I know from other threads there are many here who don’t like going to movie theaters for whatever reason. To me there is no better way of watching a movie. There are physical and psychological aspects that can’t be replicated at home unless you are rich enough to have an actual theater.
Although I believe the entire experience is enhanced by being in the theater, there are some very specific moments in movies that lose their effectiveness if you watch them on TV.
The Pat Sajak thread made me think of this. Good Morning Vietnam was a pretty loud movie. Robin Williams antics were loud. The soundtrack was great and loud. When Williams breaks down and starts broadcasting censored information he is shut down and there is silence. The silence hung very heavy in the theater. It felt like minutes not seconds. It was the most effective moment in the movie. When you watch it on tv you probably won’t notice it.
2010: The Year we Made Contact seems to be a forgotten movie now. I remember being in the theater and watching the scene where they were moving on the tether between ships when the point of view showed the surface of Jupiter churning under their feet I felt awe and slight acrophobia. On tv the scene has zero effect.
The opening scene of Star Wars in 1977 showed the tiny corvette being chased by a Star Destroyer that just filled the screen. Not nearly as effective on a 27 inch television.
Ferris Bueller telling us the movie is over and we should go home. We get the joke at home on VHS/TV, but the joke was designed for the theatrical experience.
I think Bill Murray leads the crowd in singing at the end of Scrooged, though I haven’t seen it in years.
More effective too if you were able to see it in a Cinerama theater, which I was, a famous one in LA but I don’t remember the name of it. The experience cemented that movie in my memory.
Any movie where sound is important is going to be better in the theater. So many modern movies have dialog that is so softly spoken, and if I turn up the TV to hear it, then the other music and noises are deafening. Somehow it works much better in a theater. Also, for some reason, The Third Man comes to mind – that zither music, in a theater, is everywhere, it takes over your soul and fills you with a weird combination of hope and despair. You don’t get that at home.
But when all you are seeing at first is the corvette it doesn’t look tiny, it looks like a respectably sized ship (at least it did to me), and then that huge ship coming up from behind was breathtaking. That scene was perfect, and from then on they had me, no matter what, even with the corny predictable climax, and the space march.
The Purple Rose of Cairo and similar films in which someone is in a movie theater and a character steps out of the screen and takes on life.
Citizen Kane plays relentlessly with the frame of reference formed by the projection screen. It makes a bigger impression when the screen is many times bigger than the viewer, although I guess that could be said about cinema in general.
Schlock horror producers like William Castle often used gimmicks, like ‘nurses’ in the lobby, ready to attend to movie patrons who might faint at the sight of a rubber skeleton hovering over them with visible wires. Castle had electric buzzers under the seats for one of his films and a bunch of other stuff all timed to coincide with on-screen moments (see the wikipedia article for the details of his gimmicks - they are truly joyous).
Getting your significant other to don a bedsheet to creep you out is just not the same.
In German movie theaters they always show ads before the movie, and some trailers as teasers for other films. The last ad is very often for Langnese icecream, here is an example from the '80s. The music is always the same, Germans associate this song with Langnese. In a movie theater you get a lot of laughs you won’t get at home when in the short timespan after the ads and before the movie the usher comes into view shouting “icecream anyone?” with a vendor’s tray full of icecream.
We saw this opening weekend in an old brick theater in Seattle. When the Star Destroyer came on the screen, people hunched down and started looking up at the ceiling.
The scene in The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly where Tuco is running through the cemetery can only be fully appreciated on a big screen. The induced vertigo is the perfect appetizer for the finale.
I was at the end of a block-long line on opening day, so had to sit in the front row of what had been a vaudeville theater… with seats going right up within six feet of the huge screen.
A fade to white is nothing special when you’re watching at home - but in a theater, it’s like suddenly finding yourself in the path of a giant rectangular floodlight.
Like others, I saw Star Wars in a theater back in 1977 and yes, that first scene was awesome.
Going to the movies as a kid used to be awesome, because the movies were a social experience. There was a scene in Jaws where a dead body or maybe just a leg popped up on the screen, prompting lots of jumping out of seats and screaming. And then watching E.T., there were lots of cheers from the kids in the audience when E.T. and the kids went flying on the bikes.
I go to the theater usually at least once a month and it’s rarely a full house. And somehow it’s not as much fun as it once was.
As mentioned above, Cinerama movies really have to be seen in a proper Cinerama theater. Or the similar Todd AO widescreen process. I was lucky enough to be able to see a re-issue of Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days in the Rialto theater in New York City, one of the original Cinerama theaters.
The image extends out to the limit of your peripheral vision, and you really do need to rotate your head to see everything. Passepartout’s ride on a penny-farthing bicycle through London is a real experience in a Cinerama theater. The cut-down versions made for ordinary theaters, and the home video releases that fit the image to a standard screen are poor substitutes.
If you’ve ever been to an OmniMax or Dome IMAX theater, you get a sort of super-Cinerama or super Todd-AO, stretched in the vertical direction as well as the horizontal one, and similarly unrepeatable on home video
Theaters are now far smaller on average. And you’re a bunch bigger than you were when you were, say, 8. It’s the difference between going to a high school basketball gymnasium versus an NFL football stadium. Much less awe-inspiring.
And of course in the old days movie theaters were often pretty crowded. If now you’re attending a show that’s 25% full, then all the group dynamics are correspondingly muted.
Agree with the others on the opening scene of Star Wars. It was like that ship just kept going, and going…
The trainwreck near the beginning of “The Fugitive”.
The facehugger popping out of the egg in “Alien”. (We got to the theater late, the only seats left were right in front of the screen. And it was a big screen.)
Back in high school, our Film Club got hold of Creature From The Black Lagoon in 3-D and held a Friday night screening in the auditorium. The opening is an explosion that is supposed to represent the Big Bang. It may have been just a humble auditorium but the BB went past my face and on into the back of the house. Far. Out.
A little later, the scientists that will be heading into the Amazon basin unveil a Gill-man “hand” a previous expedition recovered. Those claws were reaching right into your face – I imagine like what Whit Bissel experienced later in the film.