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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS PRINT ARCHIVE 2013 Click Here for: VENICE FILM FESTIVAL – 2013 Click Here for: VENICE 2013 – DESIGNER SHORTS *If this photo doesn't appear to be perfectly clear, please use your special 3-D glasses.	VENICE 2013 – 3D CLOONEY TUNES & SPACE BULLOCKS DEEP SPACE & AMAZON GRACE by Harlan Kennedy It’s a three-dimensional world out there. And more and more it’s a three-dimensional world in here. In the movie auditorium. Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses, said Dorothy Parker. But necking in the back row does take on a whole new meaning when both parties wear 3D specs. It’s like the osculation of aliens in deep darkness. A darkness where – if you do it during a noisy scene on screen - no one can hear your lips smack, assuming your lips can find each other. Do we need this screen process? Do we really need it? What difference does 3D make, if the film is any good and doing its business of engaging our minds and captivating our senses? In every movie, don’t we factor in depth-of-field with our imaginations? Who needs the bloody glasses? Apparently more and more of us do. 3D keeps making converts even when we don’t ask or expect it to. There was something special about the two bookending movies – GRAVITY 3D which opened the festival, AMAZONIA 3D which closed it – at the 70^th Mostra del Cinema. There we were, trooping into theatres with our macabre goggles, resembling a cadet squad about to undergo poison gas training. We fidgeted resentfully during the first seconds, even minutes of each film. No one likes having that ton weight of optics perched on his nose bridge, or sometimes, if we are lens-wearers already, one pair of glasses placed over another pair. (Robert Stack in AIRPLANE, we remember you). Yet each film found that ‘open sesame’ to our minds, hearts and faculties. Put it simply. Every 3D movie – every good one – has to find a way to make the in-depth experience seem indispensable. Not just diverting. Not just a novelty. Indispensable. GRAVITY succeeds by making what would be, and usually is, the least dramatic detail in a flat-screen futurist adventure the most hypnotic one here. Weightless objects in zero gravity! A spanner, a kitchen fork, a flashlight.... Floating loose in a space-station cabin, after an accident has jolted the off-world home and life-or-death destinies of astronauts George Clooney and Sandra Bullock, the objects drift menacingly right past our noses. One by one as they come, we wince and twitch, fearing we’ll be clonked. The motif is soon writ larger. The stars – the human ones – are biffed around the backyard cosmos colliding with everything in sight. Space debris; flying rocks; each other; and the outer ramparts and girders of the neighbour space stations they clang into, as they seek interplanetary stepping stones back to the possibility of an earthly return. It’s a farfetched story. 3D helps us believe it by fetching it a bit nearer; by making us feel right in there with the characters. (How GRAVITY will play in 2D, on your average steam-driven telly, PC or DVD player, I am more reluctant to speculate.) If this film’s passport to audience attention is its depth of field in deep space – unmoored weightless travel as a gauntlet of hazard, felt in our bones because felt through our probing eyes - Thierry Ragobert’s AMAZONIA puts a paradisal spin on terrestrial peril. We’re deep in the jungle. The director and former Jacques Cousteau collaborator pitches us into the Amazon forest, where a cargo plane has crashed – exciting sequence – and deposited the film’s surviving hero, a Capuchin monkey. (He’s being transported between owners in different countries. But never mind the plot. It’s just there to release the wonders). Just as GRAVITY without 3D might have been a dud SILENT RUNNING or dim-brained DARK STAR, AMAZONIA without 3D might be bad Disney. There are lots of cute animals. Each flounces around for a few showboating seconds. The creatures have probably been sitting in their trailers all day and are now “ready for my closeup, Monsieur Ragobert.” Colourful toucans with beaks almost poking in our eyes. A large snake slithering into our laps. A 3D sloth climbing a 3D tree. A hummingbird feeding its young, as if we were the young. Here’s an advancing tapir sniffing us out! There’s an anteater – get that proboscis out of my popcorn! For weightless objects hazardously adrift in space, read weighty fauna very much chez eux in a terrene habitat designed for simultaneous animal comfort and human terror. Or, since there are no humans, for the terror of a big-eyed, baby-faced simian. He is fantastically expressive, this Capuchin, if you blow off the froth of goo-goo sentimentality. The Venice audience roared with delight at his expressions of unguarded, staccato anxiety, as he watches each new minatory lifeform pushed before him by the offscreen wranglers. Cruel? He’s safe as houses. This jungle is a controlled movie environment. It is only the 3D that whoops up the drama, menace and beauty. It makes this Eden a vivid encounter with beauty and horror, with beasts of prey, birds of enchantment and trees luxuriant with the knowledge of good and evil. Three-dimensional cinema marches on. For every two steps backward, it takes two and a quarter steps forward. Just like a game of grandmother’s footsteps: whenever you think this screen process is safely stationed in some rearward distance of the past, along with B-movies, Beano comics and the first Beatles album, you turn round and feel its breath right on your neck. Indeed you don’t need to turn round. A theatre grows dark, then abracadabra, the lit-up stereoscopic images are right in your face. I blame it on the great or major filmmakers who have decided to have a dart at 3D. Ang Lee in THE LIFE OF PI. Martin Scorsese in HUGO…. They prove it’s possible to bring art to Barnum and Bailey. If cinema is a three-ring circus, we might as well use and enjoy that third ring. So on with the specs. Off with the prejudices. “3D or not 3D” may no longer even be a question. COURTESY T.P. MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved