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Something odd happened to me as I watched the trailer for Titanic‘s 3D re-release: I got a bit nostalgic for a James Cameron film. The sweeping camera, the intense emotion, the inevitable sinking feeling, and a time when seeing Kate Winslet naked was a treat rather than an inevitability, all rushed back to me, 12 years after I first saw the film. Have I got James Cameron wrong? Was I too harsh when I declared him a prick?

No.

This is a 3D re-release after all, making it more expensive, more difficult to watch and therefore plain unnecessary. In essence, modern-day prickish James Cameron has taken the good work of pre-prick Cameron and retroactively pricked it up… if that makes sense. It’s as if he looked at his back catalogue, saw something of genuine quality and couldn’t help but ruin it. It’s enough to make me shake my fist in the air and shout out in a growl, “CAMERON!”, but I haven’t done that since the last general election (political!)

The trailer is below, and is a bizarre case of a 2D trailer for the re-release of an old film made into in 3D, therefore unable to showcase any of the new draw. There are also some fresh new stills, some including a pre-prick Cameron, which are also from a film over 10 years old. To repeat a joke, you can get 280,000+ more stills by buying Titanic on DVD.

In summary: I do quite like Titanic, just not in 3D please.

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We all know and accept that movie marketing is based around coining phrases, pretending all ideas are original, that the film is great and, of course, sending bloggers free stuff to review (our email address is in the column on the right). Even so, the latest marketing for Spy Kids: All the Time in the World has tipped me over the edge. They are presenting the film in “4D Aromascope”. So that means that the fourth dimension is… smell!

You don’t need a physics degree to know that smell is a sense and not a dimension. But seeing as I do have a physics degree (ahem) let’s see what the fourth dimension is with the help of Wikipedia.

As you can see from the diagram above the first three dimensions are essentially the three directions within which an object can move. On a flat 2D plane you can only move in two dimensions, moving out of the plane makes a third. In cinema everything is technically 2D but those silly glasses sometimes give the effect of the image coming out of the screen, hence 3D. Lovely. We may not be a fan of 3D but the name makes sense.

The fourth dimension is time. The only direction a 3D plane can move in is time itself, or I suppose in the case of a cinema you could have the screen moving around. So a 4D film is simply a 3D image progressing through time, or a regular 3D film playing. Project a 3D film onto the side of a van and drive around town and you will get a 5D film!*

What is definitely not a fourth dimension is a scratch and sniff card! The last time I scratched and sniffed I was at the panto and was scared of girls. How little has changed.

Harvey Weinstein, we await your humble apology.

*That stuff about 5D is in no way accurate.

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It has been a while since we had a proper rant, James Cameron must have been keeping his head down, but the old 3D debate rages on and we have a new big hitter on our side. Walter Murch, film editor and sound designer extraordinaire, has written a letter to Roger Ebert, film critic… extraordinaire, to explain why 3D just doesn’t work.

It has a lot to do with the way our eyes focus and how a 3D film is all the same distance from our face, making our eyes focus at a different distance to which they converge… I’ll let Murch explain: Read more »

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Sigh. The inevitable has happened and Star Wars will be completely re-released in cinemas in 3D. George Lucas the original tinkerer strikes again.

Phantom Menace will be released in 2012. In 3D. Yep, that’ll help. Simon pegg has summed up my feelings well:

On a different note, it’s odd to think that eleven years ago I could be easily convinced that Keira Knightly was Natalie Portman.

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Ignoring for a moment Memento, The Dark Knight and Inception, (and the rather unflattering photo just above) Christopher Nolan is still a wonderful man. Why? Because he’s “not a huge fan of 3D.”

I will now let Nolan explain as i copy directly from the LA Times: “The truth is, I think it’s a misnomer to call it 3-D versus 2-D. The whole point of cinematic imagery is it’s three-dimensional. … You know, 95% of our depth cues come from occlusion, resolution, color and so forth, so the idea of calling a 2-D movie a ’2-D movie’ is a little misleading.”

Nolan goes on to explain that 3D films are less bright and that 2D films are by no means “flat”. I agree wholeheartedly and can’t think of any of my favourite films that I find lack depth in any of their frames. And as far as Nolan’s work goes Inception looks to have plenty of amazing imagery that looks amazing in 2D even on my laptop screen.

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