Can’t quite see the point of getting a HD television. Oh, I can see the point of HD; it may not actually make the acting or writing any better, and it may make programme-making even more expensive and time-consuming, but it’s fine if you’re watching a movie or a programme about brightly-coloured tree-frogs on jungle leaves glistening with rain-drops.
It’s just that, if those who are to believed are to believed, 3-D telly will be following shortly afterwards, so one might as well skip a generation and wait for that.
Not sure about 3-D stuff, myself. It’ll make a huge difference to action movies and CGI kids movies, all those blockbusters where they are desperate to make the cinema going experience bigger, louder and more jaw-dropping than the downloaded-off-the-internet experience. And 3-D will no doubt add another dimension to nature documentaries – as you already find in the IMAX shows where you snork with the fishies or flotate over the space shuttle.
I can imagine 3-D being a ‘plus’ for porn, though apparently, I am told, HD has not been such a great development, as there are some things you don’t want to see in vivid detail and HD has a habit of revealing blemishes and how much wake-up people are wearing.
But for comedy? Well, we can expect a few years, before the novelty wears off, of all sorts of gruesome bodily substances being splattered towards the viewer in order to solicit a groan of ‘ugh’. But after a few years of having people sneeze over you – or worse – I can imagine it will get pretty old pretty fast. What’s more interesting is that 3-D tends to mean longer, continuous wide shots – which may mean that comedy becomes closer to live theatre, just as it was in the 70’s.
