It doesn’t really matter if you’re interested in 3-D technology or not. Unless you’re really willing to go out of your way to avoid it, you’ll have a fully functional 3-D capable home theater in the next few years.
I may have walked out of ‘Resident Evil: Afterlife,’ but that doesn’t mean everybody did. It was the only major studio movie this weekend and it locked down 2,000 of the country’s 3,203 3-D screens. That’s more about math than any sort of groundswell of popular opinion. I’m betting that Sony went out of the way to get all those screens because the studio knew that this was going to be a one-weekend warrior, without much in the way of staying power. Although, with the largest opening for the franchise ever ($28 million domestically and performing well overseas), we probably haven’t seen the last ‘Resident Evil’ entry. The franchise will be as undead as the zombies that populate it.
So this isn’t technically a review, because I didn’t watch the whole movie. I’ll say that I watched about forty minutes of the new, oh-no-zombies-all-over-the-place sci-fi/horror yarn ‘Resident Evil: Afterlife’ before bailing. It was a late showing on Friday night, I was not in the mood, and I knew there was a whole stack of unread issues of ‘Scalped’ waiting for me at home. That said, I wanted to explain myself, to tell you all why, in such a short amount of time, I was so reviled that I kicked off my 3-D glasses in disgust and stomped out of the theater. Actually, that’s not true, I gingerly placed my 3-D glasses in the recycling bins provided. But the disgust part is legit.
So this is the lull between the blockbuster summer and the more prestigious fall. Whew. Times are tough. There is basically only one major new release this week, and it’s one that almost all of us could do without. (I didn’t get a chance to see it early because I had other things to do and, oh yeah, it looks terrible.) There aren’t even that many intriguing independents to seek out. Instead, you’ll just have to resign yourself to either not going to the movies, or maybe seeing ‘Inception‘ one last time before the home video release. That works too.
Just yesterday, I was saying that I’d like to upgrade to 3-D in my home theater, but don’t expect to replace my projector anytime soon. Hence I’d need to add a secondary TV to the room, most likely off to the side. Well, now Sony has gone and announced a new 3-D projector that almost has me eating my words. Almost.
For a while now, I’ve made a point of highlighting the advantages of 2.35:1 Constant Image Height display in my weekly HD Advisor column here at High-Def Digest. I project onto a 2.35:1 screen in my own home theater. While I’m happy as a projector user, I’ve also kept my eye on the Philips “Cinema 21:9″ LCD TV. Now that the company has added 3-D capability to the set, that makes it (for me) by far the most appealing 3-D TV on the market. There’s just one small problem: It’s not sold in North America!
By now it’s clear: I thought ‘Piranha 3D‘ was pretty great. And I’m pretty sure it’s not the heat stroke talking. I saw the movie twice this weekend, and both times the theater (the largest one at my local bijou) was at least half-empty, if not more. I tried to figure out why exactly this movie, which should be delighting audiences from coast to coast, didn’t connect with audiences. It barely made any money at the box office, and I heard some scuttlebutt last night that it might not have even made enough to stick that #5 placing. So, in the interest of scientific exploration and aimless speculation, I present to you five reasons why people aren’t jumping in for ‘Piranha 3D.’ To quote ‘Lost’ co-creator Damon Lindelof’s recent Tweet: “Am I seeing Piranha 3D tonight? Yes. Will I need to see it again immediately afterwards to determine whether it was a dream? Again, yes.”
I’m not sure I saw this coming. ‘Piranha 3D’ – which has been rescheduled for release several times, handed over creatively at least once (Chuck Russell, director of ‘The Mask‘ and ‘Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,’ was attached to direct initially), and not even screened for critics in advance of its release – is probably the most surefire, start-to-finish entertaining movie of the entire summer season. That’s not just because it delivers on the late night cable thrills that movies like ‘Snakes on a Plane‘ or ‘The Expendables‘ promised (and failed to do). This movie is smart and has a wicked sense of humor. Also, it’s sexy. When was the last time any Hollywood horror movie was smart, funny, scary, and sexy? Yeah, I can’t remember either.
So this is what the dog days of summer look like – a pool of water filled with razor-toothed piranhas. Also: mediocre studio run-off. There are only a couple of weekends left in the summer, and it seems like the studios have more or less given up. We’re trapped in that twilight zone limbo of “after the big budget studio fare” and “before the upper-crust Oscar contenders,” where there’s virtually nothing exciting going on. At least around this time last year we had Rob Zombie’s underrated ‘Halloween II‘ and Quentin Tarantino’s certifiable masterpiece ‘Inglourious Basterds.’ This year we have…
This weekend could be the one that finally knocks ‘Inception‘ out of the top spot at the box office. Not because a movie of similar quality is storming the multiplexes of America, but because we all really love Will Ferrell and, to a lesser degree, dance movies. That’s what Hollywood is delivering to us this weekend. One of them is even being presented in high-tech 3-D. (Guess which one!)
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