[tyjen]

The last movie we attended people were incredibly disruptive throughout the film, to the point that it was difficult to focus on the film. Some people enjoy screaming, laughing, and talking as part of the experience, but it's apparently been normalized beyond my tolerance threshold. Add in the cost and overall movie quality decrease of Hollywood productions, and it's difficult to justify.

Presently, we watch foreign movies at home 95% of the time and maybe a Hollywood production when they manage to find their roots and create something worth watching.

[bloomingeek]

Sort of off topic, but almost the same can be said for music concerts. During slower or softer songs, people can be heard talking and laughing loudly. I get it, they paid their money, same as us, but we didn't pay to hear them.

[dylan604]

A couple of years ago, I went to see Echo & The Bunnymen open for Violent Femmes. I had seen the Femmes multiple times, but was really excited to see Echo. These two old biddies that sat in front of us talked the entire show. In between bands, one of them dropped their purse without noticing. I picked it up and offered in exchange for the purse if they wouldn't mind talking through the next act. They were shocked at the nerve and said they didn't talk that much. I then told them all about their kids and their school work and other nonsense that I had to endure. The looked at each other like "oops". To my luck, the show was not sold out, and we moved down our row to get away from them. I obviously gave the purse back

[krn1p4n1c]

You never would’ve had this problem at a Mötorhead concert.

[pclmulqdq]

People call the classical music audience prudish for demanding quiet during performances, but IMO when you go to a concert it should be ok to shush people who talk during the quiet parts.

[butlike]

On the one hand, you're at a social experience. On the other hand, aren't you supposed to have your senses engaged in a shared experience? The interpersonal conversation diminishes that. On the other other hand, as long as you're having fun and not doing harm, do whatever. As the Master of Ceremonies, I love it. On the other other other hand, talking pushes up the noise floor, making louder concerts a necessity. A louder concert is more dangerous to your hearing.

[snapcaster]

This is so antisocial. Just go listen to it by yourself in your room if human presence is annoying

[jpc0]

There is a difference between us all experiencing a shared artistic experience and us hearing about your kids while we are trying very hard to share an artistic experience.

I wouldn't complain much about people singing along to a ballad or such but yapping, you can go do that somewhere else.

[butlike]

I'm so split on this. Ultimately I think I land on: "if there's chairs, engage in the shared sensory experience. If it's GA standing room only, it's a party and do whatever."

[dpark]

This is the typical reply of the inconsiderate. “If my behavior is so problematic, then you should stay home.”

The problem isn’t with “human presence”. It’s with the select few who can’t or won’t control their own behavior out of respect for others.

[butlike]

As a musician I ask if the music is so fragile it can't stand up to some extraneous background noise, is it really worth listening to?

Also, if the music feels bad enough to where people find talking to each other more pleasant than listening, isn't that the fault of the 'sensory experience?'

[dpark]

It really depends on the music and the background noise? Talking (more likely yelling) in the middle of a rock concert? Probably not an issue. I’m wearing earplugs anyway. Holding a conversation in the middle of a quiet passage during an orchestra performance? Everyone near you wants you to shut up.

It’s like people talking through a comedy show. Saying something quietly to the person next to you? Whatever. Talking loudly for 20 minutes? Get the fuck out. Go talk to your friends at a bar and let people who came to hear the act enjoy the act.

> if the music feels bad enough to where people find talking to each other more pleasant than listening

But then leave. If you don’t like the show, it’s totally fair for you to just get up and go. Talking through a show you don’t care about and disturbing people who do want to be there? Why?

[BrenBarn]

Curious if you have a sense of how long this has been going on. My perception is that various sorts of rudeness and inconsiderateness have been on the rise for a while, but really jumped post-COVID.

Some of it is minor but just suggests to me that many people lack any sense that they should be aware of others around them. Just today I was walking down the street and a woman was stopped, in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at her phone. She was in front of a shop door but not right in front of it, so she was half-blocking both people passing on the sidewalk and people trying to get into the store. I see this kind of thing so often now, in store aisles, on sidewalks, etc., and a part of me wants to go up to these people and inform them that there are other people around them and that if they want to take a moment to look at their phone they should step to the side.

[lewispollard]

Definitely post-COVID. I remember going to see bands in between or just after lockdowns ended, and even the bands were taken aback by the change in audience behaviour, commenting on it. Lots of self-entitled behaviour, talking and even yelling out during quiet moments, people walking up to the stage during a seated Nick Cave concert demanding to hand him stuff or shake his hand - I remember him saying "wow, you guys really forgot how to behave over the last couple of years". Now it just seems to be normalised that crowd behaviour is worse, more self-entitled. I'm not sure what's driving it - whether people who previously weren't going to gigs decided, during lockdown, that they wanted to go out and do stuff more, but just had never learned the etiquette, and/or social media making the experience about the individual rather than the performance.

