movies

[jim]

Can I complain about the crazy movie theater prices here? $5 for 10 ounces of soda? I saw this small woman carrying a large popcorn when I went to see Gone Girl. It was comical.

Do you mean 100 oz or 10? I get the smallest they offer and tell them to pack it with ice. If I remember I just bring a Coke from home. My wife and I will split either a small or medium popcorn, depending. But I can't imagine eating a large popcorn. If I had a large myself - or even split it with my wife - I'd have the farts like something else.

[lukethedrifter]

$5 for 10 ounces. It was only a dollar more for a small trashcan full of soda.

[jim]

$5 for 10 ounces. It was only a dollar more for a small trashcan full of soda.

I would get the 10oz drink. I wish they would sell something like that. I don't want a trashcan of soda, even if it's free.

[ghostrunner]

I'm not sure why but movie prices have barely gone up in 20 years. Theaters barely make any money off the movie itself, so any need to increase revenue is reflected in the concessions. That's where they make their money.

Edit - forgot this - theaters make more the longer a movie plays. The first weekend they make nothing in most cases off tickets. The way the business works now with big opening weekends and steep drop offs, that helps force the concessions up. In the old days of course, movies might stick around for weeks if they were performing decently. Theaters love Titanics and Avatars when they come along.

[Vidor]

I think they're flawed but this is all wrong IMO. Did you end up watching any more than the first hour? Weird place to stop too, as the first movie is probably the best in terms of story. Anyway can't answer in full right now, but LOTR is Star Wars for some people.

Well, if one has contempt for the source material--"cartoonish/fantasy source material"--then sure, one won't like the film adaptations.

I'm quite confident that the LoTR films will in fact still be watched decades from now. That said, man, Jackson sure did lose his fastball when making "The Hobbit". I was just watching the end on HBO today. The part where Martin Freeman is facing down the dragon at the end of the second movie is genuinely spine-tinging. But it keeps cutting to this family we don't care about in the town, and the dwarves that we don't care about, and then Evangeline Lilly bursts in. From an artistic standpoint, making "The Hobbit" a trilogy was disastrous.

[The Third Man]

I live in Olathe [expletive] Kansas and I can still see Nightcrawler at at least three theaters around here. Anecdotes aren't too terribly useful here.

I see two on Fandango. One theater you can only see it at 11pm and the other is not in Olathe. It's only conveniently accessible if you want to go at 11pm or you want to drive to another town.

It's in 2 theaters in Manhattan. 9 total screenings today.
It's in 1 theater, 4 screenings today, in LA proper, and same for Seattle.
1 theater, 2 screenings in Portland.
Zero theaters in SF and Boston.
1 theater, 1 showing in Chicago.

For a film with a Best Actor Golden Globe nom, and that's only made like 10 mil at the box office so far, and that's not yet available on VOD, and that has some of the best buzz of the year, that's a very small amount of exposure to many millions of people. If I lived in those cities above and I heard all the buzz and I wanted to see a great performance I'd have to do a lot of work to see it, if it were available to me at all. Interstellar is younger by a week and people can see that virtually at will.

That tells you something about distribution, but also a lot of something about what people want to go pay $11 for.

Driving to "another town" is virtually meaningless around here. Technically speaking, I drive to Overland Park, Lenexa, or Shawnee every day, usually passing through all of them, just to do anything I ever do - go to work, visit any of my friends who are more than a few blocks from here, go to any of the bars I go to, etc. It's suburban sprawl zone. To get to my house to the Alamo Drafthouse or the Tivoli is 20 minutes - that's nothing to me. Any of the big AMCs around here, or the Fine Arts Group theaters, or the new Cinetopia (which I haven't been to yet) are 10, maybe 15 depending on the time of day/traffic. And we're talking about a movie that came out two months ago.

Also, apparently the Overland Park area is pretty good for movies if [expletive] San Francisco can't see this movie and I can.

[docellis]

I watched a movie called Coherence a few nights ago and I can't stop thinking about it, trying to figure it out. It is based on the Schrödinger's cat thought experiment, sort of. I could probably watch it 20 times (twice so far).

God damn it. Watch Coherence and tell me what you'd do if you met you.

after you mentioned it the other day, i went ahead and rented it and ended up falling asleep about half way thru, mostly because i was just really tired.

gonna give it another whack tonight

finished watching it last night and i gotta be honest here...i just dont share the same enthusiasm. i like the concept but it did nothing to hold my attention, until towards the end then it started to get interesting, then ended immediately.

i dunno, maybe i need to watch it again

It is something that maybe not everyone would like.

But notice that major first scene characters were lost: Man who starred in major tv show, encounters woman who loves that show says she has never seen the star of the show.

Final "action" scene, how many Emily's are there?

Most importantly, if you knew there were other "yous" would you be scared of them?

I wouldn't.

[The Third Man]

Finally watched Gone Girl today. Reminded me of a more polished, more melodramatic version of The Last Seduction. So of course I really dug it.

[The Third Man]

If anybody has any hard-to-find stuff they want to see, now is the time to ask, because Karagarga (a private torrent tracker with an awesome library of rarities) has a sitewide freeleech for the next 4 days. Let me know.

[Famous Mortimer]

I just enjoyed the Cinemageddon Christmas freeleech, filled all the space on my hard drives with Fred Olen Ray and Jesus Franco movies.