Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com
Last night, at my mom's suggestion, I started a "transition diary". A daily journal tracking my medical transition and how I feel about it. This will serve a dual purpose in not only creating somthing to look back on nostalgically, but also help me remember things I want to bring up at my check in appointments. That's really all i have to say about my transition today. Appetite holding steadily elevated from what I'm used to. Spiro, being a diuretic, got me taking extra bathroom trips. This'll probably be status quo for a few weeks until the changes that are slowly happening become noticable.
You know what I miss? 3D movies. No, seriously they're cool. I mean I guess they still release on occasion, but not like they used to. Sure, it got bad with every movie in the 2010's getting a (poor) 3D conversion, but like y'all remember seeing Avatar in 2009 or Tron: Legacy in IMAX 3D!? Holy crap right!? Sure, it wasn't the paradigm shift for all of cinema that color was. Most movies do not benefit from 3D at all, but I almost wonder if that's because no one knew how to use it. Much like color you can't just take any random movie convert it to 3D and expect it to be better. There is ample evidence of that, but what cemented color's place in film's future is that color has a whole ARRAY of applications to enhance storytelling. You can use it to build complicated networks of associated color coded symbols. You can use it establish mood. You can use it to draw the audience's attention to specific parts of the frame. The applications of color are virtually endless. Is that also the case with 3D? I don't know. I'm not sure if we'll ever know. 3D was viewed by the industry as a gimmick. A marketing tool to add value and drive up ticket prices. Convert the movie to 3D and you can charge $5 more. Any filmmakers genuinely excited by the potential prospects of 3D were drowned out by producers forcing movies never shot with visual depth in mind to add it in as cheaply as possible. There were and are those who experimented with what 3D can bring to a film's storytelling. James Cameron's Avatar can, of course, not be over looked. His decision to break the mold and shoot his sci-fi epic in 3D added an unparalleled level of immersion in the world that not only enhanced the spectacle, but supported the themes of the film making us feel more connected to the environment. Henry Selick's Coraline was exceedingly clever in making sets for the magical and threatening otherworld slightly larger than the sets for the mundane world. The increased size not only making the otherworld feel more grandiose but also more dangerous. Paradoxically, Selick made the exterior sets of the otherworld feel smaller by emphasizing how close the sky was. Instead of a vast expanse, the othermother's small artifical world's sky felt constrictive. These are aspects to these movies completely lost in 2D (except to the most observent), and, without 3D versions being commonly available, are relegated to mildly interesting trivia points on IMDB.
At the end of the day though, I do like to try and strip away the pretension. I think Avatar and Coraline are two of the best 3D movies out there, but the real reason I love 3D is because it's really fun to see stuff fly in your face during an action scene. This really hit home for me when hitting the highlights of Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D on my VR headset. All of Afterlife's action scenes don't go more than 30 seconds without throwing somthing in your face. Whether it be bullets, knives, debris, blood, or whatever it will contrive physics to have it fly at the camera, and its fun. Also slow-mo. Dredd was another excellent action movie to see in 3D, and it's no accident that the plot revolves around the distribution of a narcotic that makes time appear to move very slowly. The only thing more fun than having somthing fly at the camera in an action scene is having something fly at the camera in an action scene in slow motion so you can really appreciate how cool it looks. To be honest, it's a real missed opportunity that The Matrix franchise wasn't big around the 3D craze of the 2010s. Cinematographer Bill Pope and the Wachowskis would have done wild things with 3D. Ah well guess I'll just have to settle for Alita: Battle Angel to see a 3D Bill Pope shot movie.
Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com