Whatever the merits or otherwise of Avatar, there can be no arguing against the fact that James Cameron’s latest blockbuster has redefined the future of cinema. A new type of camera was invented to make the film, and entire cinemas have been built specifically to screen it in all its digital IMAX 3D glory. But is 3D all it is cracked up to be?

I saw the Avatar: An IMAX 3D Experience presentation at the brand new Odeon Metrocentre cinema in Gateshead, the only digital IMAX theatre outside of London, and opened in the week of the movie’s release. Screenings were fully-booked days in advance, and we struggled to get tickets for a couple of weeks.

When we did eventually get to see it, we were sat at the front right corner – not great seats for the £12.50 ticket price. The screening was preceded by a brief introduction from a man in a suit who reminded us to return our hefty 3D specs for sterilisation after the movie, and warned us that the immersive nature of the experience might cause illness. But there was no warning of physical injury. Looking up and left at the huge screen for 162 minutes required a painful twisting of the neck and back that left me in pain for a few days afterwards. Injured by a 3D movie! Pah!

The 3D effect certainly works, although the final image appears to be made up of several flat layers, almost like a paper diorama, and so is not particularly realistic. The end result is a little like leafing through a child’s pop-up book. Amusing, and worth a look, but hardly the holy grail of cinema. It seems to me a technology that will be better suited to video games rather than movies. And the sum effect of Avatar is a bit like watching someone play a video game for the best part of three hours.

The movie itself – well, it’s Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure on a bigger budget, isn’t it? To be fair to Cameron, he has obviously tried hard to ensure that the 3D doesn’t get in the way of the story. For example, there are noticeably few arrows and pointy sticks flying out of the screen. But the overall experience still detracts from the movie’s content. Moviegoers around me were constantly removing their glasses to see how the effect worked, and looking around the cinema to see how it was affecting others. Hardly the immersive experience Cameron was trying to create.

And that’s the problem with 3D. Unlike sound and colour, 3D doesn’t represent an advancement in cinema technology. In many ways it’s a backward step. Rather than immerse the cinemagoer in the movie, 3D is an unwelcome distraction. Using 3D for the odd novelty slasher movie is fine, but surely no one want to see it become the standard for every blockbuster movie?

Unfortunately, the amount of money invested in 3D suggests that we’re going to be seeing a lot more of it. Better get used to those specs.

Film, Technology

Voddler is a much-talked-about video on demand service that launched in beta testing mode in Sweden last year. The service allows registered users to stream movies and TV shows either on a free ad-supported basis, or premium pay-as-you-go or subscription options.

So far Voddler has attracted at least £10 million of investment, and has signed deals with Disney and Paramount. It’s been labelled as a Spotify for movies, but can it live up to the hype?

Voddler beta is currently only (officially) available by invitation in Sweden, but I’ve had the opportunity to try it here in the UK. (It’s possible to register for an invitation at www.voddler.com, and on receipt sign up using a Swedish zip code – thanks Andy.)

The initial impressions of the Voddler client are poor. Navigation is via the keyboard arrow keys, with no mouse or QWERTY use, and username and password entry is incredibly laborious. Setting up the screen resolution size is a similarly annoying process. It seems to have been optimised for wide screens – great for TVs, but not so good when viewing on most computer monitors.

Once logged in, you’re presented with a very underwhelming menu screen – essentially a load of movie poster thumbnails that can be sorted into recommended, free, premium and genre categories. Highlighting a thumbnail brings up (very) brief details, such as director, runtime, and year of release. Again, navigation is annoyingly slow. But what’s available?

The free-to-view movies include the likes of Chinatown, Crash, Chopper, Bridge To Terabithia, The Italian Job, Lucky Number Slevin, and Saws I-IV. So there’s plenty to keep you occupied, although perhaps nothing to really excite.

Premium movies, costing around 24 to 37 Swedish Krona (£2 to £3.25) each, include titles such as Angels and Demons, The Proposal, The Wrestler, Watchmen, Hanna Montana, and Saw V.

The TV show category is home to a forgettable selection of cheap documentaries of the type that play on unwatched Sky channels.

