idk what the heck ya’ll are doing with this candy smuggling nonsense. I bring beer.
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He’s also not going to ask if that’s a service animal or which tasks it’s been trained to perform.
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In my younger days my boys and I would smuggle a pint of whiskey in, but really I 100% think you could just bring a cooler and no one would give a fuck.
After going to an old theater in Queens I insisted my gf and i get undressed on the porch before going inside bc of bedbugs. Yea that was a good movie
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Yeah I used to go to dozens of movies a year and now I go to maybe 2 or 3, mostly because it’s something my friend and I do together.
I did what everyone who doesn’t use their garage should do:
I had the garage door rails and openers taken down and a wall built behind the doors. Then painted the walls/ceiling dark and had it carpeted. Mounted a 150” screen on the wall and a 4K projector on the ceiling; put in an Atmos sound system and have nice theater seating.
Whole thing costs like 5k and now I can watch not only movies but all the great shows these days and football and other sports. Also, I mounted Vive lighthouses on the ceiling and can play VR in the 16x20 space between the seats and screen.
With all the 4K stuff on Netflix, Prime, Apple+ and in 2 weeks Disney+, along with iTunes upgrading my digital copies of movies to 4K, there just isn’t much reason to watch anything anywhere else.
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I’m kinda thinking these hermetically isolated lifestyles might be super unhealthy for both ourselves and society as a whole.
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If I had a setup like that I would legit hire a teenager to work the door just so I could sneak Junior Mints and a pint of Jack Daniels into my own home theater.
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For sure.
Not lessened, but seeing a movie alone in an auditorium would not be the same experience as seeing it with an auditorium full of all or mostly strangers. To me, it’s powerful in a different way because they’re strangers. Maybe more powerful for the kind of experience I want.
We’re all processing the movie together, the action, the romance, the visuals, the music, the pacing, any deeper meaning that’s too effective (or crude) to be ignored.
And because they’re strangers, I can’t help but feel their reactions as more genuine. More affirming and encouraging and empowering to further subsume myself into the full experience the movie is attempting to draw me into.
When a joke is funny and makes me laugh, it’s somehow even funnier hearing an auditorium full of strangers spontaneously burst into laughter, too.
When I’m on the edge of my seat, I’m in the movie, and my subconscious notices that everyone else is in some expression of anxiety and anticipation along with me.
I see it’s not funny or scary just to me, this is true, true enough that most or all of the theater had the same kind of reaction. We’re sharing a visceral experience and making the best sense of it we can.
It is in part why I despise cell phone users at the theater. Maybe we’re not all having the same experience of the movie, but we’re all focused on having an experience about the movie. Cell phone users deny themselves the gift of intensely focusing on one thing at a time.
Maybe the closest corollary is a religious experience. I am an atheist, but I grew up a student of the Lord in the most extreme, intoxicating spiritual experiences that can’t be replicated alone. They require the unified focus of a group on manifesting an experience into reality.
So knowing how much I value that kind of experience, I’m not sure how I could replicate it outside of going to the theater. Where else would I feel comfortable joining with dozens of strangers to watch the same movie together?
This too illustrates why I delight in watching movies at the theater and then again at home. It’s not at all the same experience. I can watch a movie both ways, then watch it again with a new person and thrill in experiencing it for the first time through their eyes. Or those times a movie that I haven’t seen in a theater is rereleased in a theater, I’m almost certain to go. I find all of these to be meaningful and meaningfully unique ways of experiencing a movie.
Such is the life of a lifelong lover of cinema.
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There were two movies I had done work for that I wanted to see with an audience, Training Day and Constantine. Training Day was because I wanted to see the reaction to the reveal (worth it). Constantine was for the opening scene (not worth it).
I had heard about the opening scene before I worked on the movie, so it wasn’t the shock it was for people who hadn’t seen it. I brought a tape op in the room, and sent him through the ceiling when it happened. In the movie theater I saw it in, the impact wasn’t enough and I’m guessing it was toned down to not cause heart attacks.
Sometimes it’s better to see it at home. Sometimes it’s better in a theater. These days, to me, the only movies worth seeing in theaters are epics where you can’t get the same experience even in a great set up and certain comedies where you get the audience reaction as it’s going down.
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Would it be the same watching it with strangers in Np27’s garage? If not, then there must be something about the venue itself separate from the watching it with strangers aspect.
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A move that I personally thought was genius was AMC’s Best Picture Showcase. It happens over two Saturdays, between the time the nominees are announced and and the telecast. They show 5 of the nominees one Saturday and the other five the following week, which is usually the day before the show. It’s a good deal, $60 per person for both weekends and you get to see 9-10 Oscar-nominated films most of which aren’t on video yet because everyone waits til December to release them.
But every time I go the theater is 80% empty. :(
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I’ve always enjoyed watching a good comedy in the theater. The experience of laughing along with a huge crowd at great jokes can only be replicated in a comedy club ime
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Is this ordered via pay per view or On Demand or something? I’ve never heard of this, but am very intrigued by it.
