Comment by mosura
3 hours ago
Back pre digital I was once lucky enough to see Aliens on one of the private cinemas at Fox, and it was astounding. I think people underestimate how poorly operated most normal cinemas used to be, combined with maybe not the best prints etc.
I remember seeing In the Mood for Love on the big screen in my local arthouse cinema back around 2000. It was shot with analogue film and projected as such, and the sheer details of the textures were astounding. It's not a bad film on my 4k monitor, but I don't feel the same awe.
I’ve only seen that movie on an old MacBook about a decade ago, but I can certainly believe it’d be a treat seeing it the way you mention.
Funny enough, I want to see a version of Chungking Express that feels processed to look like an early-2000s digital camera.
Blame lossy compression to save bandwidth. There's no way to legally stream in Blu-ray quality.
IIRC in the film era there was one "master" of the movie, it was duplicated multiple times to make negative versions of the film, then those negatives are used to make the positive copies that are sent to theaters. So you're watching something that has been copied at least twice.
Commercial theaters are all digital now. They don't even have film projectors anymore. Some independent or "revival" cinemas might still have them.