The images were lensed in 4K resolution, and shot by astronauts from the International Space Station. Unless you’ve been to the ISS, and there are those in greater Houston who have, you’ve never seen views like those on display in A Beautiful Planet. Jennifer Lawrence narrates.

Witness a typhoon with a well defined 25-mile eye; the aurora borealis from outer space (approximately 250 kilometers above Earth); surreal views of major cities from an astronaut’s viewpoint; thunderstorms at night; and even how items are stored on the ISS, as well as the first espresso machine in space complete with a zero gravity cup.

While there are no country borders from this high up there are certain nations that are delineated by light and dark. One such place is Seoul, South Korea, which is lit up at night while North Korea, just next door and with as many people, is uncomfortably dark. Areas of drought (in California) and smoke from fires in tropical forests (in South America) are easily visible. Each picture says 1000 words and yet some images are beyond words.

A Beautiful Planet is unwinding in an exclusive one-week engagement at the Edwards Marq’e IMAX Theater.

— Michael Bergeron

Flash-forward to 1952 and the second wave of 3D moviemaking caught filmmaker’s fancy. For the next couple of years films of all genres were made in 3D, from John Wayne movies (Hondo) to killer robots. The latter subject was main plot of Gog, made at the end of the ‘50s 3D cycle and basically buried upon release and not seen in its pristine 3D form until now.

Gog 3D (3/1, Kino Lorber) was produced by Ivan Tors who was known for his sense of scientific accuracy in his productions. Of course even the most fastidious modern sci-fiers like Apollo 13 or Gravity or The Martian will have detractors that point out how this or that couldn’t happen. Previously Tors had made similarly themed atomic generation tales of wonder The Magnetic Monster (1953) and Riders to the Stars (1954) and all three films constitute a trilogy known as the Office of Scientific Investigation. During this period Tors also was the showrunner for the television series Science Fiction Theatre.

The 3D process gives Gog a very deep look. Every scene has its layers and the bright colors used for costumes only add to the sense that things are popping out of the screen and into your eyes. The cameras used for the 3D effects are different that one used for contemporary films and subsequently the look is divergent. Watching Gog I never felt that sense of staring into a forced perspective like modern 3D so much as being thrust into the space that the characters, and robots, inhabit.

A group of scientists are planning space travel research from an underground laboratory. When an accident occurs the investigators come up against the mind of a supercomputer (NOVAC) and its robots Gog and Magog that really seem to run the secret base. Destruction with a camp sensibility ensues. Richard Egan and Constance Dowling (who later married Tors) star. Themes are played out that would become a staple in later sci-fi movies from Colossus: The Forbin Project to The Andromeda Strain to The Terminator.

Extras are superb and include audio commentary by film historians Tom Weaver, Bob Furmanek and David Schecter. At one point they mention that actor William Shallert makes his first appearance in a sci-fi film here but Shallert also co-stared in The Man From Planet X, a cult classic helmed by Edgar G. Ulmer from 1951. There’s also an excellent interview with the director Herbert Strock as well as a 20-minute featurette with Natural Vision 3D co-creator (also the director of photography on Gog) Lothrop Worth that contains as much lore about Hollywood as you can cram into a reel.

As for Gog the robot, the mechanical fury moves around more like one of those automated vacuum cleaners than a humanoid C-3PO. And that fact alone moves Gog a few notches up on the essential viewing list.

— Michael Bergeron

The new version of Poltergeist was shot in the 3D process and contains the hallmark of that genre. A squirrel jumps straight into the lens at one point. Every reel there is one object or another coming straight at the viewer. Another signifier of 3D – the tilt shift shot – appears throughout Poltergeist. The tilt shift makes the image look sharp and yet forces the perspective to make the highlighted object in focus look like a miniature. The tilt shift use in Poltergeist revolves around establishing shots of the house where the family has just moved.

Of course the house and the neighborhood around it was built on top of an ancient graveyard. Yada yada. For what it offers – PG13 horror thrills for an age group that wasn’t alive when the 1982 Poltergeist came out – the new Poltergeist delivers on that count.