No it’s at an AMC Theater near you!
https://www.amctheatres.com/movies/2-23-2019-best-picture-showcase-day-two-59106
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Okay, yeah, there are a couple of things like that I did before. Was super hoping I could see this stuff at home, oh well.
The way it works is you order tix or show up for Day 1 and buy in person. They throw a little merch your way and give you a badge on a lanyard and you make your way to the theater and claim your seat. They have one cinema set aside just for that. They play half the nominees Day 1 and the other half Day 2 which is the following weekend. You can leave and enter the theater at your leisure and as long as you have the lanyard they will let you back in. The one I go to is at a mall with several restaurants nearby and there’s always a long break between movies three and four so we go and grab dinner during that time.
The down side is of course you have to devote your entire day to watching five movies but as a movie person I don’t mind at all.
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It would not be the same. It is about the venue.
So there are different elements to the experience. I don’t think it’s even nostalgia for all of the great experiences I had in cinemas over the years, because when I think about what I’d want to recreate from that outside of nostalgia, I end up making a movie theater.
I want a spacious room where I’m close enough to people I don’t know to share their experience, but not so close that we’re forced to directly interact.
I want to know and sometimes hear/sense that there are other large crowds watching different movies in close-by rooms.
I’d like for food and drinks to be readily available, preferably outside of the auditorium, but I’m okay with in-auditorium delivery if that’s what we all consent to by seeing the movie at this place.
See where I’m going?
What about you? Is there anything unique to the theatrical experience that you love?
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let’s have the first Unstuck meetup at Cannes
I’m going to get a little into the weeds here with you. Everything you’re seemingly saying is that it’s the audience experience that makes you want to see movies in the theater (I’m the opposite). I go to the theater if I want to get something very particular out what I think the film ‘experience’ will be (epics and comedies, like Namath said, while there are a few exceptions). I think it is very possible to replicate what the director intends at home in the right set up. I do not believe it is the ‘audio/videophile’ set up, and I do not even believe you need to get that close to what I’ll describe below to still translate the experience (two experiences that definitely did not translate are Sicario and Inception, but those are the exact kind of movies that shouldn’t).
If you’re making a ‘serious’ home theater of any kind, it should be calibrated to be like a movie theater (really with a small room certification that could apply to mixing). Otherwise, you’re just putting the sound into a space with no idea of whether the true intent of the mixers and director is coming across. This is why mixers are so terrified of consumers. We don’t know what they’re doing at home, and we have to be ready for whatever they’re doing.
My understanding is that Michael Mann feels his movies are replicated well enough on an 80" screen. I don’t agree with Mann on taste, but the guy unquestionably knows what he’s going for and accomplishes it. So if you’re looking for what the ‘experience’ needs to feel like at home, 80" is probably a good starting and ending point. The room size should be developed around that size of screen to give a small theater feel. I don’t think he’s wrong, and I feel pretty close to the theater ‘experience’ even with my 60" screen and 2.1 audio setup in my studio.
Keep in mind that throughout my career I’ve worked on much better than what the consumer ever saw versions of movies. Even on small screens, if it looks good, then the ‘experience’ is relatively there. I was too busy to see Fury Road in the theater, and really regret not getting to do that because of the sound mix. I feel it would have had much better impact in a theater (similar to Inception and Sicario).
To put a finer point on this weeds discussion, back in the late 90s there was an article in The Hollywood Reporter about the movie going experience. I believe the article was in response to the outrageously loud Star Wars remaster trailer (it was ear splitting to the point I had to plug my ears), and generally how movie theaters were getting way too loud, especially the trailers (this has changed dramatically, FYI). It had a survey in it. It had a simple question with three choices:
If you had a volume knob in the movie theater, would you:
a) Turn the volume up overall
b) Turn the volume down overall
c) Turn the volume up and down throughout the movie
The answer was overwhelmingly ‘c’, which was a true indictment of theatrical mixers who were using way too much dynamic range in their mixes to create ‘moments’. When you’re watching a movie and the dialog is unbearably low at the beginning of the movie, it’s because they’re building to a moment of extreme loudness later. In TV we don’t get to do this. A theatrical mixer might work with nearly 30dB of dynamic range (each 6dB is a doubling of loudness perception from the previous level as a point of reference), while in TV we have generally been limited to about 10 to 14dB of dynamic range and usually much less. Consumers much prefer the TV style of mixing, and in general I do too. A 14dB boost above dialog sounds enormous, so you really don’t need all that extra stuff except for huge action sequences.
Final point is I recently worked on [redacted], and when I was doing my screening I noticed to hear detail, I needed to turn it up a little. This was for one of those movies using a ton of dynamic range. The mix was really cool, as was the sound design (I think Oscar level), but one scene had a high end/low end extreme volume moment (not the hottest thing in the movie), and it blew my $3000 subwoofer. Thanks mixers. Even at my reference level, they were too hot in the hottest moments, even though it had really good impact overall.
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Oh and there’s usually movie trivia between shows and they give prizes like movie tickets and posters and other tchotchkes to make it fun but that’s probably theater-dependent