[tdockweiler]

I've seen a lot of good movies lately but haven't been able to post much.

A.I. - 10/10

Blown away by this movie and it's definitely one of the best i've seen in 5 years. You can tell that many video games were probably very inspired by this movie.

Moon 7/10

I liked this and have now seen it twice. It's pretty good, but not a movie I'd ever buy.
I liked it enough to want to google the director's other films. Found out there is a related film by the director that's a Netflix exclusive and called "Mute".

Mute 9.5/10

Critics absolutely hated this movie, but I loved it from start to finish.
The last half hour or so was the best and I was really worried the director would screw up the entire movie.
Only major negative is that Paul Rudd's character should have not tried to be funny.
I really have no complaints about this movie. I found it pretty sad and kind of a downer.
I think it has a 9% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes!

The War - 6/10

This is a recent documentary about WWII.
Found it pretty dull overall. How do you have such a super long running time and say so little.
It's not very in depth and there is not much new I learned about WWII.
You know what annoys me a lot? How African Americans fought in WWII for our freedom yet went home to segregation.
Or then if you were a Japanese-American you had to fight for your country while they locked up your family in a prison camp.
Only one episode I'd rate as very good.

Casino - 10/10

One of my top 10 favorite films when I was 15 or 16. It fell off my favorites list but now I wonder why. I think it's one film that's near perfect in every way. Maybe the only negative is they focused too much screen time on Ace's crazy wife. I actually liked this more than "Goodfellas".


Narcos - 10/10

Ok, so not really a movie, but I loved this Netflix series. I can't wait to see what happens in season 4.
PS I also managed to watch "Breaking Bad" for the first time start to finish. Loved it of course, but nothing I could watch a second time!
The last episode almost made me depressed for a week. It's really strange to have a TV show do that to me.

 

[tdockweiler]

12 Strong (5.5/10) / War Machine (4/10)

Easily two of the worst war movies i've seen in years. "12 Strong" reminds me of those really terrible old John Wayne WW2 movies.
"12 Strong" is just very poorly made and the action scenes are especially bad.

Molly's Game - 4/10

Hated this from start to finish. Didn't care about anything that was going on or what happened to it's characters.
It's one of those you just wish you had turned off.

 

[DamageInc77]

Molly's Game - 4/10

Hated this from start to finish. Didn't care about anything that was going on or what happened to it's characters.
It's one of those you just wish you had turned off.

If you hated it from start to finish, why give it a slightly below middle of the road rating?

 

[oqvist]

The finest hour 3D.

I kind of miss 3D. I love the peak through the window effect though of course you always want a larger window. Just wish there was an easy way to play bluray 3D through VR headsets legally. 3D should have come after the VR headset wave now I fear it won´t come back

I am at the same time getting more and more frustrated on my 4K oled. It really must have 4k content or there is little point it seems . My 1080p plasma is going strong.

As for the movie realism go out the window it´s hollywood at full whistle but it´s entertaining for sure but there is no real drama as the hollywood mechanisms is always the same for these movies. 7/10

 

[DamageInc77]

Can't stand 3D personally. Didn't realize there were people out there who actively liked it and sought it out.

 

[oqvist]

Can't stand 3D personally. Didn't realize there were people out there who actively liked it and sought it out.

There is a percentil that can´t deal with stereoscopic vision which is one of the problem when marketing it of course. Like some puke because of VR

I have none of these issues whatsoever. I am curious if some that can´t deal with stereoscopic 3D on one panel would have the same issue in VR headsets with one panel for each eye and perfectly rendered 3D?

 

[DamageInc77]

There is a percentil that can´t deal with stereoscopic vision which is one of the problem when marketing it of course. Like some puke because of VR

I have none of these issues whatsoever. I am curious if some that can´t deal with stereoscopic 3D on one panel would have the same issue in VR headsets with one panel for each eye and perfectly rendered 3D?

I've used the HTC Vive for dozens of hours. I've got no problem with it at all. I just think that 3D makes films aesthetically ugly in 99% of cases.

 

[castleofargh]

I imagine the future of 3D not in theaters but at home like most people nowadays. when I think about what would be good 3D for me, I imagine a mix of technology, stuff filmed with the Lytro tech(or rendered as if for actual 3D work), that would adjust based on eye tracking. so when I decide to look at some irrelevant part of a scene, that's where the picture becomes focused. \o/
because right now, I'm fine with a pretty blur, but I'm really not fine with the ugly duplicate image in unfocused areas. it really messes with my brain and I suspect it's a big part of why I end up with a headache(so as a result I'm not a huge fan in general).

of course this would first require massive computational power to do it "in real time", and it would also require some drastic changes in the way to film a scene. so I'm not sure that even with the tech fully available, many directors would agree to work that way. I'll probably not see that in my lifetime, but I'd love to. a movie that's really just a window and you look wherever you like with what you look at coming in focus. yup, I'd really love to experience that in a few movies.

