If the only places to see movies where you live are AMC and Carmike megaplexes that are more invested in selling you a large popcorn (free refills on the large!) and playing Buick commercials before the show than they are in interesting films, I understand if you’ve given up on movie theaters.
However, if there’s an independent theater near you that’s taking risks and fighting the good fight for unique films and classics on a big screen, you should go. Go as soon as you can. Go tonight. Check it out. If you have to go alone, that doesn’t matter. Half the people in these places come alone, because they don’t know anyone else who wants to see Spider Baby on 35mm. It’s still a good time. Maybe you’ll like it. If so, go back, become a regular. They need you and you might eventually find that you need them, too… if you care about movies, at least.
I’m not asking you to eat more kale and asparagus here. This is something fun.
That’s one of the points of Julia Marchese’s entertaining documentary. It’s ostensibly a colorful profile of The New Beverly, a long-running revival house in Los Angeles, where the old film prints are plenty and where famous actors and directors regularly drop in for screenings, but it ends up as a celebration of ALL such theaters, as well as an impassioned defense of 35mm film in the digital age. Analog film is slipping away from us. It’s a rare theater these days that can show it. Movie studios are becoming less willing to rent out the prints or even keep them archived at all. Meanwhile, nearly everyone is forgetting how beautiful projected film can look.
The saddest result of this change though is that older films are becoming even more difficult to see in a theater. All revolutions have casualties. The VHS revolution, the DVD revolution, the Blu-Ray revolution and the theatrical DCP revolution have all left out interesting films. Every new format brings about a new scramble to preserve forgotten movies, to not lose history. And there’s a lot of history on big cumbersome film prints. (You ever see a DVD projected onto a big theater screen? It doesn’t look very good. It looks cloudy.)
If you’re a major movie geek, this documentary really gets you going. A variety of directors, from Edgar Wright to Joe Dante to Lloyd Kaufman, offer commentary on theaters and the state of film presentation today. When it’s all over you want to hug a film print. And then project it. And then store it somewhere safe. And fight anyone who says it’s not cool.