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It seems like I'm one of the few people who will admit to liking the 3D movie effect. I don't really care if it's a "gimmick". If I'm gonna pay extra to see a movie in the theater, it's good for there to be a gimmick.

I guess I can imagine, say, The Godfather being distracting in 3D. But for any movie that's just supposed to be "fun" I don't see what the problem is.

It's almost the exact same movie as "Big Trouble in Little China" -- loudmouthed American guy stumbles onto magical Asians. And both even have Victor Wong (a good guy in both) and James Hong (a good guy in Child, bad guy in China)

I saw it when I was a kid. I liked it then -- probably quite a bit more than I like it now. It really is a star vehicle for Eddie Murphy, but when I was younger I thought the supernatural story elements told a legitimate story. When the main bad guy turned into a gargoyle, I was like, "Holy shit!" His eruption from the ground when he might have been dead was one of my "movie jumps" (like what some people do when Carrie's arm comes from the grave at the end of that film).

I see now that the story is not very fleshed out. (And the comedy isn't really all that funny)

I guess the Golden Child is supposed to be a Dalai Lama, but no one ever mentions it. (Not the movie, not Ebert's review, not the Wikipedia article) It probably was easier for me as a child (and maybe American audiences in general) to just go with the flow and accept that for some reason a little Tibetan kid was some magical golden child than to process an unfamiliar term like "Dalai Lama". But I'm pretty sure what's happening at the beginning of the movie is that the kid is selecting what items belonged to the previous Dalai Lama as proof that he is a reincarnation.

I don't know a lot about Tibetan Buddhism, but I don't think much else from the movie's mythology relates. I think the character / demon of Sardo Numspa was made up just for this movie. It's unclear who the master he talks to, although the idea I got as a kid (and I haven't been convinced otherwise since) was that he probably went to hell and spoke with Satan himself. So the movie isn't confined to one religion.

The thing about the magic knife comes out of nowhere and isn't really integrated into the story. (Who made it, why is it magical, why make a dagger that's mostly just for killing golden children [one other use in the film aside], what's the point of the test, the test doesn't really make sense...) According to Wikipedia, it's based on a real bit of Tibetan mythology, but as far as I can gather, the connection is tenuous.

So, anyway, the way the film incorporates pre-existing mythology is kind of half-assed, the way it tries to weave those elements to make its own mythology is kind of half-assed, the story holds together but just barely (there's no way you'd be able to bluff a knife onto a plane now, and I'm highly skeptical you could have even before 9-11), and it's not hilarious as a comedy (apparently, the movie was not concieved as a comedy, which, knowing how movies are made in Hollywood, could be guessed)

Ghostbusters is still the standard for melding hilarious comedy with a credible supernatural story.

Going back, I think one thing that made me interested in 3D movies was when I finally got Magic Eyes to work ... almost 10 years after the craze started, and when I thought I might never be able to get them to work.

There are a lot of "tricks" for getting them to work (lining up dots, etc), but once you get them to work, you realize all you are doing is acting as though you're looking at something farther away than the image. Some people say that you cross your eyes, but that's backwards. If you're looking at a computer monitor, your eyes will be pointed inward to focus on something close in front of you. If you'd look at something far away, your eyes will be pointed inward less.

I'd suppose if anyone has working binocular vision, they should be able to get magic eyes to work.


But, anyway, what was interesting to me about them was that they looked more three dimensional than real life. They seemed like a magic portal to another world, where everything pops out. For some reason, real life doesn't seem that vivid. Maybe it's because I can't really look at everything in a scene at once. If I could see close and distant stuff simultaneously, maybe the closer stuff would pop out. But I can't -- if I look at something close, then far away stuff is in double vision, and vice versa. But since a magic eye is faked 3D, it's all really at the same distance, so you can focus on the supposedly near and distant stuff at once simultaneously.

It's sort of the same thing with 3D movies. They're able to look more vividly 3D than real life.