been steadily growing since then, except for a brief hiatus during the 60's; 70's; 80's; 90's and 2000's. This decade looks promising for the technology, because the audience demographic finally consists of just two groups: folks who were born after the 50's and think 3D movies are a new idea; and those who were movie-goers in the 50's but can't remember how many pills they've taken today, much less how many dimensions they were seeing on the big screen five or six decades ago.
Being born in late 1953, I'm close to the second category, but my long-term memory is etched onto my hard-drive... it's my short-term memory that goes through periodic reboots. In other words, I'm one of those geezers whose family has to wear name tags, but I can still remember a TV show called World of Giants where Marshall Thompson played a guy about 6 inches high. So I haven't forgotten my exposure to the 3D pioneers. Technically 3D movies were in their hey-day during the first few years of my life, when I was occupied with learning how to walk, read comic books, and hit my mouth when feeding myself (almost there on that last one). I didn't become a serious movie-goer till the early 60's. But back then, movies would periodically be re-released at the theaters rather than being shuttled quickly to TV, and some of the 3D movies released in the 50's came back around in theatrical release in the 60's, during the time when my big brother and I were being dropped off for Saturday matinees (and picked up on Sunday, if we had been particularly obnoxious that Saturday morning).
Before I ever saw my first 3D movie, I had been exposed to 3D comic books. For a young and naive comic book reader (yes, they used to exist), the occasional 3D comic book was a curious animal. The cover consisted of the the usual primary colors blasting their way into my still-tender retinas, and promised that, if I dared to crack the book open, the images inside would reach out and grab me by the throat. When I tried to preview the book before buying, it was the newsstand guy who usually did the throat-grabbing, so usually I'd fork over the dough and wait till I got home before seeing if the contents lived up to the hype.
When first opened, a 3D comic book looked like it had been left out in the rain. All the pictures were runny and blurred, like the comic books I tried to read in the tub. Attached to the book, though, and easily separated from the binding via the miracle of perforation, was a cardboard set of glasses with cellophane lenses, one red and one blue. Once these were donned and secured with strategically-placed daubs of library paste, the muddled mess on the pages became a diorama where every sound effect (Pow!, Ka-Boom!) floated above the page. The images weren't in color (they were sort of a strange tan-and white combo) but they were darned impressive to me. The glasses lived up to their hype a lot better than the X-Ray specs that were advertised on the back cover.
So when I saw the TV commercial announcing the re-release of the 3D presentation of House Of Wax, I was sold from the very first "Amazing!"... and by the 23rd use of the word "miracle" I would've swiped my dad's car keys and driven down to the theater myself if I'd had a periscope to see over the dash. The ad wasted a lot of time trying to convince me that House Of Wax was already a spine-chilling 2D masterpiece, and that the 3D experience only made it about a thousand times better, almost guaranteeing permanent cardiac damage. They needn't have bothered... just the idea of moving 3D pictures was enough to sell me; I would have gone if they were a hawking a 3D theatrical release of Meet The Press or The David Susskind Show.
We were there to see it at the first Saturday matinee, along with about a million other kids, all there to watch the story of a deranged wax museum proprietor who uses corpses as his exhibits. From today's vantage point, it might seem a bit shocking that they'd let little kids see such lurid material... back then, though, I think our parents were resigned to the fact that all children were deranged and a movie wasn't going to give us any ideas that we hadn't already come up with.
The glasses they handed out at the theater were remarkably similar to the ones in the 3D comic books. They were flimsy little cardboard jobs with colored lenses made out of the same stuff they wrapped my dad's pack of cigarettes in. And when the movie started and we all put them on, it was no longer the typical Saturday matinee.
Critics who lament the advent of home theater because one loses the "communal" experience of seeing a movie in a public arena are obviously not waxing nostalgic over a Saturday matinee in the 60's. It was far from a shared experience. At any given time during the showing of the cartoon, 3 Stooges short, and feature presentation, there were dozens of individual dramas taking place at full volume in the audience. The bottom border of the screen was ragged with the silhouettes of kids who thought they could dive into the picture if they could just get close enough to the screen. The aisles had more pedestrian traffic than downtown Tokyo. No one walked down the aisles; everyone sprinted as if there were a record to be broken, and collisions were frequent and noisy. The air was full of particulates consisting mostly of popcorn and candy wrappers, so it was sort of like watching the movie in a blizzard. The floor beneath the seats was coated in Jujubes, and if you were unfortunate enough to hit a thick patch, you had to leave a sneaker behind. There were ushers, and a theater manager, but they were just there to prevent outright homicide; otherwise they mostly stayed in their bunker.
In other words, the average Saturday matinee was about as orderly as Omaha Beach. But on this Saturday matinee, for the 3D showing of House Of Wax, things were different.
