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January 04, 2007
Dream palaces no more
Film critic David Denby takes an extended look at the future of cinema, and how technology is changing the way we watch movies.
He keys in on the way home video serves to diminish the movie-going experience, robbing us of the communal experience of losing ourselves in a larger-than-life image, of being immersed in sound, color, light and shadow.
At home, watching an old movie that once engulfed us, we yearn for more emotion, more color, more meaning. If we can’t get it, we have to fill it in from memory, the way someone listening to a beloved piece of music on the beach will fill in instrumental color and rhythms wiped out by a roaring surf...
I went to a friend’s house and sat alone, looking at some familiar old movies on an excellent forty-two-inch gas-plasma screen fed by a standard DVD player. The classic 1940 comedy “The Philadelphia Story,” starring Katharine Hepburn James Stewart, and Cary Grant, came pretty fully to life. The high-def screen yielded such benefits of M-G-M’s glamour years as the sheen (from backlighting) on Hepburn’s hair and the satiny white look of the studio’s imagined Main Line mansion. Few of the visual qualities were lost, and the fanged upper-class banter is so peculiarly intimate that it played very well at home.
Switching to color and to something that was largely digital and high-tech to begin with—the first “Spider-Man,” from 2002—I scored again. The director, Sam Raimi, went for a hard-edged jolt, with solid colors and the surging, swinging movement of the Marvel Comics style, and his graphics still looked sensational. There was little reality to capture—the movie, at its best, was pure artifice and pop rapture.
But Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver,” from 1976—a neo-noir film that exaggerated aspects of reality into something that was the opposite of pop—was a dud at home. What I loved in the theatre was the encompassing lurid rawness: the hookers, pimps, and thugs prowling the neon-red streets. On the home screen, the steam rising from the manholes—Dante’s burning underground lake percolating in Manhattan—didn’t loom up and envelop me, and the bloody violence at the end didn’t explode in my face.
The big plasma screen seemed inadequate; I was constantly aware of the outer edge of the frame just when I wanted to abandon myself within it, yielding to the power and sensuality that Scorsese and the cinematographer, Michael Chapman, had achieved. It wasn’t good, and it was worse than a diminution: it was a betrayal.
My first foray into big-screen home theater was prompted by an attempt to watch one of the Lord of the Rings films on a 32-inch CRT widescreen TV. The letterboxed image was about eighteen inches tall -- simply ridiculous.
A front projector and a screen six-feet wide, mated with Dolby 5.1 surround sound helped; not only did the ethereal New Zealand vistas fill my peripheral vision, but I felt as if I was peering through a window into Middle Earth.
Band of Brothers was a different experience when projected onto the screen, with bullets whizzing overhead and the sub-woofer WHOOMPing as mortar rounds fell near GIs in the snow outside Foy, Belgium.
Sure, I miss the waves of laughter rolling through the theater as a gut-busting comedy unspools, but I don't miss people talking, narrating the action, babies squalling, small children whining during R-rated violence, cell phones ringing, people answering them (Is she talking to her boyfriend on the damn phone!?), the rudeness of the audience reaching new heights of theater etiquette ignorance.
Which is why I rarely go to the movies anymore; the view from my couch is better than what's available at the local mega-plex.
Posted by Mike Lief at January 4, 2007 10:43 PM
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Comments
Let's see: I can save at least $20 bucks, sit close to someone I like, put my feet up, not fight crowds for a good seat, be allowed to bring my own food and drink, pause the movie when my bladder calls and not have to sit uncomfortable for an hour because the bathroom is a 1/2 mile and a flight of stairs away, and still enjoy very decent sound and a terrific picture.
Why would I EVER go to the movies unless I am just really anxious to see the movie itself ... and not many of them do that to me anymore.
Posted by: Thin Ice, Sr. at January 5, 2007 06:46 AM