Wow, in 2007 Lucas to Re-Release all Star Wars film in 3D - in theaters!

[Christopher C. Murphy]

Ok, the coolest thing since the advent of color cinema!!! I personally believe this annoucement will change filmmaking forever. (not now, but it's the next phase of HD production for us all!)

Lucas to Re-Release all Star Wars film in 3D - in theaters! Apparently 3D films will help with piracy because it's difficult to pirate them. You need the proper viewing situation....a theater!

http://www.mtv.com/movies/news/artic...05/story.jhtml

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=592898

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Stor...440820,00.html

http://www.darkhorizons.com/news05/050318a.php

http://today.reuters.com/news/newsAr...STRY-3D-DC.XML

More about the tech behind it all:

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/st...3196055&EDATE=

Lucas, Jackson, Rodriguez, Zemeckis and Cameron are officially the coolest filmmakers. There will be others, but these guys are in a position of power. I believe the future of cinema looks bright! (and in 3D!)

[Robert Knecht Schmidt]

Change filmmaking forever? Don't count on it. 3D is no less gimmicky than it was in 1955, and 2D films "converted" using whatever process can only hope to become "2 and a half D"--i.e., layers of flat images that shift just-so with respect to each other.

[Christopher C. Murphy]

And you're an authority on 3D filmmaking? They're professionals whom all have experience with it...in today's world.

Also, 3D films have been making real money the last few years. Imax is huge...it's just that most Hollywood studios haven't embraced it...until now!

These guys are A-list directors, I'm listening and definately get it.

[Marco Leavitt]

I'm pretty ambivalent about 3D, but I'd love to see the Star Wars films in their original presentations without all that extra crap he's piled in there. How about releasing those?

[Dylan Couper]

Sorry Murph, I'm in RKS's corner. While Imax is a great format, 3D ain't much more than a gimmic that gets old in the first 10 minutes. If they released Star Wars in Imax... That would make me happy.

And to further dump on you... :)
And as far as Rodruigez... besides making it out of nowhere, what has he ever done for cinema? Your list of Lucas, Zemekis, Rodruigez, Cameron reads like Sesame Street's "Which one of these things is not like the other" game.

[Christopher C. Murphy]

lol, you guys are funny..

[Marco Leavitt]

I think you're being a little hard on Rodriguez. He's yet to produce a classic movie, but his continued independence in the industry is remarkable. I wouldn't bet against his being remembered as a legendary maverick with a major impact on the way studios learned to deal with their auteurs. I think "Sin City" is looking very promising, by the way.

[Robert Knecht Schmidt]

As promising as Sky Captain, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, and Catwoman, anyway.

3D is a gimmick. The human visual system is great at using perceptual cues--perspective, lighting, and so on--to translate 2D images to 3D representations, so we don't really need 3D projection to recreate the 3D world inside our heads, which is exactly what our visual systems do when they observe a 2D scene. People don't go to movies for the platitude of viewing collections of objects in layers that shift in parallax when they move their heads back and forth like so many pigeons. People go to movies to experience a collective myth-dream: cinema is foremost a spiritual experience, not a technical-perceptual one.

Films--more broadly, stories--that touch the core of our experiences as conscious, living beings, take us through special experiences, and reveal to us in symbolic ways truths about ourselves are ultimately the most successful. No new technology can "revolutionize" this immanent aspect to storytelling, as it has remained the same from the times of the earliest fables recounted round the campfire, to the pagan mythic panoply of the Hellenic era, to the tentpole rattlers of the previous century, to the stories on the big screen today, and on into the future for as long as humans remain merely partially-conscious beings in search of Something More.

George Lucas once gave the impression he understood this, but that seems like such a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

[Marco Leavitt]

You won't get any argument about 3-D from me. I'm still trying to refocus my eyes after "Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone."

[Christopher C. Murphy]

Robert, what you are saying is hilarous to me. You're trying to sound intelligent and yet it comes off like you're not. Lucas himself was recently on PBS talking about the "campfire" thing. Did you just rip him off or what? The fact (I'm going to act like you know and give my opinon as fact!) is you are wrong about 3D.

In one sentence you're saying 3D is gimmick right? Ok, so film itself minus 3D isn't a gimmick? Any technique that gets people to stare at NOTHING is a gimmick. The theater wall is a flat wall with light shining on it. Is that not a gimmick already equal to any 3D experience? They're all fake Robert - sorry to drop that bomb on you. You sure like to talk like you have all the answers. All my statements are opinions, but you are so factual in your assessment of the future? There is nothing more annoying than someone pushing their opinions as facts - online it's the worst.

You believe "storyingtelling" is the answer to everything? Gee, I forgot that we're all morons and you're a genius. Check it out - no one has stated storytelling wasn't the driving force in ANY cinema experience. You're trying teach me something I've known since I saw my first movie. Let me put my moron hat back on...sorry.

You slam Lucas - ok, sure! He's responsible for getting more people into the theaters than anyone in history! Between Star Wars and Raiders alone he's #1 the last I remember. So, you're telling me that he's wasting his time talking about 3D filmmaking? Oh, ok...I'll listen to you instead and forget 3D filmmaking.

Wait, I can't forget it because I'll be going to watch Star Wars in 3D at my local theater in about 600 days.

[Joshua Starnes]

I think the problem is that when they say 3-D you're thinking of the old 3-D process that kind of faked 3-D, and this isn't really what they're talking about. It's not about having things appear to come out of the screen, but about a more immersive viewing experience.

[Scott Tebeau]

Well it sound like Chris isn’t too keen on other people’s opinions.

As far as Lucas is concerned he is a postmodern whore who has taken to eating his babies. Even recently he has begun to back pedal motioning towards the idea that he has become soft from pandering to lowest common denominator. He concluded with the message saying that he is going to return to his roots and start dealing with edgy subjects again.

Sure buddy....

Remember, size isn't everything.

[Ken Tanaka]

Fellas...let's keep cool. It's just a movie...and you're in the News area! <g> Go to the Production area to debate "storytelling".

[Robert Knecht Schmidt]

"Ok, so film itself minus 3D isn't a gimmick?"

And here you touch on a valid point worthy of examination. Any artificially constructed framework in which art is built is bound to have some level of "gimmick" to it--iambic pentameter was Shakespeare's gimmick; cubism, Bracque's; Northern harmonicas and Eastern sitars did a lot for the Beatles at their various stages. In films, incidental story elements, known in Hollywood as "high concept hooks"--extraterrestrials, lycanthropy, videotapes with disturbed little girls trapped inside them--these are all gimmicks, of course, significant only for their symbolic representations of psychological modalities.

But these modalities are indeed what are essential to films, stories, myths, dreams. The talent of any artist lies in the representation of these inner struggles, immanent to life, sometimes symbolically disguised but always analogically veracious and mythically profound. Strip all the gimmick away from art and you're left with psychology (or in some lamentable cases nothing at all!).

And this partially solves the question of why is 3D projection is a gimmick time-and-again rejected by the moviegoing public. Uncomfortable tinted glasses and encumbering shutter goggles may give us some small semblance of verisimilitude--though, as I've already pointed out based on an understanding of the functioning of the HVS, it is negligible--but this added "depth" makes a film no more "deep."

The Warden is welcome to move the relevant parts of this thread to the appropriate forum.

[Jonathan Jones]

Tsk Tsk...
Saucer of milk...table two.