[gspetr]

> many people lack any sense that they should be aware of others around them.

It's not "people". One half of all people grows up playing contact sports or at least have some form of rough-and-tumble with their homies in schoolyards. This half also knows that you can get punched if things get too rowdy.

The other does not. Almost all of the entitled road blockers are in this category.

[rayiner]

I went with my daughter to see Taylor Swift in Tokyo. It was an amazing experiences. Swift fans prefer recording Tokyo performances because fangs don’t sing along to the music or talk during the performance.

[shiroiuma]

I saw Avatar 3 here in Tokyo where I live. It was great! I saw the Dolby 3D version. Popcorn was pretty cheap, tickets were reasonably priced, the audience was as quiet as the dead.

I've seen several other movies (normal ones, not 3D/IMAX/etc.) here since I moved here, and they were all the same. Audiences here have excellent behavior.

We're planning to see Project Hail Mary this weekend when it comes out, this time on IMAX.

[DoesntMatter22]

Japan is a whole other level of respectful. I have seen a movie in the US in 10 years because when I go people are on their phones or talking

[maleldil]

> don’t sing along to the music

What's wrong with that?

[0_____0]

inconvenient for the purposes of recording, sounds like

[rayiner]

Audiences in Tokyo aren’t quite to make it easier to record. It just so happens that audiences in Tokyo tend to be quiet, so the recordings of the Tokyo shows tend to end up the clearest.

[rambojohnson]

A couple years ago I went to a county fair because someone said the pie judging was worth seeing. I’ve been to fairs before but never really watched the judging part. They had all the pies on this weird low table, like not quite a kid’s playset table but close, so people leaning in to look kept bumping it with their legs and thighs without noticing, and after a while one of the pies just slowly started sliding toward the edge every time the table got nudged until it eventually tipped off and landed upside down on the floor while the judges were busy debating crust integrity on another pie.

I picked it up and put it back and they still gave it third place.

[dctoedt]

The Beatles famously stopped touring, and stuck exclusively to studio recording (apart from the Abbey Road rooftop concert), in no small part because they got tired of not being able to hear themselves sing or play due to all the girls' screaming.

https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/why-did-the-beatles-stop-tourin...

[dawnerd]

Just went to a very small show, 200 tickets but lots of no shows. Maybe 100 people there total. The folks at the bar were so rude to the talent just loudly talking over them. I just don’t get it.

[snapcaster]

Couldn't disagree more. It's a social experience, it's so unfun and antisocial to have some go to a large gathering of humans and get annoyed when their presence is detectable. Go listen to the song by yourself in a room

[ozim]

With current TV setups or projector technology I basically have cinema in my living room.

As a kid who grew up in 90’s I would say it is easily better than what cinema had back then.

I don’t have that high expectations of sound/video as many people will point out that streaming kills the quality but for all its worth still much better than what I need to enjoy a movie.

[dylan604]

One of the criteria for me to go to the theater was the big screen and big sound would really add to the experience. The last film I saw in the theater was was so loud that it physically hurt and ruined the experience.

As you say with the image quality being as high at home now plus a decent surround system really makes the theater experience at home very enjoyable.

[foobarian]

These days it's hard for the screen and sound alone to compete with home theater tech. So the only remaining edge a theater might have is the presence of others. The Minecraft movie was the perfect example of this. Some of our kid's classmates went to see it multiple times due to the viral audience cues. And to think that some theaters tried to suppress it.

[mschuster91]

If you got a house of your own, yes.

If you are in an urban area and are not a millionaire, you probably live in some kind of apartment or studio. And yes, you can stick up a projector and a good surround system... but it might be that the builder cut corners on the floors and your neighbors already come knocking when you are talking, much less turn up the audio system to a tenth of the sound pressure a good cinema sound system provides.

[ozim]

I do live in an apartment and I am far from a millionaire.

I don't have any of the problem - but I don't have "cinema sound system" as I mentioned whatever I have must have just clear sound and clear doesn't mean loud. I don't need "sound experience" to enjoy a movie.

[mschuster91]

> I don't need "sound experience" to enjoy a movie.

Unfortunately, most cinema movies are not properly remastered in their audio tracks, but keep the original cinema mix. That results in very silent dialogue (which is not a problem in a cinema, at least as long as people behave and don't yap around all the time) and very loud sequences particularly in action shots.

When you now give such a movie to your usual home theater setup, you have to turn up the volume enough so you can understand the dialogue and either constantly turn it down whenever it gets heated or live with neighbors complaining.

