MeDotOrg wrote:If anyone has not seen it, please rent a copy (Blu Ray if you have it) of Lawrence of Arabia, if nothing else, just to see what a REAL army looks like instead of a CGI army. One of the last great spectacle movies made without CGI. (As I was writing this I just remembered Attenborough's 1982 Gandhi, which would also qualify).
The Dark Knight was all live action - no CGI.
"Others cannot endure their own littleness unless they can translate it into meaningfulness on the largest possible level." ~ Ernest Becker "Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death." ~ Simone de Beauvoir
And unexpected because in projecting and screening the film at 48fps, twice the rate at which film has been projected until now, Jackson has taken a familiar and beloved land, the Middle-earth of his and Tolkien's imagination, and turned it into a disquieting and unfamiliar environment.
"I'm the biggest film nerd there is, and it took me a while to adjust to it," Jackson told TheWrap at a Monday evening reception for his film. "But once I made the adjustment, I thought it opened up new possibilities -- and it took advantage of 3D in a way that 24fps can't do."
But how long will it take viewers to make that adjustment?
"I don't know," he said. "But I think most of them will be good by the middle of the movie."
It makes me wonder what kind of "adjustments" were needed for the introduction of sound, color, widescreen, 70mm, 30fps Todd AO, etc.
I've seen real Cinerama, 30fps Todd AO, real Vistavision and other unusual formats, and I never needed an "adjustment". It was just "Wow, that looks awesome!" and sit back and enjoy the show.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
Despite its drawbacks, "The Hobbit," as noted, does have real virtues, and the best way to appreciate them is to see the movie, whether in 2-D or 3-D, in the traditional 24 frames per second format. Though Jackson and other zealots for high frame rate would have you believe that the new system is more immersive, the truth is just the opposite.
Whatever its virtues may be from a technical point of view, audiences looking for a rich, textured, cinematic experience will be put off and disconcerted by an image that looks more like an advanced version of high definition television than a traditional movie.
I've heard the difference is that in 24 fps, it's a cool looking spear. But in 48 fps, it's a spray painted pvc pipe with little widgets hot glued onto it and a hair dryer duct-taped to the top. The clarity is just too, well, clear.