Originally Posted by count.d:
Saw The Desolation of Smaug in 3D HFR on Sunday and enjoyed it. It doesn't seem right to criticise these masterpieces. The 3D HFR is incredible and takes time to adjust to the clarity of the characters. They are so crisp in relation to the background, they do tend to take one's concentration away. It can lead to thinking this is not cinema, but there again, should the whole picture look diffused, so we can enjoy soft images like what we're used to?
HFR 3d is probably on the cards for many films in the future and it's certainly a cinematic experience.
I was dragged to this the other day while looking after a young relative, and I have to say that it is technically very impressive, but a long way from being a masterpiece.
It is another piece of Jackson hackwork, nothing more: entertaining if you're into all that elf guff, but as a piece of cinema it is desperately shallow, and highlights the problem that has faced mainstream cinema ever since the box-office failures of true (if flawed) masterpieces like Malick's Days of Heaven and Coppola's Apocalypse Now in the late 1970s; and the all-conquering success of the ultimate hack directors George Lucas and David Cameron, which is a progressive infantilising of the language of cinema.
As someone who was wowed by the magic of movies even before he was intoxicated by music, I find the current state of mainstream cinema deeply depressing. The most distressing decline of all is to be found in the films of that former master of the mainstream, Spielberg. This is the man who made wonderful movies like Jaws and Duel FFS.
The Desolation of Smaug is not a bad movie by any means but it is in no way a masterpiece, and certainly not above criticism. Remove the technological innovations like HFR and 3D and you have at worst nothing, at best not much. It's a bit like Kubrick, a man who made wonderful films like Dr Strangelove and Paths of Glory, until his obsession with technology on films like 2001 made him forget about movies and just make cold - if initially impressive - exercises in crowd-pleasing.
The great film-makers are people like Renoir, Dreyer, Welles, Powell & Pressberger, Ozu, Hawks, Murnau, Vidor, Bergman, Lubitsch, Lang, both Rays, Wilder, Huston, Curtiz, Scorsese, Scott and Lean (sometimes!), Kurosawa, Hitchcock, Paradjanov, Ford, Kiarostami, Lynch, Cronenberg, Christiansen, Tarr, Almodovar, Leone, Peckinpah, Dassin, Fellini, Besson, Mizoguchi, Griffifth, Sturges, Sirk, Cukor, Penn... most of them are dead, and most of the others work on the margins.
There are good directors, like Fincher, Nolan and JJ Abrams (whose Star Trek movies seem to me to be thoughtful blockbusters, in the way that Kubrick's Spartacus and Exodus were half a century ago) but I wish they would look back at the masters and take something from them.
I watch The Desolation of Smaug and I can't remember much about it, and I wouldn't be arsed if I never saw it again. But A Matter of Life And Death, Citizen Kane, Gone With The Wind, The Passion of Joan Of Arc, Tokyo Story, The Godfather, Badlands, Casablanca, La Regle Du Jeu, Vertigo, Songs of Our Forgotten Ancestors, Pather Panchali, Double Indemnity, Twentieth Century, Duel, Lawrence of Arabia, Taxi Driver, The Adventures of Robin Hood... they all possess an indefinable magic and transportative powers that tramples all over the unimaginative hackwork of Cameron and Jackson.
People are very sniffy about television but all the best stuff - Mad Men, Borgen, Breaking Bad to name but three: character-driven stories, stunningly shot without resort to high-tech trickery or superhero/elf shenanigans - is being made for TV, not the cinema. That is very sad.
Many people on this forum say that young people would get into hi-fi if they were only exposed to just how good music can sound on a decent system; I completely agree. Similarly, I would say to you, go and watch a proper film by a great like Carl Dreyer, Jean Renoir, Hitch or Michael Powell and Emeric Pressberger. Then you'll see the real magic of movies.
Life's too short to watch elves in 3D.
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