Eye-Poppin' Dept.

The Times takes a peek at the next big frontier for filmmaking: 3-D. Or, rather, the next thing they can think of to get us back into theaters instead of cooped up in front of screens that are easily as good if not better than anything you'd find in the local omniplex.

It's a redux of the whole push to digital in theaters as well: who pays? And in the short run, everyone's trying to find some way to shove the costs off onto a third party.

But the main stopper for me is 3-D as a storytelling device. There's yet to be a major movie in 3-D that couldn't just as easily been told in 2-D — or that used 3-D in a way that no "flat" movie could emulate.

James Cameron's upcoming Avatar is turning into the receptacle for expectations about such things. Many people don't even care if it's in 3-D or not; they just want something that wasn't as treacly at heart as Titanic. (Me included.)