Theater vs. Home Theater: Are the Battle Lines Drawn?

In March’s "DVD Roundup," Charlotte Meyer wrote a well-thought-out ode to the pastime of moviegoing, concluding that there was nothing like the theatrical experience. TV at home just didn’t cut it.

I disagree. Charlotte lives in a college town, where no doubt some care is given to movie showings: they aren’t just movies, they’re films. I live near a college town, but it shows films only on the weekend, and usually the same one two weekends in a row. To watch current movies, I go to a six- or tenplex at a local mall.

At the multiplex, unless I’m attending a matinee, I’m faced with ticket prices three to four times that of a rented DVD. I’m offered stale popcorn and watered-down drinks that cost the same as a full meal at the local Chinese restaurant or Ruby Tuesday. The popcorn is drowned in something they call butter but in fact has never seen the inside of a cow. Nor is it low-fat, which would at least be some compensation. I’m pointed in the direction of the theater showing my chosen film. The employees are all of high school age and uninterested in monitoring patrons’ comings and goings once they’ve been pointed in the right direction. An underage kid can easily pay for a G-rated movie, then watch an R-rated one. So much for the rating system.

Once in the theater, unless I’ve timed it right -- which I never seem able to do -- I’m subjected to ten to 25 minutes of commercials, many of them the same ones I saw on TV the night before. Then there are ten minutes of trailers and, finally, the feature. If I’m lucky, the theater has a good print. More often it’s already mangled, displaying scratches, blips, and even splices. The films are run automatically, so if there’s any problem, whether a burned-out projector lamp or a break in the film, it can be quite a while before I can flag someone down to take care of it. The seats lack lumbar support, so by the end of an epic like The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, it’s 30 minutes before I can walk upright again.

Though the audience is repeatedly cautioned during the pre-feature ads to turn off cell phones, there is always one idiot who thinks the warnings don’t apply to him. People bring along their infants, whom they seem to have trained to cry and carry on at just the wrong time. Not wishing to discourage the one or two adult tickets these very young children represent, the theater management does nothing to discourage this practice. The audience bolts to its feet as soon as the end credits start rolling, often standing still in front of me to don coats -- if I want to read the credits, I have to peer around them. But by the end of the credits, that’s no longer a problem. Then I am God’s lonely moviegoer, the only person in the theater. No one seems to care who has made this entertainment for them to enjoy.

Ten years ago, even this medley of inconveniences would have been preferable to watching a movie at home on a 32" TV, interrupted by commercials and no doubt panned and scanned. But today I have a 52" high-definition set with excellent resolution and a raft of DVDs to watch that are technically amazing. I can choose not only from today’s wannabe classics, but can pick a tried-and-true classic in a restoration that makes it look better than ever. There are literally thousands of choices. My viewing chair has lumbar support -- at the end of the movie, I can walk. Many times, the DVDs have extra features to give me a better understanding of the feature I’ve just seen. If there are commercials, I can fast-forward or skip through them. There are no babies in the house. And I know I am not alone in saying that the fantastic sound of my system is better than that of any theater in the area.

The other night, in preparation for a DVD review, I played Warner’s widescreen DVD edition of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. I sat there enchanted through the entire film, reveling in story, picture, and sound -- totally immersed in the entire event. I had my own popcorn, properly prepared with a low-fat butter substitute. When I’d watched Corpse Bride in the theater some months before, it was a dim projection of a tattered print as I ate popcorn that made me gag, amid an audience that didn’t understand Tim Burton’s dark humor and so provided its own.

In the early days of TV, film studios were concerned that TV would cut into their market, and so came up with 3-D, CinemaScope, and stereo sound. I believe the threat to theatergoing is even stronger today. And what are the theaters coming up with to counter it? Higher ticket prices, astronomically priced popcorn, more commercials, and ruder audiences. It doesn’t seem like much of a war to me. I will always want to see certain large-scale special-effects films on a screen as large as possible, but as things stand now, home theater wins in a landslide. Unless you live in a college town.

 ...Rad Bennett
radb@hometheatersound.com

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