Making Spectacles More Spectacular
Posted on | July 10, 2005 at 10:56 pm | Comments Off
Another serious lack of updates lately. A hand injury made it uncomfortable to type for several days, plus I’ve been pretty busy. Haven’t had a lot to talk about. I’ve got a lot of music to review, but haven’t had the time/energy to put down all my thoughts yet.
Last week was “Re-Experience in a New Format Week” at the movies. My friend Bryce’s wife and kids were out of town, so he had a lot of free time to do geek stuff. First, we saw the digitally-projected version of Revenge of the Sith. It was nice – the eye candy was even more eye-candyish, though the improvement over the film version was not as drastic as it was for Attack of the Clones. You could definitely see more details. We both swore that Padme had some disappearing/reappearing pants in her scenes on the volcano planet. Unfortunately, the enhanced viewing did not make the story any clearer or more interesting. Repeated viewing definitely doesn’t help this flick, as story/logic flaws become even more evident, and the bad dialog/acting sticks more pronounced. But that eye candy…
The other re-formatted movie we saw was the Imax version of Batman Begins. I thought it was pretty cool, but I’m not sure Bryce got as much out of it. The sound design was excellent. I did notice that I tended to focus on facial blemishes – easy to do when a single mole is like a foot tall. Poor Morgan Freeman. Michael Caine really needs some work done around his eyes. Christian Bale has some kind of growth on the right side of his nose near the top, which I hadn’t noticed at all the first time, but which really stood out for me this time. Even Katie Holmes did not escape my enforced scrutiny – she had something on her forehead that creeped me out. It will probably be the excuse that Tom Cruise eventually uses to dump her, hopefully before she’s totally ensnared in His Vole-ish Life.
Both Bryce and I thought there were also some minor edits in the Imax version, especially around the Scarecrow and the use of his mask. But we both could’ve been just misremembering the original, as those parts were pretty quick and intense. Or maybe they really did dial it down just a little bit for this version. I may have to research that on this thing called the Internet.
Latre.