Saw RealD 3D (HFR). I don't know why they put parentheses around HFR, but it seems to be the fashion.

To further answer Jim's question, another aspect of these films is the lack of grain. In a digital world, the chemical artifact is lost.

One explanation I stumbled across is the uncanny valley. When stuff looks more and more real, at a certain point it starts to look weird. If the eye accepts something as "fake" that's fine. If the eye accepts something as "real" that's fine. But somewhere in-between it looks creepy.

Jackson uses a lot of fast moving imagery, fast camera moves, scenes that are likely to show up with judder artifacts. These look much nicer at 48. The tradeoff is that slow stuff may look odd to some eyes.

I think Jackson is trying to break an old paradigm for the visual look of film. He's not mucking with color space or dynamic range. (Dolby *is* developing cinema technology to address those.) But he is messing with spatial and temporal resolution. By combining grainless with HFR, I think the change is more that just a tweak in picture. His "look" goes against decades of film practice.

The film did come with one of the major pitfalls of HFR. Three nerdly nerds behind me were talking over the credits arguing about frame rate, the quality of CGI, the quality of the 3D. I would have joined in, but I was wary about challenging their alpha nerd in such a nerdtesterone laden environment.