The original Poltergeist itself was loosely based on an episode of The Twilight Zone: “Little Girl Lost” from season three, which aired in March of 1962. The main criticism about the new Poltergeist questions why a classic film would be remade. Because they don’t re-release films nowadays like they used to. Oft times the only way to see a classic film is at a museum showing or someplace like the Alamo Drafthouse, which specializes in the old and the new.

After my screening of Poltergeist I took my 3D glasses and walked into a 3D showing of Road Warrior: Fury Road 3D, and watched the first 10-minutes. Then I walked over to another auditorium in the same theater and watched the first 10-minutes of Mad Max: Fury Road in regular 2D. Mind you, MMFR was shot in 2D, after extensive 3D tests where director George Miller scrapped the 3D plan in favor of one that offered a better array of lenses.

Plain and simple, the 2D MMFR was sharp and the visual imagery fed the viewer’s sense of depth. The 3D MMF was too dark and not sharp, the resolution looking rather fuzzy. This is the opinion of someone who has already seen MMFR (2D) twice.

— Michael Bergeron

At this point the MC grabbed the mic and told the audience, “Give it up, people, let’s have a hand of applause. It’s not about what you like.”

It’s not about what you like goes a long way in explaining how people react to artistic interpretations of art, music and film. It’s not about what you like is exactly how one should approach a film by Jean-Luc Godard, the enfant terrible of French cinema. Godard has not made a commercially accessible film since 1980, and that title would be Every Man For Himself or Sauve qui peut (la vie). Even that film is a far cry from such iconic nouvelle vogue titles as Contempt, Masculin Féminin or Breathless.

The new Godard film Goodbye to Language 3D literally has six screenings in Texas, three in Austin and three at the Alamo Drafthouse Mason Park, which technically is in Katy but that’s close enough to Houston to count as a day trip. Godard and his cinematographer Fabrice Arango spent five years on the production of this film, the only 3D film Godard has made. Cameras utilized include the Canon 5D and the Flip Minos, and while the former camera is expensive both are still within the budget of regular consumers. Godard and Arango achieve a kind of anti-3D where some of the shots are double exposures and you can only focus on them by closing the right or left eye. Eventually the images merge into perfect 3D as they cross paths. There’s a parallax view experience going on that is better witnessed visually than explained verbally.

Like many recent Godard films Goodbye to Language 3D occupies its running time with political references here exemplified by shots of helicopters and sounds of gunfire. Intercut throughout the 70-minute running time are a French couple, mostly naked, and a dog. The dog’s nose lunges out to the audience like a spear being thrown by a native in a 1950s’ 3D film. Likewise many of the angles chosen put the viewer askance with what is happening on-screen. Like one high angle shot from the top of a shower where the faucet head is in the foreground while blood seems to be pumping from an unseen source into the water below.

Traditionally 3D films, like Avatar or Hugo, are shot with 3D cameras but with a forced perspective. The director tells the audience where to look. Goodbye to Language couldn’t be less concerned with such formalities. Different shots in GTL are so sharp and in deep focus that your eyes are confused as where to exactly plant their gaze. The aforementioned double exposure shots will confound all but the most serious viewer.

Godard may be the most idiosyncratic director to ever commit a film to the cinema. It’s like he’s only making films for anybody who can identify specific quotes from Claude Monet or Mary Shelley, or for those who can tell the difference between Jean Arthur and Miriam Hopkins, much less Fritz Lang (who appeared in Godard’s philistine look at ‘60s movie production in Contempt). The average bear on the street will not recognize a reference to Godard any more than a wink and nod to Alistair MacLean (Guns of Navarone, Ice Station Zebra, Satan Bug) who like Godard was a genre staple of the 1960s.

If there’s one character in GTL that sticks out it’s the dog. At one point we see the trusty canine bobbing its head above water as it’s trust down a river brimming with rapids. Of course, even the lowest budget digital film can afford CGI yet Godard never shied away from depicting animal cruelty (cf. Weekend). Who is to say that this is not a tip of the pork pie hat to the D. W. Griffith film Way Down East where Lillian Gish did death defying stunts in a similar icy tumultuous situation? Previously the dog’s pointy nose was projecting out of the screen and into my lap in true Godard style of frame-by-frame posturing.

