KD^3C^3 - 20260308 Cover your eyes don’t act surpr

The time change happened again. 

They stole an hour from us. Let’s make them give it back. With interest. It als always makes me want to go watch the movie Timecrimes again. It’s on HBO Max and Kanopy. 

Outside of that, there’s another movie coming out with variable aspect ratios. This is becoming a minor trend in big budget movies, with the goal, I assume, of driving more people to the theater who otherwise wouldn’t go and doing so with formats that cost more per ticket. 

The first time it happened that I noticed was Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s most recent big giant movie. Oppenheimer was filmed on 70mm imax which means it’s very big film. And very big film means a cleaner picture, with potentially more detail. Which isn’t a bad thing! 

Putting aside the absolute ridiculous (and to my mind, thoroughly debunked by Steve Yedlin) idea that film is somehow inherently superior to digital when it comes to capturing light for a movie, a larger format is nice, but it also means relatively few people will get to see the movie that way. There are only a handful of movie theaters in the world that can show a typical 70mm film print, because there just aren’t projectors for it. And that’s before you add in the imax of it all. IMAX is a “tall screen” format, meaning the picture is a lot closer to square than the more typical letterbox rectangle. And there are only about 40 movie theaters worldwide that can show this aspect ratio correctly. And only 10(!) that do it with film instead of digital projections. So unless you are an absolute film sicko, you probably watched Oppenheimer wrong. 

This was then followed by Sinners, a very good movie, which not only shot on imax 70mm but also on a different format with a very wide aspect ratio (ultrapanavision) and then switched between them at key moments. This makes for a really cool experience watching the movie because it feels like the whole world opens up when the picture gets bigger. But. We still have the problem where only a small handful of movie theaters can show the movie “as intended”. Ryan Coogler, the director put out an explainer video about all this, and fully seems to useratand that most people won’t be able to see the movie this way, which is nice. He at least put some effort into making the movie work in all the different formats, which isn’t something I ever felt we got with Chris Nolan and his film absolutism. 

But now a new challenger appears! Maggie Gyllenhall in her second directorial outing gives us The Bride! (exclamation point included in the title) which not only features the imax 70mm format, nor just swapping between 2 aspect ratios, but goes one step further to actually have 3 different ratios. https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/the-bride-imax-making-of-maggie-gyllenhaal-1235182881/

Which, sure, whatever. It’s still only going to be accessible to a small number of people and imax theaters are so rare it mostly feels like marketing  trying to foster FOMO in audiences. If you’re not near an IMAX screen are you going to drive hours to go see this reimagining of The Bride of Frankenstein? I’m not. 

But on the flip side both Oppenheimer and Sinners were huge successes and Sinners grabbed more oscar nominations than any other movie. So what do I know? I know most Oscar voters probably aren’t watching their screeners on giant imax screens at least. 

Anyway, I hope the movie is good, even if I’m going to watch it wrong. But first I have to get back to playing Slay The Spire 2 badly.