For one thing, we were all wearing the same glasses, which were a great equalizer... every kid in the audience looked equally dumb, and that cut down on some of the customary bullying. And when the movie started, the audience came alarmingly close to silence; so much so that the manager rushed into the auditorium to see if somehow the oxygen had been sucked out of the room. There were a few kids still talking, mostly the ones who had put the glasses on upside down and thought they were being gypped, but the rest of us were engrossed in something we hadn't seen before. It didn't matter that the image wasn't exactly as clear or crisp as what we saw in a regular movie... frankly, the 2D image on the soda-spattered screen wasn't that great to begin with, and we weren't the most discriminating of audiences. But this was different enough to temporarily cure our inherent ADD.
Most of kids who came away from the movie that day couldn't tell you a thing about the plot, whose house it was, or even if it was really made of wax. But they all remembered one scene that did absolutely nothing to advance the plot: there's a carnival barker type guy on the curb outside the wax museum, promoting its grand opening by describing the wonders to be found inside. All during his pitch, he's working a paddle-ball... you know, the wooden paddle that has a rubber band stapled to it with a rubber ball attached to the other end. This guy is an Olympic gold-medal ball-paddler, and he spends all of his brief screen time smacking that ball straight out at the movie audience.
We'd been pretty subdued before that paddle-ball scene, concentrating on getting our heads tilted just right to get the full effect of the 3D. But when that ball shot out into the audience, we went nuts. Arms went up, popcorn went flying... some kids who had brought their baseball mitts dove for the ball. It was magical, in a chaotic sort of way. We couldn't have been more surprised than if Howdy Doody had shrugged off his strings and took a stroll through the Peanut Gallery.
Of course, attention spans being what they are among that demographic, the novelty soon wore off, and before the movie was over, the audience was pretty much at each other's throats again. I'm sure not many surviving members of that audience could tell you that Vincent Price starred in that movie, or that it was one of the first screen appearances of Charles Bronson (billed as Charles Buchinsky). But they can tell you that it featured that guy with the paddle-ball. As far as we're concerned, Reggie Rymal was the star of that picture. After seeing House Of Wax, I wasted many hours and went through ten pounds of rubber bands trying to master the paddle ball in the hopes that one day, I could cause 3D movie audiences to scatter.
The differences between then and now are pronounced, and they start at the box office. It turns out that the 3rd dimension is similar to extra servings of dipping sauce at McDonalds or tolerable internet bandwith... it costs extra. I'm thinking that the only reason people in the movies haven't jumped out of the screen and joined us here in the real world is the increased cost of living with a 3rd dimension (well, that and the fact that most of us here in the real world aren't as pretty). The times we've attended 3D movies, it's clear that many of our fellow movie-goers weren't prepared for the bump in ticket price. As we stood in line at the box office for Clash Of The Titans, we could see the ticket takers break the news to each successive customer, then wince as if they expected to be beaten severely about the head and shoulders if it weren't for that Plexiglas that makes everything they say unintelligible. So standing in line to get your tickets takes a little longer than it used to, as each transaction becomes a negotiation ("well, how much is it if we don't use the glasses?").
The glasses themselves are a lot more sophisticated. No more cardboard... they're now made out of molded plastic that fit your face just like a foot in a glove. And no more cellophane red and blue lenses. Whatever the technology is that now scrambles your brain into seeing 3D, it uses some sort of light polarized smoked lenses like the kind seen on sunglasses whose only practical purpose is to make you look cool. I've read where some of the 3D projection systems utilize glasses that actually require a tiny button-battery power source to make them work. In spite of official denials, I'm still suspicious that the glasses work by drilling into your brain when you put them on. (I'm okay with that, though... it's seems a reasonable trade-off for 3D.)
Most importantly though, the glasses still make the entire audience look equally dopey as they watch the movie.
I guess I should say something about the actual movie. Which one was it? Oh yeah, Clash Of The Titans...
We were disappointed. We weren't really expecting a masterpiece. The movie is a rough remake of the 1981 movie that featured Ray Harryhausen's impressive stop-motion animation, and is based loosely on the Greek myth of Perseus. Both movies are really just excuses for the audience to have fun watching a bunch of guys in sandals and skirts fighting a bunch of exotic creatures created through cinematic special effects. And both movies work on that level. My son Sam would inexplicably collapse into paroxysms of laughter every time he saw a commercial for the movie that showed Liam Neeson gravely issuing the command, "Release the Kraken," and he wanted to go to the movie based on that scene alone.
No, we were disappointed because it just didn't seem like a 3D movie. All those pointy objects up there on the screen and I can't recall one of them being jabbed at the audience. It was the most 2-dimensional 3D movie I've ever seen. I'm told that this is one of those movies that wasn't shot as a 3D movie, but was converted to one after the fact (something present technology allows that wasn't possible back in the old days), so perhaps I'm being unfair. But I've seen other movies that I'm told were 3D afterthoughts, and even they had the occasional "get-out-of-my-popcorn" moment. Clash Of The Titans seemed more like an animated diorama, with different layers moving horizontally across the screen rather than spilling out into our laps.
Maybe the battery in my glasses was low, and there wasn't enough power to drill deep enough into my admittedly thick skull. All I know is that I think I would have enjoyed the movie more if I had watched it in 2D with no expectation of a Kraken chasing me around the auditorium.
Where's Reggie Rymal and his paddle-ball when you need him?