 

[nraymond]

I imagine the future of 3D not in theaters but at home like most people nowadays. when I think about what would be good 3D for me, I imagine a mix of technology, stuff filmed with the Lytro tech(or rendered as if for actual 3D work), that would adjust based on eye tracking. so when I decide to look at some irrelevant part of a scene, that's where the picture becomes focused. \o/
because right now, I'm fine with a pretty blur, but I'm really not fine with the ugly duplicate image in unfocused areas. it really messes with my brain and I suspect it's a big part of why I end up with a headache(so as a result I'm not a huge fan in general).

of course this would first require massive computational power to do it "in real time", and it would also require some drastic changes in the way to film a scene. so I'm not sure that even with the tech fully available, many directors would agree to work that way. I'll probably not see that in my lifetime, but I'd love to. a movie that's really just a window and you look wherever you like with what you look at coming in focus. yup, I'd really love to experience that in a few movies.

Glad you picked up on something most people don't verbalize and might not consciously realize. As a photographer, I am very aware of bokeh (the out of focus areas in a photographic scene), compulsively evaluate the depth of field, angle of view and I make quick mental estimates of the focal length and sensor size used for scene compositions. I also can't help but notice the number of aperture blades that are visible in the specular highlight patterns (and I can't describe how sad it makes me when computer games have 'simulated lens flare' when you are supposed to be playing as a person, looking through their eyes, yet eyes don't have multiple glass elements in them that light bounces off of and the pupils in our eyes are perfect circles, not a series of distinct aperture blades, so there should absolutely not be any lens flare!)

Anyway, VR is in the best position to get proper depth of field. Foveated rendering is in the early stages of integration, and while primarily it's focus is on improving performance by performing variable quality rendering with the best quality rendering where you are looking (because the human eye has the best acuity where you are looking, so high quality scene rendering where you are not looking just wastes GPU horsepower). A side-effect of having eye tracking is of course the ability to do focus-where-you-look, i.e. dynamic bokeh, i.e. make the scene render in a way similar to how your eye works - what you are looking at is in focus, and foreground and background things are out of focus. I used to use a Tobii Eye Tracker on my gaming PC. Current version is the Eye Tracker 4C: https://tobiigaming.com/eye-tracker-4c/ At least one game I own supports focus-where-you-look, The Solus Project, and it was pretty compelling. I could see it fitting in well in VR.

I am fine with plain 2D, and especially low framerate (24fps movies for instance) media, has artistic gestures in terms of extreme bokeh (a great example would be the cinematography of Sławomir Idziak, Piotr Sobociński, or Christopher Doyle) and in fact I would go so far as to say something would absolutely be lost if some films were somehow remade with infinite depth of field (no visible bokeh) or focus-where-you-look depth of field. When selective depth of field is done by a master cinematographer, it is a powerful part of the language of film, and I don't want to see it go away.

Now part of the reason why Avatar was such a success was that it was from the ground-up built and realized as a stereoscopic 3D film, which meant tons of cinematographic decisions were made and constraints put on things so that it would work really well in 3D. There are almost no scenes with selective focus, almost the entire film is infinite depth of field, and it's at a 3D distance from the viewer that is very comfortable to look at (unlike, say, the distance many of the scenes from the "T2 3-D: Battle Across Time" attraction has) so you can look at almost any part of the frame at any time and feel like you are mostly in control of your own eyes (stereoscopic 3D films that have bokeh completely break my immersion and make my head feel weird when I use my eyes to focus on something in the 3D space of the film that is out of focus and refuses to focus because that bokeh is permanently part of the film, and then feeling compelled to instead make sure I keep my eyes on the parts of the scenes that are in focus and avoid those out of focus parts in 3D becomes an added source of stress that additionally takes away from the experience). 3D films most guilty of having infuriating bokeh are the post-process converted ones, which were neither shot nor conceived in 3D but had a had it done after the fact or late in production, and there is nothing an algorithm can do to remove bokeh or other cinematic decisions that are part of the film (there is some help from the fact that visual effects in films these days are both very prevalent and computer generated and if they go back to those source computer graphics and re-render them properly in stereoscopic 3D those can come out ok, but that still involves a lot of work to do right since many of them when they were first created were only made to look good in 2D and don't necessarily look good in 3D). One of my favorite films to have seen in 3D was Wim Wenders documentary "Pina" (2011), which absolutely added a lot to the experience being in 3D.

