…we watched it again, yes. But only because it’s so bloody ridiculously good.  And they gave us free beer.

But this time we saw it in the Apollo cinema in London on a Sony 4K 3D Screen.

What does this mean? You ask. These numbers, letters and brand names are all a bit Electric Spectre for Slashing The Seats, a blog more at home with yelling at crappy directors and praising lord god Robocop.

Well, let me tell you.  Sony 4K projects are a new thing that makes watching 3D movies actually pretty cool. The technology behind 3D is a bit of a dick really. It’s like listening to an amazing story delivered by someone with a mildly annoying voice. You see, 3D is delivered by showing one frame designed for your left eye, and then one  for your right eye. At 24 frames per second. For hours. This messes with your brain a touch and is why it gives people headaches. Your brain and eyes are designed for the real world, not trickery.

What Sony 4K does is have two projectors, one for an eye each. Meaning your brain doesn’t get confused, overheat and cause you to drool into your popcorn. And it makes the screen brighter, crisper, less flickery and generally, nice.

It’s 3D without being a dick about it.

It also has a ridiculously huge pixel count. So it makes my newly bought 1080p 42 inch TV look like a turd. Bastards.

We were given a nice talk from a man from Sony, clearly excited by his own product, explaining all of this and a dude from Apollo cinemas telling us they’ll start rolling these projectors out across their chain.

So, if you like proper 3D delivered..err.. properly, head on down to one of their cinemas…

And yes Toy Story 3 is bloody amazing. But you’ve already read the proper review, haven’t you!?

Ah Dreamworks, will you never learn? While rivals Pixar continue to leap ahead of the pack with sky high concepts and sublime characterisation, Dreamworks seems satisfied to churn out slapstick/Scottish accent mash-ups that – ahem – drag on…

To be fair, How to Train your Dragon is a visually arresting diversion with some lovely moments, but the mile high benchmarks set by the likes of Up! Will unfortunately always leave this trailing sadly behind and appearing…well, just too damn cartoonish to compete.

Based on Cressida Cowell’s children’s novel, we’re transported to the mythical land of Berk, a Noggin The Nog setting with manly Vikings refusing to up sticks despite the almost constant, fire-breathing attention of the titular scaly beasts, while Chief’s son Hiccup takes dragon-slaying lessons to win the respect of his father ( a superbly cast Gerard Butler). Typically, things soon go awry as Hiccup can’t quite bring himself to kill anything, instead nursing an injured dragon back to health as we stumble innocuously into one boy and his dog territory.

Unfortunately it’s not only innocuous –it also veers dangerously into boring territory. Even at under a hundred minutes the pace drags, shown in a harsh light against some truly breath-taking 3D flight and fight sequences.

Meanwhile the oddly Scottish Vikings run around shouting, fall over and look goofily at camera as the writers run out of things to say and fill the gaps with bucket-on-head clowning. The novel may be brisk, but surely there was enough material to fill out such a short running time? The result is an uneven adaptation that will leave younger children fidgeting at the lumpen ‘comedy’and adults glumly checking their watches.

It’s a shame that what could have been a genuinely entertaining concept is instead delivered as a missed opportunity, Dreamworks providing some superlative animation but missing the razor-honed wit of their rivals.

Ah the Great White Shark, cinema’s premiere super-beastie since the mid 70’s, is all set for a comeback according to insiders at Universal. Apparently the success of 3D releases – including of course, Mr.J.Cameron’s latest Avatar – means we’ll be seeing an all-new, all-intruding-into-your-eyeballs version of chum-chomping classic Jaws in the near future.

This also means of course, that the blockbuster has finally come full circle and will become extinct over the next few years, leaving us with independant releases about midewestern farmers struggling with homosexuality. And sharks.

More on this over at cinemablend

Normally we don’t go for direct press puffery here at STS – prefering to think our journalistic integrity is worth a pint or two at least – but the 25th of February sees the premiere of Tim Burton’s Alice In Wonderland, and we’re willing to make an exception as the 3D extravaganza and the nice chaps from Disney will be transforming London’s Leicester Square for the event in aid of The Prince’s Foundation for Children & the Arts

The entire cast—including Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen and newcomer Mia Wasikowska as Alice will be attending, and hopefully we’ll be able to distinguish Tim burton and Helena Bonham-Carter from the drunks stumbling out of Chinatown as the entire place gets it’s bi-annual scrub down in preperation for a royal visit (that’s HRH The Prince of Wales, not Stephen Fry).

We’ve already seen some pretty stunning visuals – including the (did we mention it was exclusive? we probably should) new image of Anne Hathawy above – from the movie, as Alice “embarks on a fantastical journey to find her true destiny and end the Red Queen’s reign of terror” apparently. Oh -and it’s in lovely 3D – not sure how that works with the Cheshire Cat but hey-ho.

Alice in Wonderland is released across the UK on March the 5th on 2D, Disney Digital 3D and IMAX® 3D screens, so come on down and join in as we attempt to sneak past the bouncers and cram your camera full of celebrity goodness in aid of a good cause.

We’ve seen his heart, we’ve seen his nipples, we’ve even seen him pork his girlfriend in the middle of a shopping mall to a standing ovation. And now we get to see Jason Statham’s bloody ludicrous hitman Chev Chelios..in 3D!!

Fuck yeah.