The actual viewing experience is more impressive. After a brief period of buffering, your chosen movie is preceded by a couple of (Swedish) ads, and a trailer. Movie playback is very good, certainly comparable with the BBC iPlayer, although again the clunky controls let Voddler down.

Overall, Voddler seems to have the under-the-hood technology in place, but needs to work on its user interface. One of the real joys of Spotify was how instantly and easily it worked. Voddler, in contrast, is slow and difficult to use. The movie selection isn’t great, but this will no doubt expand as it moves out of beta and into other territories.

For the time being there is enough here to make it worth installing on your laptop for long train journeys, but, unlike Spotify, Voddler is far from essential.

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Film, Technology

We are now just days away from leaving the decade that has been the noughties, although we don’t yet have a similarly catchy name for the 2010s. And if 2009 was a little thin on helpings of five-star entertainment, the noughties as a whole was thick with it. So here, as seems obligatory, is my wholly self-indulgent, why-should-anyone-else-care, mercifully brief review of the best of 2009 and the noughties.

In music, the big news of 2009 was the UK launch of Spotify, the streaming music service that has already changed the way millions of us listen to music, just as the iPod did at the beginning of the decade. Most of the music picks below are linked to Spotify for your listening pleasure. (The other links point to Amazon.co.uk.)

In terms of actual music, 2009 wasn’t a vintage year. There were enjoyable albums by A Camp, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Noah and the Whale, but the only couple I really had on repeat play were Sigh No More by Mumford and Sons and the odd but fantastic indie-prog opera that was The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists.

Great movies were equally difficult to find in 2009. I wasn’t as blown away as the Oscar voters by Slumdog “Milliner”. Much better were Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, The Hangover, Swedish kiddie-vampire flick Let The Right One In, and JJ Abrams’ surprisingly entertaining re-imagining of Star Trek.

No 2009 movie was as good as the best of 2009’s TV. Season two of Mad Men was a joy, with Don Draper developing into one of TV’s most intriguing characters. The Thick of It was the best British offering, with Peter Capaldi’s Malcolm Tucker spinning fantastically out of control. And any Seinfeld fan will have loved the reunion storyline that ran through the hilarious final(?) season of Curb Your Enthusiam.

Books? Maybe it was weariness in my first year away from book publishing, but I’m not sure I found a single 5-star book in 2009.

But what about the noughties as a whole? It was a great decade for music, and I’m struggling to whittle my selection of faves down to less than ten. So I’m going for Gold by Ryan Adams, Josh Rouse’s Nashville, The Trials of Van Occupanther by Midlake, Glory Hope Mountain by The Acorn, O by Damien Rice, Come On Feel The Illinoise by Sufjan Stevens, The Crane Wife by The Decemberists, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco, Funeral by Arcade Fire, and Give Up by The Postal Service. (Annoyingly, my two top picks aren’t available on Spotify, so the service is by no means perfect.)

The best movies of the noughties? They’ve got to include The Lives of Others, The Royal Tennenbaums, Donnie Darko, and Daniel Day Lewis in Paul Thomas Anderson’s incredible There Will Be Blood.

The noughties was quite possibly the decade in which TV came of age, thanks in no small part to HBO. The Sopranos ran through until 2007, and the intelligent, multi-layered mob drama, with every episode better than most movies, probably deserves to be called the greatest TV show ever made. Perhaps only David Simon’s intricate, addictive onscreen novel The Wire can challenge for that accolade. HBO also brought us Curb Your Enthusiam, Six Feet Under, Deadwood and Band of Brothers, all brilliant in different ways. Elsewhere in US TV, the reimagining of Battlestar Galactica was approximately one zillion times better than any reimagining of a really quite rubbish 70s sci-fi soap had any right to be. From US network TV, Arrested Development was a brilliant and much-missed sitcom, and The Shield was a brutally gripping cop drama that literally pulled no punches.

As for books, my favourites of the decade include Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, The Damned United by David Peace, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers meddled brilliantly with the formula of how books are supposed to be written. And The Road by Cormac McCarthy was quite possibly the best book I’ve ever read.

So that was the noughties. What will the next decade bring? Will the album format survive? Will the CD become obsolete? Will Voddler do for movies what Spotify did for music? Will electronic books take off?

As for that catchy name for the years 2010 to 2019, anyone for “tennies”?

Books, Film, Music