The bottom line is that stereoscopic 3D is not a panacea. It was a mistake for the industry to ever have suggested it was one, because it set the wrong expectations for everyone involved. It is another tool of expression, and a valid one at that, but should be used thoughtfully.

 

[oqvist]

Another problem is lcds. Its such a horrible display technology. Response times way to slow for stereoscopic vision to fool your your brain so you get these ghost images. My first stereo3d experience was in the crt era and had to wait for plasma to get something that worked nearly as good. Of course both these got replaced by jucky LCD:s. And I bet it will win over oled as well just due to being cheap rather then goof.

Now with separating the eyes completly and no odd depth of field or motion blur tricks it would feel just like real life just like the visuals for games do. I have much less eye strain in vr focusing on infinity then using my monitors.

 

[nraymond]

Another problem is lcds. Its such a horrible display technology. Response times way to slow for stereoscopic vision to fool your your brain so you get these ghost images. My first stereo3d experience was in the crt era and had to wait for plasma to get something that worked nearly as good. Of course both these got replaced by jucky LCD:s. And I bet it will win over oled as well just due to being cheap rather then goof.

Now with separating the eyes completly and no odd depth of field or motion blur tricks it would feel just like real life just like the visuals for games do. I have much less eye strain in vr focusing on infinity then using my monitors.

I used to be very excited by the coming 4k revolution because I was looking forward to strain-free 1080p stereoscopic 3D via polarizing screens/passive glasses on 4k screens because finally you can do every other line polarized when you had 2160 vertical resolution and retain 1080p resolution per eye (unlike the previous gen 1080p polarized 3D LCDs that halved vertical resolution which meant 540p per eye, which made text hard to read). Sadly, stereoscopic 3D screens no longer have consumer interest, so we'll probably never see this product.

 

[castleofargh]

Glad you picked up on something most people don't verbalize and might not consciously realize. As a photographer, I am very aware of bokeh (the out of focus areas in a photographic scene), compulsively evaluate the depth of field, angle of view and I make quick mental estimates of the focal length and sensor size used for scene compositions. I also can't help but notice the number of aperture blades that are visible in the specular highlight patterns (and I can't describe how sad it makes me when computer games have 'simulated lens flare' when you are supposed to be playing as a person, looking through their eyes, yet eyes don't have multiple glass elements in them that light bounces off of and the pupils in our eyes are perfect circles, not a series of distinct aperture blades, so there should absolutely not be any lens flare!)

Anyway, VR is in the best position to get proper depth of field. Foveated rendering is in the early stages of integration, and while primarily it's focus is on improving performance by performing variable quality rendering with the best quality rendering where you are looking (because the human eye has the best acuity where you are looking, so high quality scene rendering where you are not looking just wastes GPU horsepower). A side-effect of having eye tracking is of course the ability to do focus-where-you-look, i.e. dynamic bokeh, i.e. make the scene render in a way similar to how your eye works - what you are looking at is in focus, and foreground and background things are out of focus. I used to use a Tobii Eye Tracker on my gaming PC. Current version is the Eye Tracker 4C: https://tobiigaming.com/eye-tracker-4c/ At least one game I own supports focus-where-you-look, The Solus Project, and it was pretty compelling. I could see it fitting in well in VR.

I am fine with plain 2D, and especially low framerate (24fps movies for instance) media, has artistic gestures in terms of extreme bokeh (a great example would be the cinematography of Sławomir Idziak, Piotr Sobociński, or Christopher Doyle) and in fact I would go so far as to say something would absolutely be lost if some films were somehow remade with infinite depth of field (no visible bokeh) or focus-where-you-look depth of field. When selective depth of field is done by a master cinematographer, it is a powerful part of the language of film, and I don't want to see it go away.

