The Captain

Apparently Maureen Dowd does more than dish snark about politicians. She also writes about 3-D expert Phil McNally:

Captain 3-D, a 42-year-old Northern Ireland native, is also known as the resident “hurl-o-meter” at DreamWorks, the guy who goes through every frame to adjust the amount of depth, dial the intensity up or down, and fix the right-eye/left-eye camera settings so that moviegoers can enjoy dragons skydiving past them without having to turn their popcorn bags into motion-sickness bags.

“I am certain that it is not good to be in a business in which the result of what you do is to make people hurl,” says Jeffrey Katzenberg, the C.E.O. of DreamWorks Animation. ...

A while back, the Captain invited me into his inner sanctum to watch a sequence of Monsters Vs. Aliens on a big rectangular screen. I had Three Dee goggles over my peepers, and the sequence he showed me really popped off the screen in a good way.

I had the same reaction when I saw the whole feature at the Burbank AMC, "Heey now. It reaches out and grabs you!"

I've seen a bunch of dimensional features at this point, and sometimes they're more painful than life-enhancing. But the Captain's handiwork has a good balance to it. He knows when to pull back on the reins so you're not overwhelmed by more depth than your pupils, retinas and brain can tolerate.

There might come a time when the movie-going audience gets thoroughly sick of Three Dee movies, but Captain Phil will slow the arrival of that tipping point, because he's damn good at what he does.