The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

[polkablues]

I seriously do not care a whit about Jackson's take on Tolkien's work (confirmed by this overlong, dramatically inert movie), so my only real case for seeing it in the theater was to test-drive the supposed New Big Thing of 48 frames-per-second, and it did not disappoint.  Wait.  No, opposite of that.  It disappointed.  It did nothing except disappoint.

What the Great Crime was to the Armenians, so is HFR to my ability to enjoy a film.

The best I can say for it is that after two hours or so, my brain stopped actively rebelling against it and it finally approximated to some small degree the experience of watching a film.  The worst I can say for it is that is was like watching a cross between a History Channel reenactment and a 1980s BBC series about LARPing.  Not even History Channel, one of those weird offshoots of the History Channel you get when you pay for the super-expanded cable package.

As it turns out, 24 frames-per-second is a magic number that should never be fucked with again.  The absence of motion blur, the off-putting, stutter-stepping "fast-forward" effect whenever a character moved... rather than the closer resemblance to reality that Peter Jackson promised, 48fps creates this nightmare shadowbox of reality, where your parents have been replaced by realistic alien clones who may or may not be planning to kill you and eat you once you fall asleep.  It's the uncanniest of valleys.  We as a species need to agree to put the whole idea on a train out of town and pretend it NEVER HAPPENED.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go boil my eyeballs.

[AntiDumbFrogQuestion]

48fps creates this nightmare shadowbox of reality, where your parents have been replaced by realistic alien clones who may or may not be planning to kill you and eat you once you fall asleep.