People who know me know I’m extremely picky about movie theaters. The slightly-out-of-focus thing (Hi Melissa!) makes me want to spray the projection booth with bullets. I can’t stand the poorly-named “UltraScreen” because the 35mm negative can’t survive being blown up that big, and it ends up looking like grainy 8mm home movies. I don’t like the seats at Star Theater because they remind me of a Disneyland ride. Stuff like that.
Well I’ve always disliked the Orpheum downtown, even though it’s a fantastic old-style theater. The sound is epically poor, and now they have a cafe in the lobby and at night you can often hear patrons and music from the back of the theater.
Well, John and Matt and Sparky and I went to see “Punch-Drunk Love” there tonight. The dialogue was so muffled it nearly drove me insane, and the print looked like it had been dragged across a concrete floor by monkeys. And to top it off, Sparky had some kind of maintenance porthole right at his feet (above a broken seat, no less). While it wasn’t a portal into another dimension – that I would have supported – it revealed some sort of nasty subfloor covered in trash. A moviegoing experience to treasure.
Ahh, the infamous Orpheum. I saw Seven there when it first came out and I missed half the movie because the sound system was so bad we could barely hear the dialog over the noise. I thought they renovated it since then. Guess not….
Did you ever go to the Majestic when it was still around? At least there you could see artsy movies meant to be shown in dingy, dirty theaters.