Five Awesome Movies That Should Have Been 3D (and Now Actually Can Be!)

by Awl Sponsors

3D movies are everywhere, but what about all those awesome films from back in the day that never had the chance? Well, forget about waiting for Hollywood to do silly remakes of them. Thanks to innovative new technology and one smokin’ cool little 2D/3D conversion button, movie junkies like me can actually go back in time and make what was once flat (but still awesome) into something three-dimensionally cool.

The TV offering this little twist of visual magic is the new LG Cinema 3D and rather than go into some long, drawn-out tech explanation of how it works, let me say this: All you have to do is push one button and any 2D movie you’re watching instantly presents in brilliant, smack-ya-upside-the-head 3D. Toss on the 3D specs and grab yourself a seat, for I am about to present my top five picks for movies that’ll finally get the 3D treatment they so richly deserve.

#5: “Diehard”
Back before Bruce Willis started shaving it all off, his John McClane was the balding everyman that kicked butt and bled profusely as he did so. Few movies warrant 3D more than this one — and seeing Hans Gruber fall to his death in glorious 3D is more than worth the wait.

#4: “Escape From New York”
Snake Plissken never looked so good. The dystopian nightmare that John Carpenter imagined is at its cheesy best in televised 3D. The chaotic rubble ruled by the Duke of New York never seemed so… rubble-y.

#3: “Predator”
This film is easily one of the best Arnold Schwarzenegger movies ever made — and the fact that Arnie never appeared in 3D is a modern crime. And how fun is watching the future governors of California and Minnesota go toe-to-toe with a made-for-3D alien monster collecting skull-mugs for his man-cave back home?

#2: “Back to the Future”
Marty McFly lived every guy’s dream — a chance to turn back the clock, fix all the problems, and make your future come alive. This movie was just destined for 3D. Heck, just seeing Biff’s fists coming at you makes watching this epic a blast.

#1: “Ghostbusters”
Easily the best of the films begging for 3D viewing, “Ghostbusters” gives us Bill Murray and company at their smugly comedic best. Watch it now in LG 3D and savor the glory that is the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man stomping around Times Square. And do it before some horrific, memory-savaging remake or ghastly 2nd sequel is created to insult your psyche.

For more info on the LG Cinema 3D TV, click here.

Which of your favorite movies would you convert to 3D with the LG Cinema 3D TV?

“Two men in Missouri who became severely ill after sustaining tick bites were found to be infected with a new type of virus, according to a study from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).”

“We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

Observers: Paul Ryan’s convention speech last night was possibly a tad inaccurate. Will he somehow manage to get away with it? Yeah, probably.

Andrew Kessler and Jay Caspian Kang read; Xiu Xiu and The Vaselines play. Unfortunately, neither do this together.

‘Rebecca’: The Real Housewives Of Cornwall County

Oh, DAPHNE. Daphne. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” THAT’S how you open a novel, guys! Right there. Make it count. What’s Manderley? Why aren’t you there now? Why are you telling me about it? We have so many questions, and we’ve barely used our old-timey paper knives to cut open the first few leaves. (Just kidding! This book is from the 1930s, the leaves were already cut for you. Which is good, really, because I don’t even like to have to turn my Kindle on, and instead just leave it in sleep-mode all the time, you know?) No, the first chapter of the novel is not only completely perfect in every way, it must have inspired Our Girl Shirley Jackson when she came up with “The Haunting of Hill House” twenty years later. Remember? “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.” Bingo!

Sure, maybe it’s just your generic “this old house is full of seeeeeecrets and andirons you could never find at Restoration Hardware” schtick, but, let’s face it, everyone who wrote after du Maurier owes a debt to du Maurier. “The Birds”? That was her, too! So, obviously du Maurier is a genius, let’s talk about Rebecca.

THAT BITCH. Or, was she? Twist! No, see, the thing is, we’re never quite sure if she was really a monster or not, right? Du Maurier was influenced by Jane Eyre, and let’s just say that we’re still waiting for someone to Wide Sargasso Sea our friend, the first Mrs. Maxim de Winter. Maybe Maxim is the monster! Maybe they were both monsters, in that full-on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf-y way of the couple that enjoys embarrassing dinner guests with their performative fighting. Which brings me to my other contention: God, what Andy Cohen would have given to get his hot little hands on these people. Are they not made for reality TV? It wouldn’t have been Mrs. Danvers putting a bug in our heroine’s ear about replicating that damned outfit for the big party, that’s for sure. “Hey… do you know what would be SO MUCH FUN?” Totally. No one would have been killed, either, it would have been three seasons of wine-throwing and shouting and make-up-sex and pointed interviews in Us Weekly, followed eventually by divorce and more interviews and a ghost-written (hee!) cookbook.