Speaking to the slightly more respectable dudes over at TheFilmStage, Crank Co-Writer and Director Brian Taylor spilled the beans on the further adventures of The Stath’s mechanical heart/jacked-up-on “Chinese Shit” indestructidude: “I already have a storyline in place for Crank 3 – I think it’ll be in 3D”.

What peril remains to trouble a man who survived falling 10,000 feet from a helicopter? More importantly, what strategic McGuffins will be dropped to keep the baldy hard-man functioning this time round? Being 3D, we’re betting on fireworks and/or long, pointy objects.

News from our friends over at Electricspectre of something that might just -just-make the Star Wars prequel trilogy palatable: 3D!

FUN FACT: Did you know that in Phantom Menace most of the shots of Yoda were a puppet? Don’t worry though, those shots were re-done in CG for the new trilogy re-release. Yup.

On an unrelated note, Star Wars fans must once again brace for impact, as according to an interview with Access Hollywood (and received by ‘leccyspectre via Pocket Lint) Lucas has been inspired by Avatar to give Star Wars a three dimensional make-over.

“We’ve been looking for years and years and years of trying to take ‘Star Wars’ and put it in 3-D,” George explained to Access. “But, [the] technology hasn’t been there. We’ve been struggling with it, but I think this will be a new impetus to make that happen.”

Star Wars in 3D would be pretty sweet. However, many fans will be concerned that Lucas decides to do a little bit of extra tampering “whilst we’re here, y’know” and gives Boba Fett a supersoaker or something.

Thoughts?

Studios have a hard-on for that non-pirateable third dimension right now, so it’s only right that the mac daddy of merchandising gets the treatment, and if beirdy overlord Lucas says it-it’s the law – STS is looking forward to ducking flying Gungans soon…

Hi! I’m James Cameron, but you can call me Big Jimbo. You may remember me from such movies as Piranha II. I’d like to tell you about the dangers of climate change..and..erm..the plight of the Native American..or something..and I’d like to do t through the medium of animated nuclear explosions! Fuck Yeah!

Is there any movie on earth that couldn’t be perked up with a few exploding helicopters? Cameron has obviously been paying attention to the abortive foetus of his Terminator franchise and taking notes – unfortunately he was scribbling them in the back of a notebook at an Al Gore seminar, resulting in an unholy Robocop/Ferngully mashup that’s rolling under the weight of its own portent for most of the running time.

Underneath the astonishing technical displays and absolutely gob smacking visuals, Avatar is at heart a happy enough run of the mill kid’s film. With lots of added high voltage death dealing. Imagine a preacher on a roller coaster, or better yet, imagine a noodly old hippy in a moth eaten sweater strapped to a rocket powered laser cock, screaming “save the earth motherfucker!” and destroying any neo cons who don’t agree that we need climate action now.

Welcome dear reader to the world of Avatar, a movie so hyped that even the girls in my office know it exists, and unfortunately so cynical that they are actually looking forward to it. Cameron is a great storyteller, with spot on timing that’s cemented his place as Hollywoods go-to dude for..well, whatever it is he fancies making really – if you make several billion with a toy boat, you can generally afford to take time out to study deep sea exploration.

Unfortunately all that time underwater seems to have given big Jim a bubble in his brain, the only possible excuse for the vapid Cali-eco warriorisms faffing about on screen here. Sam Worthington starts things off as a marine, who’s attempts to ‘fight terror with terror…sigh… leave him paraplegic, so your sympathy button is already fired up when he’s plopped into the – it has to be said – piss poorly designed alien avatar, a cutesy boots lanky blue fella designed to mimic the Na’vi, indigenous to planet Pandora, and, in the opening scenes at least, ideal cannon fodder.

On the plus side, Avatar looks fucking astounding, go see it in 3D and I challenge you not to get a techno fetish hard-on as the beautiful dragonfly choppers blast overhead, rockets taking out great swathes of rain forest in some glorious destruction. Make no mistake, JC is a man who loves the smell of napalm in the morning, its just a pity he likes to balance it out with heaps of ‘hey, the Earth is like, totally our mother dude’ in the afternoon.

Add to this a badly thought out love story and the whole thing starts to teeter under the weight of its own pomp, it looks like a particularly well designed cut scene from a total emersion game, but..well, it’s a bit shit. Too syrupy and preachy for adults, too violent for the smaller children who’d enjoy the quasi dinosaurs and bright colours, Avatar is grab bag filmmaking that would benefit from having about an hour cut out – and of course more exploding helicopters.

Ultimately this is a technical triumph on a par with Jurassic Park or The Matrix in terms of raising the bar for what can be achieved in movies, but its unfocussed story telling means this can’t even rank as a magnificent failure. Note to JC – ditch the aliens, get back to killer robots!

Last week the whole geekverse collectively piled onto the internet to watch the teaser trailer to James Cameron’s long awaited 3D sci fi epic Avatar.

And…it was a bit naff. All the space stations, technology and believable bits of steel and glass looked really, bloody cool. And then…Big crappy tree elf creatures rendered in uncanny valley dwelling Jar Jar-o-vision. Lets not beat around the bush. They looked more like a cut scene from an eco friendly first person shooter on PS3 than the cinema event of the year. And I have  horrible feeling that the film will beat the viewer bloody by over use of the old and tired sci fi allegory about how we are destroying the planet. The aliens will, of course live in harmony with nature, symbolised by wearing fur and beads, and the humans will try to destroy them – for future-oil. Or whatever McGuffin Cameron comes up with.

I’m not holding my breath.