I was too scared to go to Karnaval tonight. (Not for fear of crackheads, rapists, and muggers, mind, but mortal terror of K-Fed.) Besides, I was engaged elsewhere: A screening of The Nightmare Before Christmas in glorious 3-D at the Mann Criterion with a roomful of sing-alonging, screaming faithful.
Can it really have been thirteen years since I saw it the first time? It was Gina's birthday, and our little cadre of mean girls got all sparkled up and took up what seemed like half the theater. It was the first movie I ever bought, displayed lovingly in my room for years because of the SPECIAL EDITION embossed on the cover. That summer on a family trip to Florida I begged and pleaded and stomped until my mother took a whole day off from the beach to drive me inland to MGM, so I could see the display of actual sets and figures from the movie. This was pre-Tower of Terror. Kids my age didn't want to go to MGM. Ever. No dancing bears, no Mickey sightings, just a blossoming geek girl standing transfixed in front of a cabinet full of Skeleton Jack heads.
Disney Digital 3-D is some serious magic, y'all. It's not seamless, but it's as close as I've ever seen, by light-years. My quarrel with the format (aside from the fact that it usually looks terrible) is that movies seem, more often than not, converted to 3-D for the express purpose of making things jump at your face. And despite all manner of opportunity to do so, it only happens in Nightmare three or four times. For the rest of the film, it's just...there. Simply existing, in an admirable show of restraint from Disney/Pixar/ILM, to add form and shadow and depth, to brilliant effect.