Let’s think about how we would have conducted ourselves differently, were we the unnamed heroine (let’s call her “Mallory,” just to make it easier to talk about her). Hands up if you would have immediately packed off Mrs. Danvers! “Oh,” Mallory says, wispily, “oh, Maxim would have been cross.” Whatever, Mallory. You’re the hot young thing, he’s the cranky widower. Blow him, then say “I really must insist we let Danvers go. Let’s shine some new light into the place!” Then, literally, rip out all the tapestries and curtains and let a team of closeted 1930s homosexuals go nuts with Maxim’s line of credit until you’re in a few magazines. Right? Alternatively, burn the place down, and go live in Monte Carlo. Or whatever country they play cards in in Casino Royale — Montenegro? Any place with a bunch of little cafes and a Chanel store. Cornwall is not for the young and beautiful, Mallory. And I bet Manderley is ruinously expensive to heat. You can feel the damp radiating off the walls from here. I don’t know how the humidity suits YOUR hair…

Or, well, we could guess. Mallory does spend a LOT of time negging herself, doesn’t she? “…straight, bobbed hair and youthful, unpowdered face, dressed in an ill-fitting coat and skirt and a jumper of my own creation.” “…the raw ex-schoolgirl, red-elbowed and lanky-haired.” “I was like a little scrubby schoolboy with a passion for a sixth-form prefect, and he kinder, and far more inaccessible.” “…my dull, lanky hair.” “…the sorry spectacle that I made, with troubled eyes and scarlet cheeks, lank hair flapping under broad felt hat.” “…my sticky hands…” But that’s all just window-dressing, because the big guns are saved for Mrs. Danvers. I mean, you simply cannot read du Maurier’s description without wondering why the townspeople haven’t already burned the evil hag at the stake: “Someone advanced from the sea of faces, someone tall and gaunt, dressed in deep black, whose prominent cheek-bones and great, hollow eyes gave her a skull’s face, parchment-white, set on a skeleton’s frame.” But, you know, Mallory has lank hair? (Shampoo, rinse, two squirts of Bumble and bumble’s Prep spray and an ionic dryer, you’ve got yourself a stew going.)

This is the issue, of course, with the gloriousness of Rebecca, the canker in the heart of the rose. Rebecca was fun, Mallory is a bit of a drip, and she is in no position to enjoy being mistress of Manderley. I’m sorry, but it’s true. The whole place is no good, it smells musty, the staff is either evil or has one foot in the grave, and Maxim is a bit surly; you need to sweep in there like a FREAKING QUEEN, and start ripping out drywall. Or peat, or whatever they were building dessicated mansions out of in Cornwall prior to the Conquest. But that’s just not how it’s going to go. It’s going to be a lot of fumbling and apologizing to Mrs. Danvers for moving your dressing table and saying “Maxim, are you happy?” and then throwing one terrible party. But that part isn’t even the good part, is it?

No, to the casual reader (and aren’t we all, really), the emotional pay-off of Rebecca is not “I HATED HER,” or “I KILLED HER” or “SHE WAS DYING ANYWAY,” or “THROW YOURSELF AND YOUR LANKY PEASANT HAIR OUT THE WINDOW.” No, it arrives in a blur less than a hundred pages in, when Mallory is supposed to leave Monte Carlo with the wretched Mrs. Van Hopper, like the fluffy, lanky little white-mouse-with-pink-eyes she is, and instead dashes into Maxim’s room to reveal their untimely departure, and he’s all “I, a MAN, shall set this to rights.” And then he proposes, and says he wants to “make violent love to [her] behind a palm tree,” and she’s all “I’ll take two tickets on THAT ride,” and then Maxim tells Mrs. Van Hopper the truth, but we’re not in the room to hear, and then Mrs. Van Hopper is a total buzz-killing wang about it to Mallory, but, suck it, Mrs. Van Hopper! No one cares what you think.

Whew, let’s talk it out.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

• Assuming your name isn’t Daphne du Maurier, which would just be unfair, what pen name would you use to write glorious Gothic-y novels? Try pairing a virtue with a tree. Like, “Constance Birch,” or “Faith Loosestrife.” Did you know Daphne actually married a “Browning”? Like her name wasn’t good enough already. Okay, she did become “Lady Browning,” which I guess I would consider. Hm.

• There’s no way you missed “Texts From Rebecca,” right?

• Have any of you read her short story about the male sex doll?

• Have any of you read the Brazilian novel this whole thing may be a rip-off of?

