aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Sunday, September 25, 2005

Movies too

The theater here was recently renovated so I’ve been wanting to get back to going out to the movies. I’d like to see Good Night and Good Luck for example.

People here don’t go out to the movies much anymore. They’re not alone:

I think moviegoing is doomed to die off slowly unless Hollywood can come up with a reasonable new experience. As it now stands, I can feed an HDTV signal into a standard Toshiba LCD projector through the composite video ports and blow out a 100-inch 16:9 image on a screen and get a theater experience in the home. With progressive scan or line-doubling DVD players, the experience is phenomenal. Use a DLP theater projector or a large-screen plasma display, and you’re in heaven.

So why do I now want to go to the theater? Do I want to go because it’s more expensive than a DVD rental? Do I want to go for the greasy popcorn coated with trans-fat butter-flavored oil? Do I want to go so I can hear cell phones going off all over the place and people yakking on them? Do I want to go because most of the movies aren’t shown on large screens at all, but in boxcar-sized rooms with screens not much bigger than my projector screen at home? Do I want to go because the sound is turned too loud and pumped through a mediocre audio system?

A friend mounted his living room projector and drop down screen yesterday; his sound system is probably better than the theater’s. Another, a Bollywood buff, cancelled his popular home movie nights until he gets his tenure packet in at the end of the month.

It’s not likely I’ll get them to go out to a theater with me.