It’s called the Cinerama Dome. Yeah, very creative.
I’ve long maintained that the original Creature from the Black Lagoon is the best 3D film ever. You want to have lots of things at various distances between the subject and the camera to get the best 3D effect, with the subject relatively close. Unfortunately, staging scenes that way is often pretty artificial. In Creature, with many scenes shot underwater in relatively clear water, and with random bits of suspended matter (and fish) in that water, you have that situation occurring naturally.
And that “practical” monster suit, which could be worn while swimming underwater, is superb. It’s arguably the raison d’etre for the movie, because the “scientific” explanation for the Gill Man is garbage.
The last Spider-Man live action movie, the one with the franchise crossover stuff, seemed to leave pauses in the dialogue when Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield made their appearances, as if they knew there’d be audience cheering. I haven’t rewatched it at home yet, but I imagine the pacing will seem very off when it’s just me on my couch in front of my screen.
It reminds me of when I went to France on a school exchange when I was eleven, and saw American sitcoms dubbed into French for the first time. Maybe things are different now, but in 1985 they hadn’t added the laugh tracks as well. So all those pregnant pauses during which characters kind of stare at each other or into space while the “studio audience” goes nuts turned into a bizarre dada-esque surreal exercise. And that was just Silver Spoons…I shudder at how those old Three’s Company episodes in which Normal Fell cracks one towards Mrs. Roper then turns to the camera to savour his witticism would have played.
We do an outdoor movie night every Halloween projected onto a screen the size of our garage door. Last year was Creature in 3D. I bought 48 3D glasses and handed out nearly all of them.
Some films should not be allowed on TV because they lose so much, and not just through reformatting or editing. I am thinking specifically of Seven Samurai (1954); the theater audience I saw it with gave standing ovations to the heroes who died. Facilitated in so many ways by the big screen and sound, that kind of emotional involvement and its group expression is not something that could ever be recreated while watching the film on TV.
Paeans to violence and gore tend to go down better with an audience. I had seen Straw Dogs (1971) on TV, but it took seeing it with a theater audience for me to appreciate the humor of the scene where Dustin Hoffman tees off on a bad guy with a golf club. When William Holden shoots the whore who shot him in The Wild Bunch (1969), then takes over a machine gun to kill dozens of bad guys, it’s a thrilling moment of machismo to vicariously experience and the palpable audience reaction enhances its impact immeasurably. The many revolting scenes of flesh-eating in Dawn of the Dead (1978) were alleviated by watching it with a group of strangers in a dark theater where it became socially acceptable to laugh at especially gratuitous outbursts as a way of dealing with their disgust factor.
Films in 3-D are a special case since they are rarely shown that way on TV. I saw Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) in 3-D in a theater; there’s an early scene of a carriage going through a heavily wooded forest that drew multiple gasps of awe from the mind-blown audience. I remember almost swatting “flies” in the theater when I saw Avatar (2009). Both films were carefully designed for the big screen experience and I doubt they could play as well on TV, even in 3-D.
I sat across from someone on plane watching Avatar on their iPhone.
I have always banged the “you’ve got to see it in a theatre!” drum here in the SDMB whenever someone new comes in with “I finally saw XX, what’s the big deal? derp derp”. Inevitably they had watched whatever movie at home, with all the distractions.
My favorite was always re-releases of Lawrence of Arabia. They would do them at the Cinerama Dome every few years back in the day. Something about that vast desert on the giant screen with the music swelling - THAT is a movie going experience!
That’s the film I’m came in to mention. I’ve only seen it once; not in Cinerama, but it was 70mm on a big screen. There’s a scene where we’re waiting for Lawrence to emerge from the desert. The screen shows a long, unbroken, flat horizon. And then, maybe, just a speck. Even on a huge screen, you can’t really be sure there’s someone there. I don’t think that would remotely work on a home screen.
I saw “The Sixth Sense” in a packed theater a few days after it opened. Most of the crowd was unaware of the twist. The collective gasp when the twist was revealed is one of my favorite movie-going memories.
Good comedies are funnier when seen with a theater full of people laughing. For bad comedies, the dead silence just reinforces the badness.
I saw Scrooged in the theater and no one took part in the singalong at the end. There hadn’t been much laughter over the preceding 90-some minutes either.
Years ago, I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey on a 70mm remastered print. Not even Cinerama - just plain old w-i-i-i-d-e screen, and you were IN the movie. That’s just not going to happen looking at a TV.
What a weird mix of innocent fun, sexual innuendo, and little girls flipping off little boys.
German advertisement is… can be… weird. That one has at least some humour, which is unusual in German publicity. But I can assure you: everyone in Germany knows that one, it is a classic. Some bits have not aged well, granted. The post-hoc cringe factor is definitely there. New iterations are still being made and shown and the style is and remains unmistakeable. The innuendo is very much part of it.
We saw Inception in a crowded theater early in its run. Everyone in the theater gasped when the top was still spinning (I know that doesn’t make sense if you haven’t seen the movie). That was really kinda neat when everyone had that revelation all at the same moment.
Another thing that doesn’t really work at home is the opening credits in the original Superman: The Movie. Ten-year-old me was blown away.
It works fine. The pauses are not like the pauses in a laugh-track sitcom.
Huh? My crowd reacted because it wobbled, which it clearly did.
Oh, I saw it opening night. We had no idea it was a twisty movie. My theater erupted with strangers talking to strangers about the twist. It was thrilling.
Kinda an opposite example…
I saw Terminator 2 three times during its original run. In this scene:
All three times, after the cop said “he killed 17 police officers that night,” the audience erupted into cheers and drowned out the next bit. It wasn’t until I saw the movie at home that I learned that next bit was “men with families… children.”
Same for me during the reveal in The Usual Suspects
It was just a moment, but the last scene of Carrie (1976). It starts with nice, melancholic music, with soft, gauzy focus of Sue (played by Amy Irving), dressed in white, and her sad, bewildered expression as she leans down to place flowers on the remains of the house where Carrie died. Then all of a sudden, the hand from the grave, grabbing Sue’s arm, accompanied by screeching violins and Sue’s insane, hysterical scream as the film returns to the real life of what her life has become. It difference in sound volume can’t be reproduced at home (I’ve tried), nor can the shrieks of the audience members when no one knows what to expect (or what a jump scare was, back in 1976).
Oh, yeah, the spinning prom scene is much better on a big screen too.
The opening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind was really cool in the theatre but probably seems kind of pointless watching at home.
The screen stays black with opening credits in minimal white print fading in and out. The prolonged darkness in the theatre lets your pupils dilate nice and big. At the same time an orchestral hum slowly builds from a silence and gets increasingly louder. After the last credit the screen stays black another 10 seconds then all at once the screen is awash in white light as the orchestra blasts a single note.
The audience couldn’t help but wince and flinch at the visual and audible smack in the face.
Grand Prix (1966) at a Cinerama dome. I had just learned to drive and I was pushing my foot towards the brake in a couple scenes.
Not to mention movies that have a fake “film breaking” gag, like Gremlins 2.