Likewise a Parisian couple, rarely clad in clothing, have at least three scenes where the femme is in the foreground while the male sits on a toilet doing his business. There are some references to merde that would easily fit into a Farrelly Brothers film. I can’t recall Godard ever being quite so scatological. Perhaps in his mid-80s Godard is finding avenues of expression that have eluded him all of his life.

Goodbye to Language 3D unwinds one final time (in Houston yet in Katy) at the Alamo Drafthouse Mason Park on Wednesday, February 4 at 8 pm.

— Michael Bergeron

By: Michael Bergeron

When I was a senior in high school (100 years ago), they showed Citizen Kane in 16mm to the students. There were two viewing groups divided by the first letter of the last name. I was in the first group and when the second group began watching, I was in drama class -which was located right behind the auditorium stage where the film was playing. So a friend and I climbed up onto the catwalk where you hang lights for the stage and waited until the end of the film. When Rosebud appeared, we took a rubber chicken on a rope and swung it down right in front of the screen so you had the shadow of the chicken swinging in front of the burning sled. I guess my point is that I became a film critic in order to atone for the sins of my youth.

Flash forward to 2024. When I was a kid this was the year that we were supposed to have already colonized the Moon and physically been to Mars. All the time I meet people who say they haven’t seen Citizen Kane or A Clockwork Orange, ditto any of the films of Alfred Hitchcock. I am so envious of those people because, in a sense, they still have some of the greatest experiences of their lives ahead of them. (In addition to traveling to the Great Pyramids or the Grand Canyon or reading a good book.)

Every movie year has it peaks and valleys. Obviously the studios sandbag the end of the year with movies they expect to receive accolades (Les Miz, Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Silver Linings Playbook, et al.). But any self-aware movie maven knows there are excellent films that fall outside the realm of major studios and their advertising budgets each and every month of the year: Compliance, God Bless America, Damsels in Distress, Safety Not Guaranteed. Throw in foreign films, revivals, and the ever increasing do-it-yourself movement that manifests itself via streaming electronic downloads and you could spend your entire life watching nothing but movies. But yes, all play and no work makes Jack a dull boy.

Just as 2024 has acknowledged the triumphant return of great American directors like Steven Spielberg, Robert Zemeckis, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino, 2024 may be viewed a few months from now, as the year that foreign helmers from South Korea got their due. Jee-woon Kim (I Saw the Devil) helms the Schwarzenegger drug cartel actioner The Last Stand (out in January), and Oldboy director Park Chan-wook  has his Hitchcock tribute Stoker scheduled for release in March from Fox Searchlight. Stoker is loosely based on Hitch’s 1943 Shadow of a Doubt, wherein a young woman falls under the dubious influence of her Uncle Charlie. Also, there’s a 2024 American remake of Oldboy on the docket that’s directed by Spike Lee and stars Josh Brolin as the imprisoned man.

But if anything heralds a game change for 2024, it would be the introduction of advanced frame rate projection. It’s beyond the scope of this article to elucidate the history of frame rate as it pertains to persistence of vision and movie projection. Suffice it to say that most current theatrical projection has seen the replacement of analog mechanical projectors with digital projection operating on the premise of 24 frames a second. Considering that there’s a black horizontal line between each frame that’s roughly 48 images a second that the eye beholds. (If you’re interested in a pioneer in advanced frame rate filmmaking look up Douglas Trumbull and his experiments with the process Showscan).

Beginning with the release of The Hobbit (Warner Bros.), theaters will introduce screenings with a frame rate of 48fps. Director Peter Jackson shot The Hobbit using the Red Epic camera shooting at 48fps. On a side note, The Hobbit will be a trilogy prequel to Lord of the Rings with an installment rolling out every year for the next three years. The three films are titled An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, and There and Back Again.

As usual, Hollywood has labeled the advanced frame process with an acronym that also acts as a branding moniker. HFR3D, which stands for High Frame Rate 3D, will hopefully prove to be the same kind of advancement in watching cinema that sound was to silent. In this case, a refinement in the flicker rate that translates into a greater perception of objects in movement. Think action sequences and rapidly-edited fight scenes.

As always, the average bear will merely be confused when they see a film advertised as being in 2D, 3D, IMAX 3D, and HFR3D. Happy trails and just keep repeating – it’s only a movie.