[Leica] 2010 now Avatar

[jbm at jbm.org (Jeff Moore)]

2010-01-04-00:12:31 Rei Shinozuka:
> avatar made me vomit.
>
> literally, we were late and the kids and I grabbed contiguous seats in  
> the front row.  the front row of an imax 3D showing.  and i get vertigo  
> watching my son play video games on the PS3.  woof!

I had to flee from an Imax showing of the newish Star Trek reimagined prequel
movie.  The combination of shaky-camera photography and a screen which
completely filled my field of vision, no stationary non-movie landmarks
allowed, made me really queasy and I got out of there just before I hurled.
Took awhile to recover -- plenty of time for the rest of the people who'd 
come
with me to give up and come out, too.

We'd been looking forward to that "superior" presentation, but aside from the
problems of puke-inducememt in those of us who were sensitive, the sides of
the frame -- even though the screen was broad -- were cut off.  Text on the
screen was missing letters.  I guess they insisted on stretching the movie to
fill the screen vertically.  And the blacks weren't, very.  It was all kind 
of
a lose.

When the movie came out on Blu-Ray, we borrowed it from the neighbors (we do
coordinated purchasing -- we each buy the things we anticipate actually
watching several times, but try to avoid duplication -- and cooperative
Blu-Ray swapping, which I tell myself gets the cost per viewing pretty close
to what theatre outings would be, yet with fewer scratches and cooties on the
discs than rental or Netflickery) and I enjoyed it thoroughly on a nice
60-inch teevee.  No spewing at all, and the popcorn was better.  It wasn't
coming from dual synchronized 70mm film rolls, but I actually had a better
time.

 -Jeff