I mean I also owned a (low-mid end) consumer 4K projector for the past 7 years that had better image quality than most (but not all) of the non rep cinemas where I lived, so sure, tragedy of the commons and whatnot, but then I decided it’d improve my disposition to move someplace with more high quality cinemas
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I wish I could complain but I’m banned from all their social media accounts
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the article is talking exclusively about multiplexes in NYC
Is there a guide to which cities still have good theaters?
I think there are just a lot of fairly evident externalities that accumulate
like, having more independent theaters nearby, having imaxes where it’s still part of the marketing, or famously getting (local/national) premieres, all create a virtuous cycle. NYC AMC listings always look like they’re doing like 300 screenings of doctor strange or something so I’m not surprised they’re not so good
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Rich movie directors have been buying up old theatres in LA so it is getting better there. They still aren’t really doing as much as they could though and it really bothers me
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chicago has three great repertory theaters that have been going for decades now where ive never seen bad projection fwiw
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Tagging in @notbov my understanding is there is a lot less the theater itself can do with the digital projector and the projecter distributers/big chains don’t give enough of a shit to make sure they are properly maintained and calibrated at every location.
some amcs just project shit on amazon prime too there’s so many different kinds of awful quality movie theatre experiences
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The past decade has really killed any childhood fondness I had for movie theaters. Why have a worse experience than watching at home? Makes no damn sense
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Tbh I could barely stand ever going to movie theaters by the time I was an adult. Too many people loudly snarfing popcorn a half a foot from my ear or like, literally taking phone calls or constantly chattering with each other.
I feel like a good 15% of confrontations I’ve had with complete strangers have been in movie theaters. Which is really high considering I’ve been to the movies like a dozen times in the last decade
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the good thing about digital projection is that, in theory, presentation is consistent from room to room (DCP spec actually has tolerances for color, light level coming from the lamp, sound, etc. and addendums for laser projection and direct view displays) and there’s no degredation
the flipside to this is if you are sent garbage, you are playing garbage and there’s very little recourse other than tearing at the package and taking the out the video mxfs and trying to do something
I mean, if the movie is unecrypted
also considering some of the language I see in listings, you should assume that unless otherwise stated, you’re seeing a 2K print on a 2K projector and, yeah, if you blow up 2048x1080 big enough, it’s going to look shit
honestly I’m just happy nowadays if all the picture is on the screen and not spilling off the sides onto the masking
(lol this doesn’t matter, the spec has wiggle room for cropping to accommodate tortured rooms)
I wish I had a copy of the Disney Digital framing chart they send with releases, it really demonstrates how much picture you can lose and still be acceptable
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I have good experiences with movie theatres in Toronto but i go at off peak times for Cineplex and tend to go to rep screenings with mostly well behaved crowds for cult movies at the Revue or the Paradise. I have had one off bad experiences like the time the audience laughed at every moment in Bound like it was The Room but that experience hasn’t happened to me lately. I however can totally understand why people want to watch stuff at home after I witnessed teens standing and snapchatting throughout all of Barbie last summer.
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Degrading projection at the hands of our increasingly centralized and disinterested corporate overlords is one thing, but come on, complaining about the rowdy teens is grumpy old man shit. I pay extra for that
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the thing is, everyone in the chain of showing you a movie cares except for the guys running the place where you watch the movie
yeah, they went through a lot of nonsense to lock down movies but they also put a bunch of controls in place to make things look and sound good
this can’t stop a manager turning down the bulb power to save a few bucks on buying bulbs (hey xenon bulbs are expensive) or the company designing rooms with less speakers (I saw GxK in a standard AMC room and I swear to god they just didn’t have a subwoofer in there, so you never felt anything in a movie that’s 60% roaring by volume)
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These are the overlords to which I am referring yes. Managers do what corporate policy tells them
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A lot of movie theaters are franchises, so the manager is more like a small business owner (ie psychotic) than a corporate lackey. They’ll ignore or bribe their way past any rule if it means ultimately saving a nickel.
this place got bought out by b&b theaters, a midwest theater chain, during covid. I thought they could only improve but they’re actually worse. and like every other business/hospital/resturant/etc I’ve stepped foot in post-covid it feels like the most threadbare skeleton crew ran operation now. every place feels like you walked in during the last week going out of business sale, only a sale where everything is 4x as expensive as you remember. the new owner has complained how nobody wants to work but they don’t want to pay anyone yet they somehow replaced all the posters in the lobby with digital screens
I remember thinking how lucky we were a couple years ago that at least we didn’t get loud ass commercials in front of the movie and the tickets seemed fairly cheap to anywhere else. well that’s done now. god the ads and shit in front of furiosa were so loud it just distracted me thinking how the movie seemed too quiet in comparison. this isn’t tv, I’m stuck here for two hours, I can’t change the channel. I can’t mess around and do other stuff in the room, you have my undivided attention already, why is it doing the tv thing of making the commericals louder than the feature.
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an edgy friend of mine recently had a similar bound theatre experience which i dont get at all that movie is just Good
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Bound rules, it deserved a better and more respectful audience when I saw it.
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Count me in the pro I Saw the TV Glow camp. Fred Durst as the dad who enforces gender roles is pretty fucking inspired. International adult conspiracy indeed.
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