This docu about the New Bev Cinema in Los Angeles (now under management of technophobe Tarantino who made sure they play everything in 35mm) feels like a elitist whine-fest. It always baffles me that overly nostalgic people are actually demanding they're getting the unintended defects from an archaic medium. A 100 years ago when film was invented film stock and prints was the best thing they could come up with at the time and it did actually work well. But it also had some problems like being sensitive to scratching, wobbly unstable imagery, mechanical projectors who made a rattling sound, loss of resolution with each transfer or duplication. Now technology has advanced and we have digital cameras who can easily match film, digital projectors who give a clean stable image that doesn't degrade with each showing. Now we can actually show the film like it was intended by the director each time it's projected! Now these elitists are saying: it's not romantic, it's to perfect, inhuman. They are actually comparing human flaws (humans indeed aren't perfect) to a medium. To those people I say: the medium is NOT the message. Good films will be made no matter what medium they're on. If they had digital a 100 years ago they would have used that. We don't HAVE to conserve a 100 year old technology because it's important. It had it's time, now we have something better. Let's move on. A typical characteristic that also defines human evolution is that people always try to better themselves and the way they do things. If we didn't we would still be no better then the monkeys we evolved from. Progress is part of the human condition so why fight it?
Review of Out of Print
