The Music Box‘s 70-millimeter film festival (this year subtitled “The Ultimate Edition”) begins tonight, right on the heels of the theater’s installment of a new 41-foot screen and 7.1 channel sound system. These technological augmentations, which debuted right before the Music Box screened the “Special Roadshow Engagement” of Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, don’t register as significant improvements (speaking as someone who regularly sees movies at the venue). For one, the sound still bounced around the main theater in a tinny, movie-palace way. And the screen seemed a bit, well, small. When 46-inch displays are considered “small”, and with manufacturers already talking past 4K TV models, it’s hard to make a case for someone to leave the house to go to the movies when they can literally grab a six-pack from the fridge, pull up nearly any film in history on their phone, and play it through their affordable, gargantuan television.
What’s required is the perfect blend of setting, setup, and content. Two of my most rewarding moviegoing experiences last year involved Mad Max: Fury Road and Inside Out, which were shot and screened digitally. I saw them on slightly-larger-than-normal multiplex screens, and was absorbed in the filmmakers’ bold compositions and outrageous story ideas. The shot-on-65-millimeter Hateful Eight, however, looked fantastic but dragged after the intermission, as the narrative switched from a gritty, post-Civil War human chess game to a trademark Tarantino bloodbath. I don’t know if the lack of interruption would have made the transition more fluid, but the point remains: all the film grain and overtures and collectible programs in the world won’t make a flawed movie unflawed. (Conversely, a great film may convince someone who first streamed it on an iPad to seek it out in as large and as comfortable a venue as possible.)
