Did your movie theater look like this?

https://www.flickr.com/photos/94921703@N00/3266470174

I watched several old films here including Star Trek: The Motion Picture and Gandhi. A local college has renovated the building and it serves other purposes now, e.g., as an auditorium, although it still can show films. It has a different name now.  It is no longer named after the town in which it is located, Holland, Michigan.

Did you like seeing films in a movie theater or cinema?  Do you still go there occasionally to watch films?  I think that today there is still a demand for viewing films that way, although it may not be as much as in the past. I kind of wish that the theaters would show old movies like The Sound of Music and Ben Hur since my TV set does not have a huge screen (40 inches), although during the time that the old films were made it would have been considered large. There is something about viewing a film in a theater setting which no modern technology can replicate.

Anybody else see Project Hail Mary?

It was surprisingly wholesome. Just saw it tonight. If you told me beforehand that I'd almost cry over an alien-human friendship, I wouldn't believe you!

@narnian78 Is there anyone here who still watches movies in a theater?

Yes, I did on Thursday before last, on 9th April, I did go to our local movie theatre, to watch The Magic Faraway Tree, which I found quite enjoyable, along with my middle daughter, who was on an Easter holiday break. Although it was based on Enid Blyton's three books; The Enchanted Wood, Up the Faraway Tree and the Folk of the Faraway Tree; and the Faraway Tree characters, like Moonface, Silky, the Elf, the Angry Pixie, The Saucepan Man, Mr Whatzisname and Dame Washalot are still in the story, plus the lands swirling around, the family are quite different from the one Enid Blyton created, with the children called Joe, Beth and Fran (for Francesca) to reflect more modern naming patterns. And because these days teachers are not allowed to slap children anymore, Dame Slap was renamed Dame Snap.  

There are about 10 different cinemas in that local complex, but I think that various factors like the COVID19 epidemic in 2020 to 2022, & a continuing avoidance of any travel not strictly necessary, especially in the last month or so, has probably eaten into theatre attendances. It is often easier to watch Netflix or Prime on TV at home, rather than going out to the theatre. 

@waggawerewolf27 

Are there movie theaters in your area that have converted into other purposes?  There are two of them in a nearby town, and one of them has a stage for other events while the other one has been made into a dance hall.  I remember that the one with a stage once had a marionette puppet show. Films can still be shown in that theater, and occasionally it is used for that purpose. But usually theaters need several screens to survive unless they can offer other types of entertainment. 

We have three other movie theaters in our area.  One of them is well kept up, but the other two are neglected and in poor condition. This is unfortunate because about thirty years ago they were nice clean theaters. Also, they are located near shopping centers and malls with stores that have left the area.

I think the movie theater is a unique and enjoyable experience if the films are worth seeing. You can see the film exactly how it was made for the big screen, which is unlike the smaller versions that are available for streaming on your television. The only difference is that years ago there were more movies of better quality, which would make me more willing to purchase a ticket than most of the films which are offered today.

I've never been that attracted to superhero stories but for some reason, I've been really liking the MCU's recent Spider Man movies. I was rewatching them in preparation for Brand New Day and I decided I should finally watch the old Spider Man movies so I could really appreciate the crossovers in No Way Home. 

I believe the consensus about Sam Raimi's Spider Man trilogy is that the second one is the best and the third one is the weakest. I pretty much agree. Sorry, no interesting contrarian opinions here.  

It was interesting watching the Marc Webb Spider Man movies so soon after watching the Raimi ones. Technically speaking, the acting, writing and visuals are all better and the characters feel more like people and less like cartoony types. And yet...I feel like the first one anyway is too serious for its own good. I mean, the plot is about a mad scientist trying to enhance humanity by turning people into lizards. Trying to fight the silliness just seems pointless. I liked the second one better because it felt like it was fighting the silliness less. That and I enjoyed the character of Aunt May more in that one. Spider Man's interactions with kids were cute in both movies. 

Anyway, I feel like the MCU Spider Man movies are the best on the whole even though they're part of the annoyingly complicated MCU mythology and I can't really appreciate them without watching a whole bunch of other movies. 

EDIT: I remember Glumpuddle saying in a Patreon-exclusive video that he was disappointed in Spider Man: No Way Home partially because he felt like Tobey Maguire wasn't playing the same character as he did in the original Spider Man trilogy. I honestly couldn't see any difference between his performance in those movies and No Way Home.

Is there anyone who remembers the movie My Side of the Mountain, which was based on the children’s book of the same title?  I saw it again after many years and I thought it was quite good. It was made back in 1969 and is somewhat dated, but to some vintage films are nonetheless appealing. The location of the story was changed from New York State to the wilderness of Quebec in Canada.  Other than that the story of the film is quite faithful to the book by Jean Craighead George. The story is about a boy and falcon surviving in the wilderness. Decades ago the movie was on the Disney channel, but now it is on Amazon Prime. It is well worth viewing!   🙂

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064708/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk

@narnian78 yes, I went to see it on my own, as I'd read the book, but I was disappointed with lots of changes.  It's clearly a fanciful fiction, assuming that a preteen could really live in the wild alone like that, and survive and thrive.

The book had lots of woodcraft information so could have been written as a camping or Boy Scout manual. 

I suppose the film producers didn't want to be responsible for dozens of kids getting lost or perishing in the mountains, trying to emulate the boy hero.

@coracle 

At first I thought it was a Disney production because I remember that it aired decades ago on the Disney channel. But now looking at the IMDB listing the filmmakers had nothing to do with Disney even though it aired on that cable channel. The movie is somewhat of a fantasy assuming that a teenage boy could survive in a wilderness with a falcon.  But I still think it is well made with beautiful photography and decent acting, which is something not always present in today’s films. It does not follow the book word for word, but it still is very enjoyable. I gave it an 8/10 rating on IMDb.com because for the most part I really liked it.  And I would recommend the book even more today than when I first read it decades ago in children’s literature class in college. Sometime I would like to read it again.  🙂

@narnian78  Are there movie theaters in your area that have converted into other purposes?  There are two of them in a nearby town, and one of them has a stage for other events while the other one has been made into a dance hall.

Yes, there was such a movie theatre in Penrith a good while ago, back last century in the 1980's, I think, when the locals campaigned to get a replacement movie theatre, called the Mike Walsh Cinema, I think it was, the old ones having been long discarded by the 1970's, when we first moved here in 1973. There is still one of these really old-fashioned theatres up in the Blue Mountains, but even the 1980's Penrith premises were taken over, and even that change to a restaurant has been changed a couple more times since. In the 1990's our main local shopping mall was refurbished to include our present cinema complex with about 10 different cinemas in the one area. These are run by big companies like Hoyts or Event, unlike the old-fashioned Blue Mountains theatre or the country setup where one of my brothers-in-law used to work in the 1960's. We have a couple of arts and movie centres, here, at the Joan Sutherland Centre & the long-lived Q theatre, where stage shows can be held. And our local Panthers Rugby League club also has such facilities as well as a conference centre.  

@narnian78 I remember that the one with a stage once had a marionette puppet show.

There have long been more and better such facilities in Sydney's CBD, where my mum used to take me and when she, myself, and my two elder children could go to see stage performances at the Theatre Royal, such as Cats or Sleeping Beauty, or maybe the Lyric, where once we went to see a stage performance of LWW using life-size puppets and where I could just make out how the dancing incorporated scene changes, probably using elbows or feet to nudge them around, or castors or something. I've also seen something similar being done at our famed Opera House (down below) at Bennelong Point for a stage performance for The Hobbit. 

Sydney Opera House.  

@waggawerewolf27 Love the Sydney Opera House! For anyone who hasn't already been there and done that, the official tour of it is an absolute must if you're in Sydney — it's a truly unique building with a fascinating story behind it. And it's even better if you can get to a performance there as well! I saw a youth ensemble from Cologne playing Vivaldi's "Four Seasons" there.

@narnian78 About cinemas (as we call movie theatres here) that have been converted to other purposes, I think I mentioned before, the one in my home town here in Cheshire — called the Rex — was one of those. It originally opened in 1936, but closed down in 1995 and was converted into shops. Then some years later, it was bought by a family-owned company that has revived several old cinemas in northern England, and they converted it back again and it reopened as the Rex Cinema in 2018! I found a review of it somewhere by a writer who had known the original cinema, and while the new owners didn't reproduce the original decor and layout exactly, they kept to the classic Art Deco style and it looks really beautiful. I haven't been there for a while and must keep an eye on what they're showing and see if there's anything coming up that I'd like to go to! They do show current movies, but often with a run of only a couple of weeks each, and sometimes they also screen classics or filmed theatre performances. And sometimes they have special evenings where (for an extra fee) they serve pizza or fish and chips before the movie starts!  

@waggawerewolf27 

Holland, Michigan is a small town with a population of 30,000 compared to Sydney, Australia. At one time there were at least four or five movie theaters in the Holland-Zeeland area. There is one theater in the downtown area of Holland that also serves food and beverages. It is clean and well kept up. The other one that is owned by a local college (Hope College) only occasionally shows films, but it was restored a few years ago to look attractive and beautiful. Still, it is no longer a full time movie theater.  Zeeland, Michigan, the town in which I live, never had any movie theaters because it is apparently too small with a population of only about 5,000.  But since it is only five miles away from Holland movie entertainment was not far away.