Now part of the reason why Avatar was such a success was that it was from the ground-up built and realized as a stereoscopic 3D film, which meant tons of cinematographic decisions were made and constraints put on things so that it would work really well in 3D. There are almost no scenes with selective focus, almost the entire film is infinite depth of field, and it's at a 3D distance from the viewer that is very comfortable to look at (unlike, say, the distance many of the scenes from the "T2 3-D: Battle Across Time" attraction has) so you can look at almost any part of the frame at any time and feel like you are mostly in control of your own eyes (stereoscopic 3D films that have bokeh completely break my immersion and make my head feel weird when I use my eyes to focus on something in the 3D space of the film that is out of focus and refuses to focus because that bokeh is permanently part of the film, and then feeling compelled to instead make sure I keep my eyes on the parts of the scenes that are in focus and avoid those out of focus parts in 3D becomes an added source of stress that additionally takes away from the experience). 3D films most guilty of having infuriating bokeh are the post-process converted ones, which were neither shot nor conceived in 3D but had a had it done after the fact or late in production, and there is nothing an algorithm can do to remove bokeh or other cinematic decisions that are part of the film (there is some help from the fact that visual effects in films these days are both very prevalent and computer generated and if they go back to those source computer graphics and re-render them properly in stereoscopic 3D those can come out ok, but that still involves a lot of work to do right since many of them when they were first created were only made to look good in 2D and don't necessarily look good in 3D). One of my favorite films to have seen in 3D was Wim Wenders documentary "Pina" (2011), which absolutely added a lot to the experience being in 3D.

The bottom line is that stereoscopic 3D is not a panacea. It was a mistake for the industry to ever have suggested it was one, because it set the wrong expectations for everyone involved. It is another tool of expression, and a valid one at that, but should be used thoughtfully.

in the long list of things I've failed with panache, photography has been my longest most active one, so maybe we are particularly sensitive to focus because we're into photography and not because it's actually a big deal for most people?
about lens flare in games, you pretty much picked the words from my brain. but yet again maybe that's a camera guy thing?

I never got to play a game with eye tracking, that might be fun. are those Tobii things IR or do you need a good deal of light on your face like with head tracking on webcam? I remember the eos5 and 3(non digital) having some funny eye tracking to pick a focus point. it really became part of how I made pictures at the time and I always wondered why digital camera never seemed interested in it while they now all get some touch screen focus options. maybe it wasn't that accurate? ok now I'm definitely off topic. sorry people.

 

[oqvist]

I used to be very excited by the coming 4k revolution because I was looking forward to strain-free 1080p stereoscopic 3D via polarizing screens/passive glasses on 4k screens because finally you can do every other line polarized when you had 2160 vertical resolution and retain 1080p resolution per eye (unlike the previous gen 1080p polarized 3D LCDs that halved vertical resolution which meant 540p per eye, which made text hard to read). Sadly, stereoscopic 3D screens no longer have consumer interest, so we'll probably never see this product.

Well the LG OLEDS had it at some point. If it was B6 or the generation before? I don´t know how OLED handles 3D though if it can compare to plasma and CRT. In theory it should be able to. Higher resolution won´t help with LCDs as they are hardly any faster now than what they where before.

 

[nraymond]

Well the LG OLEDS had it at some point. If it was B6 or the generation before? I don´t know how OLED handles 3D though if it can compare to plasma and CRT. In theory it should be able to. Higher resolution won´t help with LCDs as they are hardly any faster now than what they where before.

As far as I know, the OLEDs worked by alternating right eye, left eye, right eye, left eye images at every refresh. Full resolution, but requires active shutter glasses synchronized to the images being displayed and results in some crosstalk and your eyes getting images in an alternating fashion (while your left eye gets it's image, the right eye isn't allowed to see anything, and vice versa). What I'm talking about are the polarized LCDs where every other line is polarized differently, and then via passive polarized glasses each eye gets it's set of lines (even lines to one eye, odd lines to the other). No crosstalk, no need for fast LCDs because both eyes constantly get the image intended for them (but at half the vertical resolution). Reviews of the latter were always positive in terms of being less fatiguing than active shutter glasses, but every review would complain about the 1920x540 resolution per eye. A 4k display would permit 3840x1080 per eye, which would be fine for most things, especially 1920x1080 content, and no need for ultra-fast refresh, and you could use inexpensive passive polarized glasses.

 

[Redcarmoose]

Glad you picked up on something most people don't verbalize and might not consciously realize. As a photographer, I am very aware of bokeh (the out of focus areas in a photographic scene), compulsively evaluate the depth of field, angle of view and I make quick mental estimates of the focal length and sensor size used for scene compositions. I also can't help but notice the number of aperture blades that are visible in the specular highlight patterns (and I can't describe how sad it makes me when computer games have 'simulated lens flare' when you are supposed to be playing as a person, looking through their eyes, yet eyes don't have multiple glass elements in them that light bounces off of and the pupils in our eyes are perfect circles, not a series of distinct aperture blades, so there should absolutely not be any lens flare!)

