I finally went and saw The Hobbit last night, the 7:40 HFR 3D showing at the AMC off Route 1, and I've been trying to figure out how I feel about it ever since I got home. Short version: the movie's fine. The technology is the thing I can't stop thinking about, and not entirely in a good way.
For anyone who hasn't been paying attention, Peter Jackson shot this thing at 48 frames per second instead of the usual 24, which is the frame rate movies have used since basically forever. Twice the information, twice as smooth, in theory. A handful of theaters (mine included, apparently, though I didn't even confirm ahead of time and just got lucky) are running it in that format alongside the normal 24fps version. I paid $19.50 for a ticket, which still makes me wince a little every time I type it out, and grabbed the glasses at the door like always.
The first ten minutes are genuinely disorienting. Everything has this hyper-real quality that people have been calling the "soap opera effect," and thats exactly right, it looks like a BBC costume drama shot on video instead of a big fantasy epic shot on film. Bag End's interior in particular looked like a really nice, really expensive theater set instead of an actual place. Ian McKellen's face had this weird video-clarity to it that kept pulling me out of the story every time the camera got close.
Heres the thing though: I got used to it. Somewhere around the dwarves showing up at Bilbo's door and turning the place into a disaster area, I stopped noticing the frame rate and just watched the movie. The action scenes later on benefit enormously from it, the goblin town chase in particular was so much easier to actually track than the blurry mess 24fps action usually turns into. So I dont think its a gimmick exactly. I think its a format that needs different cinematography, lighting, and probably makeup than what everyone involved actually used, because a lot of the sets and costumes read as fake in a way they wouldnt at 24fps. Whether audiences adjust to it the way we all adjusted to color or sound, I have no idea. My gut says this version doesnt stick around long term, but the tech underneath it probably comes back in a better-executed form eventually.
Small complaint that has nothing to do with the frame rate: theater 3D glasses over actual prescription glasses are still miserable and nobody has fixed this in the however-many years 3D has been back. Mine kept sliding down my nose during the eagle scenes and I missed a solid chunk of dialogue adjusting them.
In smaller, less debated tech news, RIM finally nailed down an actual release date for BlackBerry 10 this week: January 30th. Ive lost track of how many times that phone has been "coming soon" at this point, going back to well before I started this blog even, so an actual date on the calendar is almost a bigger deal than the phone itself. I'm not going to pretend I'm holding my breath for it, my contract's up in the spring and Ive been eyeing a Nexus 4 that I still cant reliably find in stock anywhere, which is its own annoying story for another post. But credit where its due, a date is a date, and RIM hasn't had many of those to point to lately.
Also still thinking about the fact that "Gangnam Style" broke YouTubes view counter a couple weeks back, hard enough that they had to rewrite the thing to handle numbers past two billion, because the old counter was a 32-bit integer and just couldn't go any higher. Theres something very funny to me about a K-pop video breaking math that was never supposed to be a bottleneck for anything. I keep bringing this up to people at parties and Im aware its becoming a bit much.
Anyway. If you're on the fence about the HFR version specifically: go if you're curious about where filmmaking might be headed, skip it if you just want to watch The Hobbit without thinking about the projector. The regular 24fps showings are still playing at basically every theater that has the HFR one, so its not like you're stuck with only one option this week.