@Courtenay

It is fortunate that the cinemas in your area have found other uses. That is much better than having the buildings torn down. Often theaters can be restored to their original appearance even though they are used for other purposes. I would much rather see a building that is restored than neglected.  🙂

Posted by: @narnian78

It is fortunate that the cinemas in your area have found other uses. That is much better than having the buildings torn down.

I only know about that one in my own town that was restored to being a cinema after a little over 20 years as a set of shops. The outside of the building had remained much the same but the inside was completely changed, so it had to be rebuilt entirely by the new owners.

There's a shopping arcade in Wonthaggi, the nearest larger town to my home town in Australia, that was originally a theatre. It has it painted on the outside of the building: "Plaza Arcade, Originally the Plaza Theatre". I don't know its history, though, so I don't know whether it was used for showing movies or only for live stage plays. There was another theatre in the same town, the Union Theatre, which burned down in the early 1980s (not long before my family moved to the area) and was replaced by a modern building, the Union Community Arts Centre, that is used for both movies and live theatre. I've seen many of both kinds of show there over the years! Smaller towns in Australia often have live theatre and cinema in the one building, or at least they used to. The one in Wonthaggi was closed for a major renovation when I was last there — I don't know if that's finished yet or what the new version of it will look like. (I normally only get back to Australia once a year!) 

Nothing is left of any of the old cinemas here in my city, apart from one that was restored recently in an outlying beach suburb 10 miles from here. It has shown classics over many years.

When I was a small child (early 1960s) there were eight cinemas [counting on my fingers and reciting their names] within 5 minutes walk of the central square where all the buses came and went. There was also another one four blocks away - its frontage has been preserved after the earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, and it's just been announced that a new owner will restore the frontage when it rebuilds [office space] on the empty space behind it.  Two theatres also showed films in the 60s, when they didn't have bookings for shows or concerts. Perhaps 5 or 6 more were in suburbs, but all closed and the buildings were reused.  Maybe two of those buildings are still there.

Most of the older cinemas had gone by the time of the earthquakes. But we had at least four multiplex cinemas, one in the city and three in suburban malls. The one in the city was part of the former (1950s?) railway station building, which had to be demolished after the quakes. 

@courtenay For anyone who hasn't already been there and done that, the official tour of it is an absolute must if you're in Sydney — it's a truly unique building with a fascinating story behind it.

That is true enough. Joern Utzon's prizewinning design for our Opera House was unique for Sydney, and so much better & more appropriate than some of the alternatives suggested at the time. My Dad, who lived at Cremorne at the time, over the other side of the Harbour Bridge, took photos of it as it was being built, and also made it his business to be one of the spectators when Queen Elizabeth came out to Sydney to open it, in October of 1973. A year afterwards, colour television was introduced to Australia, and a decade or more later, we could watch films on videotape on Beta or VHS players. After the changeover to DVD, we could rent movies from local stores like "Blockbuster" or even borrow them from the TAFE library where I worked. But now, the availability of streaming services has done for the movie rental companies as well. 

The Event cinema chain envisaged people having theatre parties, able to dress up in costume and have a good time together, 20 years ago, when the three Lord of the Rings movies were released in succession. 

@narnian78  Zeeland, Michigan, the town in which I live, never had any movie theaters because it is apparently too small with a population of only about 5,000.  But since it is only five miles away from Holland movie entertainment was not far away.

Well, 5 miles away is about 8.04672 km, according to Internet, which would be as far away as St Marys. But we don't go out often for entertainment, these days, when thanks to the COVID19 regulations, of a few years ago, and now, worries about eking out petrol supply makes home entertainment so much easier to enjoy films without leaving home. We do have a good rail system, most of the time, plus a bus service to get around. 

On this year's calendar at home, the pictures are old worldwide maps. For June there is a barely readable 1700 map of USA's New England district, featuring "Niew Nederlandt" & "Nova Belgica", not to mention "Niew Jorck". Did your part of the USA woods have a Dutch heritage, by any chance?

@coracle But we had at least four multiplex cinemas, one in the city and three in suburban malls.

Were these multiplex cinemas replaced & refurbished after those earthquakes? 

@waggawerewolf27 The central one was not. The other three probably did have repairs and refurbishing, but nothing major, I think. (I was in one when an earthquake happened, and they had to evacuate as it was over 5.0 strength).