Is That Third D For Disposable?

 You may not remember the 3D movie craze. For a while there, you couldn't stumble into a theater without having to put on a pair of "special glasses" that would allow you to see the evening's entertainment without getting a headache. This, in turn, caused its own headache. Did you plunk down the extra five bucks for a chance to see Leonardo DiCaprio's Great Gatsby in 3D? Tell the truth, did you keep your "special glasses" afterward? Not out of any particular sentimental need but rather the thought that if you paid an extra five bucks those cheap black frames were going home with you. 

Then there was The Last Airbender, an M Knight Shamalamadingdong movie so bad that an extra dimension couldn't save it. This one was scheduled to be the first in a trilogy of Airbender films, but only succeeded in sending mister Shamalamadingdong to movie jail for a good long time and to give my wife and I a new euphemism for flatulence. For the purpose of transparency, I did not watch this movie any any dimension. It was a bar that I set for myself and my family for safety's sake. 

So why did Hollywood insist for about three years that all their major motion pictures needed to have this hokey bit of cheese stapled to it? Perhaps in an attempt to lure audiences back into theaters, something the powers that be did way back in the 1950s when people began to realize that they could stay at home and watch bad movies like Bwana Devil, but the only way they could have the true Bwana Devil experience was to head out to the mall, except there were no malls, and wear an even cheaper version of those cheap glasses that ushers were forced to hand out and collect after each showing. Perhaps you know someone who kept theirs seventy-some years ago?

If you do, they or their progeny might be the ones standing outside the IMAX theater in your area, waiting for their chance to have far too much visual information thrust at them for the three hours it takes to watch Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. There are twenty-five theaters in the United States equipped to show Mister Nolan's movie "properly." I consider myself a film buff, but not enough to make this kind of distinction. I appreciate the vision, I just don't need the extra twenty-five feet of screen to make the movie work for me. To be clear, I quite liked The Odyssey, perhaps buoyed by all the naysayers and sneering from people who haven't seen a frame of it in any format. 

But I find myself currently living in a home where my TV screen is as large as some of the ones found in cineplexes in malls, that exist now, and I don't have the same trepidation I may have once experienced when trying to decide whether or not to go out and see a movie on the somewhat bigger screen. Far away from my couch. For fifteen dollars a ticket. Until that first feature presented in Feel-Around.