• Have any of you read the authorized sequel?

• Have any of you read the authorized sort-of-sequel?

• What houses do you pretend you own? Knole? It’s all about Knole, for me.

• Seriously, do you not think you could talk Maxim into sending Danvers off with a golden parachute of some kind? The woman is clearly psychologically unstable. Try harder, Mallory.

• Du Maurier was a little gay. How does that make you feel about Rebecca’s paper-thin undies NOW? Same? Me too.

• What would the first sentence of the novel be if Jasper, the loyal spaniel, had written it?

Previously: The Mists Of Avalon

Nicole Cliffe is the books editor of The Hairpin and the proprietress of Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviews.

★★★★ An autumnal sparkle, but with the intensity of summer. The pavement, wetted overnight, had baked dry by late morning. By the fifth or sixth block of walking, a black shirt was an occasion for mild perspiration and regret. Later in the day, wind blew over the rooftops; yet more wind blew up Mott Street. Sounds carried distinctly through the clear air: a sting of horns from the stereo in a slow-moving van, the rustle of a bag against the pan of a produce scale across the street, the cough of a silky little dog riding in a blue wire shopping cart. The light picked out faces in the crowd — deep-lined and mole-flecked, or ivory-smooth, or glazed with shine — like an attentive, generous portraitist. A taxi fender blazed.

“95 percent of users on Svbtle are men, while App.net is 94 percent male and Medium has a slightly more generous division at 72 percent. It seems the virtual ladies’ room is still line-free.”

The British Invasion… Again: The Amazing Evacuation

by Robert Sullivan

Day six in a seven-day series exploring how the trail of the Battle of Brooklyn would pass across modern-day New York. Shown in photo, morning on Gowanus Bay.

On the American side, 2,000 rebels were killed, wounded or captured. On the British side, only a few dozen were dead. And so, back up on the Heights of Brooklyn, a mile’s stretch of water from New York, the Americans began the evacuation.

It would be over by dawn, and, until dawn, only the Americans will know. The British line that comes upon the last boats leaving will see a tall red-headed officer push off towards the island of Manhattan — it’s thought to have been General Washington himself. A Brooklyn woman, loyal to the British, found out in the midst of it; she instructed her slave, a young boy, to hurry to the British lines, but he was captured by Hessians who couldn’t understand his Dutch. Private Joseph Martin, a teenage Connecticut soldier who, after the war, wrote an account of all the Battles he had witnessed, from Lexington and Concord to the final British defeat at Yorktown, remembered the quiet: “We were strictly enjoined not to speak, or even cough, while on the march. All orders were given from officer to officer, and communicated to the men in whispers.”

They were marching from all around Brooklyn Heights, down to the water, to the ferry landing, from which point the army would cross the East River to New York.

The evacuation is the beginning of a new kind of strategy for Washington, who has to be convinced not to leave, who thinks maybe he can hold the British back. At a council of war in the Heights, his generals decide the danger of being cut off by the British fleet in the East River is too great. (Up to that moment, a northeast wind is holding the fleet back down towards the Narrows.) Amongst the new American troops brought in from Manhattan are the Massachusetts regiment commanded by John Glover, my personal favorite Revolutionary War general. Glover’s Marbleheaders are fisherman, boat-friendly, and they begin to row the artillery and then the soldiers across — one Marbleheader recalled eleven round trips, about 22 miles. Glover orchestrated the amphibious Crossing of the Delaware, and in some ways the evacuation of Brooklyn is the Crossing of the Delaware, Part I.

The British, considering the evacuation when it is over, had high praise. Edmund Burke wrote: “Those who were best acquainted with the difficulty, embarrassment, noise and tumult, which attend even by day, and no enemy at hand, a movement of this nature with several thousand men, will be the first to acknowledge, that this retreat should hold a high place among military transactions.”

The evacuation starts at just after dark and goes all night. A journal: “Unluckily, too, about nine o’clock the adverse wind and tide and pouring rain began to make the navigation of the river difficult… However, at eleven o’clock there was another and a favorable change in the weather. The north-east wind died away, and soon after a gentle breeze set m from the south-west, of which the sailors took quick advantage, and the passage was now’direct, easy, and expeditious. The troops were pushed across as fast as possible in every variety of craft — row-boats, flat-boats, whale-boats, pettiaugers, sloops, and sail-boats — some of which were loaded to within three inches of the water, which was ‘as smooth as glass.’”

Small craft beat the world’s most impressive navy — this is the take home point for me. And though the evacuation can seem slightly miraculous, as if it happened all at once, know that Glover had called for all the small boats along the East River to be moved to the Brooklyn side, earlier in the summer. He was ready.