Anyway, VR is in the best position to get proper depth of field. Foveated rendering is in the early stages of integration, and while primarily it's focus is on improving performance by performing variable quality rendering with the best quality rendering where you are looking (because the human eye has the best acuity where you are looking, so high quality scene rendering where you are not looking just wastes GPU horsepower). A side-effect of having eye tracking is of course the ability to do focus-where-you-look, i.e. dynamic bokeh, i.e. make the scene render in a way similar to how your eye works - what you are looking at is in focus, and foreground and background things are out of focus. I used to use a Tobii Eye Tracker on my gaming PC. Current version is the Eye Tracker 4C: https://tobiigaming.com/eye-tracker-4c/ At least one game I own supports focus-where-you-look, The Solus Project, and it was pretty compelling. I could see it fitting in well in VR.

I am fine with plain 2D, and especially low framerate (24fps movies for instance) media, has artistic gestures in terms of extreme bokeh (a great example would be the cinematography of Sławomir Idziak, Piotr Sobociński, or Christopher Doyle) and in fact I would go so far as to say something would absolutely be lost if some films were somehow remade with infinite depth of field (no visible bokeh) or focus-where-you-look depth of field. When selective depth of field is done by a master cinematographer, it is a powerful part of the language of film, and I don't want to see it go away.

Now part of the reason why Avatar was such a success was that it was from the ground-up built and realized as a stereoscopic 3D film, which meant tons of cinematographic decisions were made and constraints put on things so that it would work really well in 3D. There are almost no scenes with selective focus, almost the entire film is infinite depth of field, and it's at a 3D distance from the viewer that is very comfortable to look at (unlike, say, the distance many of the scenes from the "T2 3-D: Battle Across Time" attraction has) so you can look at almost any part of the frame at any time and feel like you are mostly in control of your own eyes (stereoscopic 3D films that have bokeh completely break my immersion and make my head feel weird when I use my eyes to focus on something in the 3D space of the film that is out of focus and refuses to focus because that bokeh is permanently part of the film, and then feeling compelled to instead make sure I keep my eyes on the parts of the scenes that are in focus and avoid those out of focus parts in 3D becomes an added source of stress that additionally takes away from the experience). 3D films most guilty of having infuriating bokeh are the post-process converted ones, which were neither shot nor conceived in 3D but had a had it done after the fact or late in production, and there is nothing an algorithm can do to remove bokeh or other cinematic decisions that are part of the film (there is some help from the fact that visual effects in films these days are both very prevalent and computer generated and if they go back to those source computer graphics and re-render them properly in stereoscopic 3D those can come out ok, but that still involves a lot of work to do right since many of them when they were first created were only made to look good in 2D and don't necessarily look good in 3D). One of my favorite films to have seen in 3D was Wim Wenders documentary "Pina" (2011), which absolutely added a lot to the experience being in 3D.

The bottom line is that stereoscopic 3D is not a panacea. It was a mistake for the industry to ever have suggested it was one, because it set the wrong expectations for everyone involved. It is another tool of expression, and a valid one at that, but should be used thoughtfully.

Great read about 3D. Saw Avatar in a theater in 3D but never realized it worked due to infinite depth of field focus. Thanks for that. I also remember seeing House Of Wax in the theater in the mid 1970s. For what ever reason that movie seemed to work only somewhat in 3D though it was amazing. There was a guy with a paddle and rubber ball on a rubber band which flew out of the screen and recoiled back, totally amazing to see. There was also a burning building which looked like it fell out of the screen right onto the audiences lap. Funny I still remember hearing the audiences moan and awe at the sight!

3D is more than a novelty and it would have been nice if it was embraced by modern film. One area where it has been embraced has been medical technology. Years ago my job was taking 3D photography of the human eye. Doctors needed the 3D effect to be both accurate and detailed and it’s one of the few areas of photography where the process can be used for actual diagnosis. If you considered X-rays photography of course that would be another use of photography as a tool for diagnosis of the patient.

In my use it was always 35mm film shot simultaneously with two film camera bodies. A set of lens holders would be used to help the eye see the images in focus and the bioptic images would be introduced as 3D to the perception process. Not in the field any longer but I hear digital is now used for 3D, mainly due to ease of use.

Both films.......Avatar and House Of Wax were polarized glasses with of course what I think was one set of polarized crystals running up and down and one side to side? Though I’m not totally sure as I remember having a little trouble getting two sets of glasses to do what polarized lens do?

You would think detail like 4K and above could simply work with polarized glasses, just like the old days. Though in the old days, I’m pretty sure a metallic screen was needed to make the effect the best. One film projector had a filter with the crystalline running up and down and another had the material running side to side. Who knows it could be introduced again in spectacular fashion and start a new trend. A concept with old technology causing a stir in trendy movie style has always happened before.

Real 3D is really a beautiful thing when it works right!