Theres The Rub
Pros and cons
By Conrado de Quiros
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 23:34:00 11/12/2008
Filed Under: Cinema
I SAW A MOVIE IN A MOVIE HOUSE LAST week, something I haven't done in ages. Ages being a couple of years ago or so. It was one of the older movie houses in SM North, which has the virtue of being near where I live. My son would later tell me I should have tried the newer ones at The Block or Trinoma, which have better video or audio. But it was just whim, or a wave of nostalgia, that drove me to it. So the first one I chanced upon was it.
The movie was "Quantum of Solace," which was OK but no big deal. I did wonder how they were going to top "Casino Royale," with Daniel Craig having reinvented James Bond into Ian Fleming's original invention, which was a far cry from Sean Connery's charmer, the agent who combined deadly form with deadlier wit. The reviews of "Casino" said Craig's Bond was now more like Bourne than Bond, and they were right. With not completely salutary results: Bond doesn't always win the comparison. He doesn't here.
But this column isn't about Bond, James Bond, this is about houses, movie houses. Or more specifically, this is about the pros and cons of watching a movie in a movie house as against watching a DVD in your own house.
Like I said, I haven't gone to a movie house in years, being content to watch DVDs at home. And I have gotten into no small amount of argument with friends over the relative merits of both. Last week had me thinking about it again, and I have this preliminary report to make after some introspection:
One, movie houses have the advantage of the big screen, which can be quite immersive. That advantage however has been offset over the past few years by the onset of plasmas and LCDs which in small rooms can loom just as hugely and be just as immersive.
Movie houses also used to have the advantage of the sharper image and the louder sound, notably Dolby's and THXs. But that too has been offset by the newer digital TV sets that offer 1080p, the high-definition standard, and that have audio and video that can give movie houses a run for their money.
Suffice it to say here that if you can't afford to have a reasonably state-of-the-art home theater, like most everyone of us, or if you have a neighbor who objects violently to loud noises from your 5.1 surround system (even as he inflicts his own karaoke on you), the movie house is still the best (and cheapest) way to go.
Two, a note on video. In fact, high definition, in the form of Blu-ray, is visually superior to the movies in regular movie houses, or the ones that don't charge you an arm and a leg in entrance fees. Of course, Blu-ray players and Blu-ray discs do charge an arm and a leg in rights to possess, so the principle is still that if you can't afford those things, like most everyone of us, the movie house is the best way to go.
It used to be said as well that you had to invest in original DVDs (at the very least) to make your 1080p TV worth the buy. Where's the sense in having state-of-the-art equipment with only state-of-the-trash (pirated) material to feed it? Not so anymore, though this one is bound to raise the hackles of the intellectual-property police.
The so-called Blu-ray discs that you find around Metro Manila are not Blu-ray discs, they are DVD discs. (You need a Blu-ray player to play Blu-ray discs, you need an ordinary DVD player to play a DVD disc.) But they are double-layer DVD discs (or DVD-9 because they contain 9 gigabytes of space as opposed to the single-layer one which has only 4.5 or so of it) which I suspect was copied from the original Blu-ray discs. Copied in compressed form of course (a double-layer Blu-ray disc has 50 gigabytes) but still of incredibly high quality. This has produced the awesome phenomenon of the pirated stuff half the time being better than the original! But I leave the others to debate the point.
Three, movies are current, DVDs and (Blu-ray discs) are not. In recent years in particular, the movies that have been showing in local movie houses are the same ones showing in US movie houses. Some of them haven't been reviewed by critics yet.
On the other hand, you can choose your wild in DVD titles. You can positively drown your sorrows, or augment them, in the Criterion Collection. Show some initiative and try to locate them yourself.
Four, a great deal remains to be said for movie houses, however. There's still considerable charm and magic in them.
At the very least, there's the added suspension of disbelief. You can't click a movie into pause to go to the john or to make a sandwich. That is not all a plus for DVDs. Not being able to pause a movie gives you a sense of something beyond your control, of something having a life of its own. That was what made movies magical when I was a kid and a little less so watching them in videotape and discs later in life. It wasn't just age that made the difference. The remote control made movies smaller than life rather than larger than it. It made movies "just like a movie" and not "just like life." But that may just be me.
Far more than that, well, the infinite charm of watching movies in movie houses has to do with going out. It's still the best (and cheapest) way to date. It's still the best place to devour popcorn. It's still the best place to remember Petula Clark's song "Downtown" by, especially the part about the lights being brighter there, you can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares, so go-watch a movie in a movie house.
A movie I did not see, "Naked Gun 2 1/2", said it best in its ad many years ago: "If you see only one movie this year--you should go out more often."
I just wonder: When are they going to have subtitles for (English) movies in movie houses?
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