If you attempt to consider the evacuation from the vantage point of today, you have the advantage of having the tides of the harbor still in place, the rivers and straits and bays acting not to terribly different than they would have 236 years ago. Of course the Hudson flows faster, having more concrete walls than sandy beaches. (Only a few sandy beaches remain.) But if you check in with those in the boat community who have considered the evacuation, you will hear them argue that boats and men would have crossed, not in the straight line that the mind’s eye might imagine, but in the loops and arcs that winds and tides determine — the harbor is a wonderfully complicated system of currents, where there is no mere high or low tide, but many in betweens.

You will see that while boathouses have sprung up the city over the past ten years — in Long Island City and the Bronx, for instance — there are still nowhere near the number of boathouses there were in the 1930s, when, say, my dad was a kid, or before. The boathouses began to disappear in the 1930s, when the harbor was pollution filled, but now thanks to the Clean Water Act, in 1972, and a great interest in the effects of harbor-bound sewage outflows, people are trying to bring them back, despite some official reluctance.

You also notice that boating on the Hudson or the East River does not seem as simple as boating on other rivers other rivers around the country or the world. There are, for instance, permit requirements in New York that are, in the opinion of many boat activists, legally dubious. Why are we not on the water all the time, given that in terms of open area, the water in New York City is the Sixth Borough?

I have spent the past couple of years thinking about this, rowing in the old Whitehalls that anyone can row in, out at Pier 40, in Manhattan. I have gone kayaking by partaking in the Village Community Boathouse’s free kayaking program in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn. And I have gone to other cities and used their boats, jealously. It’s easy to be on the water in New York, as well as fun, and, with some safety precautions (most importantly, life jackets), it is easy not only to imagine the evacuation of Brooklyn in 1776; it is easy to imagine a revolution in which we, as New Yorkers, take back the waters of New York, instead of leaving it to highly regulated privately run quasi-public parks, funded by commercial development.

Recently, on a very hot day, I went out in a boat on the Gowanus Canal, to take a trip around Red Hook, past what would have been Fort Defiance, a Continental Army battlement, through Buttermilk Channel and into Brooklyn Heights. It was the trip the British Fleet wanted to make but couldn’t due to the wind in August 1776. We had a lot of wind fighting us, but we also had the tide, thanks to the organizer of our trip, Marie Lorenz. Marie is an artist who uses her handmade boat to take advantage of the tide. I was also with Tim Harrington, a member of Les Savy Fav. He is our mutual friend — Marie knows him from art school, during which he once asked her to help tie him to a fence upside down and leave him there, to startle passersby.

We went out at dawn, and at first it felt as if we were escaping something, and then, when we got out into the Gowanus Bay it was very peaceful. We saw a giant cruise liner, a night heron, fish churning the water. Tim spotted a taco truck on the police evidence pier, a prisoner. We passed very near the onetime location of Fort Defiance, today recalled in the name of one of my favorite restaurants, and we could see down a street towards the Sixpoint Brewery, the six points reminding me of a 18th-century fort layout, even though the six point star is an ancient brewer’s mark that combines alchemy’s symbols for earth and air, as well as male and female. We eventually got out at the new Brooklyn Bridge Park, one of the new part private, part public parks. The side of the sign that faced the shore said that only permitted activity was permitted. The side that faced the water didn’t say anything. We got out.

But on the morning of the 236th anniversary of the evacuation, I went out early and just stared at the water down by the ferry landing under the Brooklyn Bridge. There were couples taking wedding photos, tourists, park workers who are not employees of the private-public park but are outside workers contracted to pick up trash. And there was the water of the harbor. The water is exactly as the Greek philosophers saw it: it is yesterday’s rain in the Catskills and tomorrow’s Atlantic Ocean. Given the tides, some of it was yesterday’s Atlantic Ocean. Tide, by the way, comes from the Old English word tīd, meaning, you guessed it, time. To look into the harbor is to glimpse back and forward in time.

This is what Walt Whitman was talking about, if you ask me, in the section of Leaves of Grass known as “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” (audio):

It avails not, neither time or place — distance avails not;
I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence;
I project myself — also I return — I am with you, and know how it is.

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd;
Just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh’d…

Previously: The Landing In New York, Scouting Old Locations, The General And The Moose, The Battle Begins and The Mystery Of The Missing Marylanders’ Graves

Robert Sullivan is the author of a several books, including Rats, How Not To Get Rich, and The Meadowlands. His newest book My American Revolution will be published Sept. 4 (next Tuesday!) and is available for preorder.