The Lela Awards: nominating the highs and lows in Stereoscopy

[tripletopper]

Hey Mods: I tried using your search mode, but it doesn't work well on Android. If there already is a topic of the best and worst 3d specific moments/movies, it's all right bye if you merge this with those other topics.

I would like to propose a vote by the community of 3D highs and lows, since the decline, if not death, of communal cinema as caused by Covid 19 probably marks the end of this 3D era (2007-2021 3D Blu Ray era), maybe we should remember some highs and lows in this era.

If Hollywood officially would want to commemorate it, they would give Ruby and Sapphire Glasses. (Anyone who sees this award trophy will know it's for stereoscopy). Of course since we're doing this all for free and for fun, the most I could promise someone is a cheap plastic lens and cardboard frame "faux Ruby and Sapphire" glasses.

And with every good there's an evil so we can commemorate the worst too as well as the best.

Let's propose some categories and some moments/films that would qualify as such.

1. The "Club of No Lelas" : movies that really hit great highs when seen in 3D and are really just blah movies in 2D. Or in the case of video games video games are "impossible to 100%" if you are Lela the Cyclops from Futurama .

Probably my nominee for the movie category would be Life of Pi. I would say James Cameron's Avatar but at least it's somewhat watchable in 2D, not excellent, but at least watchable But Life of Pi 2D is a snore fest, yet it in 3D makes all the difference. it's like night and day.

The game nominee I would suggest would be Super Mario 3D Land for the Nintendo 3DS. Nintendo officially has no game which would have the warning: "requires 3D in order to finish. 2DS users should not play this." Those optical illusion puzzles are hard enough with two eyes and removing one of those perspectives makes it a game of Luck instead of observation.
I would have nominated Crush 3D, except it's a remake of a game on either the PlayStation Portable or Playstation Vita, neither of which have stereoscopy.

The "Thor Ragnarok aka Poke My Eye Out Award". Should be an award for something if you watch the first time through you're like really into the story you're like really into the characters and then, at the worst possible time, at the emotional climax or the action climax or somewhere equally important, where you should be the most into the movie, during the first time you watch the movie, the 3D effects are so bad that you just forget everything else and just remember that the movie was totally bombed by poor 3D, quite possibly at the worst possible time.

That scene for me is the funeral scene of Avengers Endgame. Chalk this one up to an over-reliance on computers. When the city cam walks through the ground into naturally forming subgroups the Steadicam movement makes it look like the groups of mourners are just animated cardboard cutouts that are flat and two-dimensional. Did anyone else see that moment as horribly jarring? You would think the best way to do a 3D scene at a human scale at a human moment is to just walk a 3D steady cam through the crowd with a binocular camera and just pan and walk through and capture everything in true binocular 3D. And this is not me nitpicking the film and seeing the film for the fifth time and laughing at it as a fan. This is a first time viewing that totally changed my view of the movie. This is the first time that 3D actually ruined an otherwise good movie for what it is.

I even wrote to the Raxzie awards and was wondering if they had any categories for "Worst 3D". They never wrote me back, but that moment was so horrific yet so avoidable, it shod have had a special award.