Have you ever tried to watch a wide-screen movie while riding a rollercoaster? 4DX movie theaters provide roughly the same effect.
4DX theaters are touted as making moviegoers as much a part of the film they’re watching as possible. Once the 3D portion is in place (thanks to the same kind of special-effects glasses that have been used for decades), your movie experience simulates rain (mists of water), lightning (split-second lights) — and best of all, earthquakes, via rattling seats that make it a challenge not to end up on the floor. Disney World has used the 4D effect with such crowd-pleasers as The Muppets and Shrek. But it’s a lot easier to enjoy 10 minutes of this silliness than it is to provide a life-like experience for a feature film.
My first 4DX experience was last weekend, when my son and I saw Godzilla: King of the Monsters. (My mini-review of the movie: It’s enjoyable enough matinee fare, but don’t take any kids who are easily traumatized, and good luck trying to follow the plot.)
Happily, 4DX didn’t throw me out of my seat, but it did pull me out of the actual movie experience. I’m sure many people regard 4DX as a fun carnival ride. But for me, the “realistic” special effects just distracted me from the actual movie.
A really engrossing movie will draw you in without cheesy theatricals. Would Say Anything‘s iconic rain scene been more effective if the theater had been dripping water on us?
The 1977 sketch film Kentucky Fried Movie showed a theater-goer experiencing a movie in “Feel-Around.” An usher stood behind the movie-watcher to augment the movie’s action. When someone on-screen spilled a drink, the usher would douse the guy in wine. When the movie hero kisses his girl, guess what the usher does to the guy.
This was all played for laughs, of course. But I think I’d find Feel-Around more engrossing (if a bit gross) than 4XD.
So, would you like to know how technologically inept I am?
One weekend in Feb. 2019, my computer had an Internet connection, but I couldn’t get anything to come up on my computer screen. As is the way of all non-savvy computer nerds, I quickly deduced that the best way to get everything going again on my screen was to purge everything I could think of. By mistake, that included the user ID and password of my WordPress account.
When I tried to get back into my WordPress account, WordPress asked me for my user ID and password. I had forgotten my password long ago (I only use a few thousand of them), and the user ID was an email account that I had deleted long ago after it got hacked. WordPress informed me that, unless I could send them an email message from my user ID’s account, they would not be able to send me a new password, and therefore, I would be locked out of my own account.
And so it went. My access to four-and-a-half years of blogging and several hundred blog subscribers were suddenly locked behind bars. (I imagined hearing a loud “cha-ching!” from the TV series “Law & Order.”)
So I’ve decided to try and make lemonade out of my WordPress lemons. I am resuming my blogging career on this “sequel” blog.
Of course, I still have a “history” of previous blogging that I’d like to reference on occasion. So be forewarned that now, I will often hyperlink to my previous blog. For example, if I’m writing about Charlie Chaplin, and I want to reference a Chaplin movie review from my old blog, I will link to it like this. So please note that, obviously, if you go to that hyperlink, you will have to press the “Back” button on your computer keyboard in order to return to this “sequel” blog.
If, by chance, you know anyone who followed my previous blog but is not aware of my current situation, please let them know so that I can restore some of my old readership. And of course, please feel free to return to and reference my previous blog, whose URL is listed on the masthead of this blog.
Thank you for bearing with me through a quite troublesome situation.
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