Take That, Roger Ebert!

Ten days ago I challenged Ebert a wee bit over his article, “Video Games Can Never Be Art.”

Four days ago, I wrote a post about my…let’s call it, “distaste,” for 3D.

Yesterday, Roger Ebert decided to agree wholeheartedly with my opinion on 3D.  He did so in a reasonable, logical, and fully explicated way.

Now, the best response I’ve read to Ebert’s article on video games came from Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade fame.  In his response, Holkins says of Ebert’s article, “[Ebert's] arguing 1. in bad faith, 2. in an internally contradictory way, 3. with nebulously defined terms, so there’s nothing here to discuss.”

Ebert’s article on 3D, however, has a number of clearly developed points, and a number of conclusions he and I arrived at separately.  Movies are a media we have each engaged with and learned to appreciate in a number of ways.  I’d like to suggest that perhaps, had Ebert ever bothered to make the attempt to engage with video games in a similar way, he would be able to offer a well defined and good faith argument about their validity as art.

And maybe he would even agree with me.  After all, we clearly see blue-lens to red-lens.

Depth Perception – An Unnecessary Evil

I can’t for the life of me see how 3D can be made a necessary part of a movie.

I understand special effects – allowing a film maker to make manifest impossible things is important.  From the models of Blade Runner and puppetry of Alien to the CG of Jurassic Park or The Matrix, the special effects are part of the storytelling process.  Without special effects would be no future city, no fearsome alien, no pissed of dinosaurs, and no…well, no Matrix.

But 3D, so far, doesn’t impact the ability to tell a story at all.  Does it matter if that one plant really seems closer to you than that other plant?  Or that shrapnel looks like it just flew over your head?  The mere fact that the recent spate of 3D movies have all also been shown in 2D clearly indicates that the 3D is a bonus, an extra – the characters, the story, plot, themes, tension, and emotion, none of these things are created by a special camera and a pair of funny glasses.

Would you have cared more about Guido in Life is Beautiful if he’d ridden that bike right at you before crashing into Dora?  Would the opening scene of Inglorius Basterds have been any more tense had that glass of milk been popping out of the screen?