AccentedCinema
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[Weekly Update] IMAX and Lie-MAX
🕑 Added 2025-04-22 17:30:24 +0000 UTCI'm sitting in a theater with half a dozen people all waiting in silence for the film to begin. Everyone comes alone, because only snobs with no stable employment and no friends come to see Sinners in a Tuesday afternoon.
But hey, at least the ticket is only 5 bucks.
CHANNEL UPDATE
Summer Horror:
We are once again doing a horror themed video for this summer, and you get to decide what topic we'll pursue. Check out our last post and cast your vote! And leave me some horror recommendations to cover in the future, too.
Ne Zha Video:
Our next video is largely complete, waiting for me to finish the thumbnail and subtitles. It should go live this Friday. It turns out to be one of the longer videos I've made, at about 18 minutes. It's also packed with way too much information, even after I deleted large chunks of it.
You know, I've repeatedly made "above average length" videos for the past few months. I'm starting to think I don't know how average works.
Bad Chinese Movies:
For next month, we planned a light-hearted video looking at recent bad Chinese movie. It's sort of a revision of the video I made 5 years ago, calling out the Chinese film industry for imitating Hollywood. Now that the table has turned, it'll be an interesting (but possibly controversial) update.
Bonus Video:
It seemed everyone wants a video about the original Blade Runner. So that'll be our bonus video of the month. Even though I'm not the biggest cyberpunk fan, I am still a sci-fi fan, so I have a lot to say about the movie. Honestly, the whole cyberpunk genre has evolved into something that's neither cyber nor punk at this point. Maybe I'm the perfect guy to rant about it.
MEDIA TALK
So, originally I was going to watch Sinners in Imax, as Montreal is one of the few cities in North America that has a 1.43:1 screen and 70mm film projector, thus capable of showing the film in its maximum width and height, as intended by the filmmakers.
By the way, isn't it so weird that high prestige filmmakers keep making IMAX movies that you can only see in full in like... 20 theaters across the entire world?
Anyway, I was fully prepared to pay a solide 15 canadian dollars for this experience, until I realize the 70mm projector has been busted since 2015, after the showing of Interstellar. It has been 10 years, and it was never fixed. Now, this particular cinema has a massive 1.43:1 screen, but paired with a xenon projector that's only capable of 1.90:1 projection.
That means, if your film is made with an IMAX camera, a large chunk of the image would be cut off, rendering it effectively the same as a regular 1.85:1 composition.
What's worse is that the xenon projector isn't all that sharp to begin with. It would be nice if the theater upgrades to a dual laser projector, but those are rare. That means, for most people, IMAX is nothing more than a bigger screen. It's the same quality image spread over a much larger area.
And yet... I'm sure many you are scratching your head at all the jargon I just threw out. Isn't IMAX just about the super large screen? Indeed, I think the whole thing about aspect ratio and sharpness only matters to snobs like me who does not have stable employment or friends. That's probably why the theater never fixed the 70mm projector. The Xenon projector is cheaper. Digital is cheaper. And only this one Asian asshole can tell the difference.
At the end, I decided to just watch regular projection. It's 5 bucks vs 15, and all I need to do is sit closer to the screen to get sufficiently similar experience /s
By the way, the poster for Sinners doesn't inspired confidence, doesn't it? It tells you basically nothing about the film. I supposed it's good for me, because I don't know what to expect. But to an average viewer? Do they even know this is a horror film? It looks like a war movie.
Anyway, I'll see you soon in our next video!
![[Weekly Update] IMAX and Lie-MAX](https://img10.patrefans.com/storage/1/uu/in/563145-019e86f1-ae00-7b4a-bd62-c9035d47eaa3.jpg)
Comments
Oliver 'Kannik' Bollmann
For years I've been calling it fake-max, but Lie-Max is so much a better and cleverer name. Maybe it's because I grew up in Ontario and getting seeing true 15/70 IMAX in science centres and etc, but seeing the IMAX name slapped onto cinemas and movies that's just "same thing but bigger" also irks me. I mean, I guess good for the company that they found a way to get some extra $$ out of milking the name, but if they're not using that to support the actual IMAX format (and the documentaries that it so well supports) then it just feels cheap.
Accented Cinema
Some of the day shots have focus issues and exposure problems. It's not because of the IMAX format, it seems
Chauncey McAskill
I have no experience with film-projected IMAX to qualify people's disdain for digitally-projected IMAX (I'm curious to see what all the fuss is about). The only IMAX screen I've watched movies on is Montreal Scotiabank's digital projection (looks like the proper ratio). The handful of movies I've seen (Dune, Oppenheimer, Megalopolis, Princess Mononoke) all looked really great. For Sinners (which I was unaware it was shot on IMAX), I watched it at the Montreal Forum's "IMAX" screen (wider ratio). I watched it there on that screen because it was the only option that fit my schedule. Despite the gorgeous cinematography I found the quality of the image to be surprisingly shoddy. Maybe it was the projection. I think it was the photography: for example, one early two-shot in town was sunny in one and very dark in the other shot. Other shots were a little unfocused. I would be interested to watch it on Scotiabank's screen.
