Movies (Page 6)

This Halloween season, most of the current horror flicks are a bore. Some of them are actually (unintentionally) funny. Maybe the problem is that Americans have too many real things to be scared about.

Pop culture guru Rob Weiner says, “The recent slate of horror movies is pathetic. They aren’t scary. There’s nothing that captures the imagination. It’s like Hollywood ran out of ideas. It’s a really sorry state of affairs [and] audiences deserve better.”
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If movie executives could figure out how to read our minds, they’d have a hit film every time. They haven’t perfected the technique yet, but they’re working on it.

The NYU film school has enlisted their psychology department to help future screenwriters and directors figure out what movie goers want to see. Since films take years to arrive on screen, they need to figure this out before the audience realizes it themselves.

Neuroscientist Uri Hasson started out by showing dramatic movies, such as Hitchcock films, to people and while watching to their brains with an fMRI machine, to see what parts of the brain “lit up” during which parts of the film. The Hitchcock film caused similar responses in the same area of all the viewers’ brains.
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If you’re planning on seeing a film today, you’ll be glad to know that someday soon, we’ll be able to watch 3D films WITHOUT those pesky cardboard glasses because they’ll be holograms.

BBC News reports that researchers have developed a material in which holographs can be created in minutes. Of course, the images in animation need to change every few SECONDS, so this would create very slow movements, meaning the holograms aren?t ready for movie theaters yet.

Meanwhile, quantum physics has reached our movie theaters. Do parallel universes?of the kind Whitley wrote about in his latest novel 2012? really exist? What about time travel and teleportation?
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