Father of the Bride Part II will be coming soon to your local theatre screen. You can catch the trailers now. It features Martin Short in a supporting role as an Asian guy. He pronounces his Rs and Ls funny.

Y'know, I thought we were done with that joke. The Revenge of the Nerds movies ran it right on into the ground, and that was twenty-some years after it wasn't funny in Breakfast at Tiffany's, a movie that I otherwise love. If I were of Asian origin, I think I'd be about done with it.

Three-dimensional logos are all the rage among movie production companies these days. Those logos come virtually bursting from your very skull up onto the screen. It's quite dynamic.

I suppose this development reflects an effort to make the most of the medium. I wonder whether there might be a less queasy way to pursue that goal.

Here's a quick lesson in movie projection, for you to ponder next time you see the cinematic arts represented by a picture of a film reel. Film reels are a thing of the past. They have been replaced by things called platters -- big metal dishes, upon which the entire length of the movie rests. The film moves from one platter, through it's 1/34th of a second of fame in the projector, and onto another platter.

This (if I may be permitted to editorialize) is a bad thing. I have reasons for saying so. First, this means that the film is spliced together from several reels, so that it will run continuously, without anyone having to rethread a projector or switch machines. Every time a new theatre gets the print, they splice it, and the movie loses a few more frames. It's sort of like each patron at the library blacking out the last three unblacked words of each chapter before returning a book.

Second, the film is exposed to the elements for the entire duration of projection. It picks up dirt and dust, and it oxydates. This has potential long-term effects, in that it increases the likelihood of movies being lost to the sands of time. But it also has short-term effects: movies just don't hold up as well as they used to. Often the beginnings of decay appear by the third week in release.

Most important, it means that no one is up there watching. The job of movie projectionist has essentially been automated out of existence; when you yell "focus," you're generally yelling it to the walls. I watched 10 minutes of Batman Forever during which the audio was about five seconds behind the picture. No one who worked at the theatre knew about the problem until an audience member (me) informed them. It happens more often than it should.

One last reason: platters don't make very good logos. Bring back the film reel.