At The Movies

Recently I watched “Saving Private Ryan” in Blu-Ray.   I don’t know why I hadn’t done so earlier, as I’ve had a Blu-Ray player for some time.   Be that as it may, the superior high definition detail was so remarkable and noticeable, that it was almost like watching a completely different film, or seeing the film again for the first time.   The same holds true for “Star Wars” (Episode IV).  I also noticed the same with “Wreck-It Ralph”; late-model animated films really come to life in Blu-Ray format.  It’s incredible.  Not only that, I’ve noticed more films available in this format and the prices dropping dramatically:  $8 for a Blu-Ray at Best Buy?  Gone are the days of having to pay at least $30 for such a movie. 

Of course, I can remember back in the 70’s.   For our birthday parties our father used to borrow a projector and screen, and rent movies in those huge flat film cans.  He’d set up the screen at one end of the family room, and set up the projector in the kitchen poking out through the square hole in between.  You’d have to load the feed reel and the return reel, and snake the film through the winding path between them, definitely a complex undertaking.

The US Embassy (Paris) had a movie night, and we saw “Apocalypse Now” and “Star Trek: The Motion Picture”.  However, the embassy projectionist was not as skilled as my father.

As cumbersome and inconvenient as this whole process undoubtedly was, it still more closely approximates the true movie theater experience than plopping a video cassette or DVD into the player and watching the film on your TV screen.

VCRs.  American movies on the Champs Elysees in Paris came in “V.O.” format (version original) i.e. English with French subtitles.   Going to the Champs for birthday parties was fairly common.  So for my friend Ken’s birthday in 1980, I expected the same.  Except that instead of shepherding the group of boys to the Metro and then to the Champs, Ken’s dad simply plopped a large black plastic cassette into an oversized tape player on top of the TV, and voila:  Buck Rogers played on their TV.   WOW!   “Gee, that’s really neat!”   By the end of the summer 1980 we had our own 300 lb. VHS player, and after a false start, managed to watch the 1976 “King Kong” (commercial release) and “The Odessa File” (taped).

One claimed advantage of VCRs was the ability to watch one show while another was taping.  That assumed you could program the VCR, not an easy task, but by the 90s I had a VCR which was user-friendly enough to make this possible.   I taped stuff that I wasn’t around to watch.  Coordinating that with a cable box, though, became difficult, as the VCR could not switch channels on the cable box.   I didn’t have that problem as I was able to use the VCR itself as the converter box, although that meant just regular cable and no pay-per-view or HBO/Showtime/Cinemax, but back then those channels had no programming I was interested in – we’re talking about the 1990s here.

 

In a recent “South Park” episode, Stan tries to recruit the goth kids to the Playstation 4 group for Black Friday, concerned that without sufficient support, Xbox One will become the standard game system and consign PS4 to oblivion. 

“Like Betamax to VHS”, he warns. 

“What’s Betamax?”  one goth kid asks.

 “Exactly,” replies Stan. 

“What’s VHS?” asks another goth kid. 

Not only did we choose the VHS standard, we don’t know anyone who was a Betamax fan. 

For that matter, remember Laserdisc?   Long before DVDs, these were supposed to be the hottest format.  These were the same size as 12” vinyl (whoops, you do know what vinyl is, don’t you?).   I don’t remember anyone having one of these.   Throw them in the Betamax pile.

Movie Theaters.  Now, for the movie-going experience, there’s 3D and IMAX – sometimes combined.  Remarkably, it doesn’t give me a headache, mainly because they’ve managed to avoid trying to throw shit in our faces and dialed back the intensity to something endurable for 90-120 minutes nonstop.  I like that they’re re-releasing some films in 3D IMAX format.  “Saving Private Ryan” in 3D IMAX?  Bring it on.  “Star Wars” Episodes IV-VI?  What are you waiting for? Come on.

And if 3D IMAX isn’t enough an AMC theater at Menlo Park Mall in Edison, NJ, ups the ante with huge seats and a full dinner option.   The tickets are fairly reasonable, though they’re obviously making the money back on the expensive meals.  We watched “Dredd”, but the whole dinner thing was a bit obtrusive:  ordering from a menu and dealing with a whole meal while trying to watch what’s up on the screen.  At home if you try this at least you can pause the DVD; in the movie theater it doesn’t work that way.  Who knows how long that experiment will last, but the theaters in NJ are still in operation.  There are none down in the DC area. 

At the other extreme are the discount theaters, offering older films, in between their major theater release but before the DVD release, for a fraction of the price.  They’re in older theaters and have the standard popcorn deal, nothing 3D, IMAX or THX, but still an excellent value.  

Drive-in Theaters.   These are making a comeback, but slowly.  We saw one movie, “Orca”, at a drive-in theater in the late 70’s in Rockville, Maryland, which of course is long gone.   My impression is that for all the family-friendly vibe the DIT folks tried to pretend to, the DIT’s were a prime make-out zone.  You can’t really make out in a regular theater, and for teens who live at home and have no privacy, the back seat of a car in a dark DIT lot was the best they could do.  With the advent of VCRs and DVDs, we gained the ability to watch films at home in private (which killed the adult theater industry), plus contemporary morals changed and teens suffered less supervision and enjoyed more freedom.  So the DIT revival is probably fueled by baby boomer nostalgia.