[Weekly Update] IMAX and Lie-MAX

I'm sitting in a theater with half a dozen people all waiting in silence for the film to begin. Everyone comes alone, because only snobs with no stable employment and no friends come to see Sinners in a Tuesday afternoon.

But hey, at least the ticket is only 5 bucks.

CHANNEL UPDATE

Summer Horror:
We are once again doing a horror themed video for this summer, and you get to decide what topic we'll pursue. Check out our last post and cast your vote! And leave me some horror recommendations to cover in the future, too.

Ne Zha Video:
Our next video is largely complete, waiting for me to finish the thumbnail and subtitles. It should go live this Friday. It turns out to be one of the longer videos I've made, at about 18 minutes. It's also packed with way too much information, even after I deleted large chunks of it.
You know, I've repeatedly made "above average length" videos for the past few months. I'm starting to think I don't know how average works.

Bad Chinese Movies:
For next month, we planned a light-hearted video looking at recent bad Chinese movie. It's sort of a revision of the video I made 5 years ago, calling out the Chinese film industry for imitating Hollywood. Now that the table has turned, it'll be an interesting (but possibly controversial) update.

Bonus Video:
It seemed everyone wants a video about the original Blade Runner. So that'll be our bonus video of the month. Even though I'm not the biggest cyberpunk fan, I am still a sci-fi fan, so I have a lot to say about the movie. Honestly, the whole cyberpunk genre has evolved into something that's neither cyber nor punk at this point. Maybe I'm the perfect guy to rant about it.

MEDIA TALK

So, originally I was going to watch Sinners in Imax, as Montreal is one of the few cities in North America that has a 1.43:1 screen and 70mm film projector, thus capable of showing the film in its maximum width and height, as intended by the filmmakers.

By the way, isn't it so weird that high prestige filmmakers keep making IMAX movies that you can only see in full in like... 20 theaters across the entire world?

Anyway, I was fully prepared to pay a solide 15 canadian dollars for this experience, until I realize the 70mm projector has been busted since 2015, after the showing of Interstellar. It has been 10 years, and it was never fixed. Now, this particular cinema has a massive 1.43:1 screen, but paired with a xenon projector that's only capable of 1.90:1 projection.

That means, if your film is made with an IMAX camera, a large chunk of the image would be cut off, rendering it effectively the same as a regular 1.85:1 composition.

What's worse is that the xenon projector isn't all that sharp to begin with. It would be nice if the theater upgrades to a dual laser projector, but those are rare. That means, for most people, IMAX is nothing more than a bigger screen. It's the same quality image spread over a much larger area.

And yet... I'm sure many you are scratching your head at all the jargon I just threw out. Isn't IMAX just about the super large screen? Indeed, I think the whole thing about aspect ratio and sharpness only matters to snobs like me who does not have stable employment or friends. That's probably why the theater never fixed the 70mm projector. The Xenon projector is cheaper. Digital is cheaper. And only this one Asian asshole can tell the difference.

At the end, I decided to just watch regular projection. It's 5 bucks vs 15, and all I need to do is sit closer to the screen to get sufficiently similar experience /s

By the way, the poster for Sinners doesn't inspired confidence, doesn't it? It tells you basically nothing about the film. I supposed it's good for me, because I don't know what to expect. But to an average viewer? Do they even know this is a horror film? It looks like a war movie.

Anyway, I'll see you soon in our next video!