I'm sitting in Newark (Liberty) waiting for breakfast and my flight to Chicago. I'll be checking in periodically as I journey to Chicago to help with a retreat for volunteers at St. John Bosco Parish.
Hobbits Revisited
I took a break from retreat prep to scratch an itch of sorts. I saw the Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in the much debated high frame rate format. I had a mixed reaction to it. It was hardly the unmitigated disaster some have made it out to be, but it is still a novelty. I agree with Matt Atchity of Rotten Tomatoes and What the Flick that if Peter Jackson was going to experiment he should have done it on a lesser project.
From a technical stand point, the problems I found with the standard projection really had to do with the fact that The Hobbit was meant to be seen at 48 fps, and transferring it to 24 frames is similar to showing a wide screen movie on an old LD, small screen TV. Much of the detail is lost and images become obscured. To make another comparison, it's kind of like listening to a symphony on a mono transistor radio.
That said, should the movie have been made this way to begin with? Like I wrote, it's a mixed bag. The scenes with Gollum are truly frightening, and the final confrontation was better for the high clarity. But other times the action looked like it was ripped from a video game. Sometimes this shift between hyper real and super fake happened within the same scene.
In the end this use of high frame rate was a bit of a misguided move. This is a sweeping epic that deserves a big screen presentation, but the intended viewing experience makes this too much of an uneven ride. While even the standard format has its problems, I'd stick with it until the movie guys figure out what they're doing in 48 fps.
We're almost ready to board. More when I get to Chi-town.
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