Straight-to-streaming releases usually don't suffer from that problem, because they are made and mixed for normal users streaming on their laptops with shitty speakers. Note I said usually, because Disney's Star Wars series are still mastered for decent setups with dynamic range.

There's a debate to be had about the impact of that on storytelling, as straight-to-streaming these days is produced with the movie/episode on a side screen while people are doing something else, so everything that you would normally see on a screen is verbally described by actors, but that's another debate entirely.

[evrenesat]

Thanks for clarifying that. I always thinking it was due to my bad hearing or lack of fluency! English is my second language, and without subtitles, I'm having trouble to understand the dialogues without increasing the volume until I reach a level where I also got disturbed from the sound effects, bg music etc. It's a bigger issue with movies, not only due to what you explained about sound mixing, but also error correction of my brain works worse without the context, unlike series where I know the plot and the characters.

[shiroiuma]

>you have to turn up the volume enough so you can understand the dialogue and either constantly turn it down whenever it gets heated or live with neighbors complaining.

It doesn't help that many actors these days have become students of the "mumble acting" school of acting. It's amazing watching some 50-year-old movie from the 70s and the dialog is crystal-clear and perfectly understandable.

[mosura]

Back pre digital I was once lucky enough to see Aliens on one of the private cinemas at Fox, and it was astounding. I think people underestimate how poorly operated most normal cinemas used to be, combined with maybe not the best prints etc.

[Telemakhos]

I remember seeing In the Mood for Love on the big screen in my local arthouse cinema back around 2000. It was shot with analogue film and projected as such, and the sheer details of the textures were astounding. It's not a bad film on my 4k monitor, but I don't feel the same awe.

[jjmarr]

Blame lossy compression to save bandwidth. There's no way to legally stream in Blu-ray quality.

[danbolt]

I’ve only seen that movie on an old MacBook about a decade ago, but I can certainly believe it’d be a treat seeing it the way you mention.

Funny enough, I want to see a version of Chungking Express that feels processed to look like an early-2000s digital camera.

[the_af]

Well, to be fair, In the Mood for Love is a gorgeous movie. It does look great in almost every screen. It shines in a cinema screen.

[SoftTalker]

IIRC in the film era there was one "master" of the movie, it was duplicated multiple times to make negative versions of the film, then those negatives are used to make the positive copies that are sent to theaters. So you're watching something that has been copied at least twice.

Commercial theaters are all digital now. They don't even have film projectors anymore. Some independent or "revival" cinemas might still have them.

[markdown]

> As a kid who grew up in 90’s I would say it is easily better than what cinema had back then.

The best thing a home theatre system has that is equivalent to the 90's experience and superior to current cinema is that you can have an intermission to take a leak.

In the 90's, the intermission was long enough to visit the bathroom and then buy some more popcorn and candy. These days I have to miss some part of the middle of the movie.

[symfoniq]

As a huge film buff, I sadly agree. And theaters in my area aren’t doing a good job keeping their projection technology current. When we went to see “Wicked”, my wife leaned over and whispered that it would probably look better on our 77” OLED, and she was absolutely right. The theater image was dark and lacked vibrant color.

[alwa]

The last time I chose to watch a movie in a theater instead of the comfort of my home, I went for the raucous audience aspect of the experience.

[socalgal2]

There's a middle ground. I go for the laughter and reaction of the audience. I don't go to hear the 2 people behind me have a conversation during the movie. Nor do I go to have people critiquing the movie out loud as we're watching it. I certainly don't go to watch people pop out their phones and scroll through social media or check their messages.

[vasac]

One of my better cinema experiences was watching Austin Powers 3 at the theater in some random late-morning screening where there were only three friends and me in the hall, plus two elderly ladies in their 70s. They were laughing so hard that the movie became even funnier for us, because you somehow wouldn’t expect them to find it that hilarious.

Also, growing up in a small town in Yugoslavia in the 80s definitely didn’t guarantee a top-tier cinema experience, to put it mildly. But the feeling I had watching the James Bond opening credits from a damaged film reel, with frayed subtitles projected from a decades-old projector, is something I can never quite recreate when watching on a 4K screen from a perfect source. So there's that.

</old-man-rant>

[aaronbrethorst]

Out of curiosity was it a movie where you’re expected to throw toast?

[dylan604]

The midnight showing of movies like Rocky Horror Picture show are fun when everyone knows that audience participation is the entire reason of going, but that's the only time I want audience participation.

[lelandfe]

It’s not a call and response like that but the audible gross out sounds from the theater audience for The Substance added so much to my viewing.

[mark_l_watson]

Well, rude behavior stemmed from lack of empathy for other people who have to listen to them. I am sorry you had that bad experience.

Off topic, but since I retired a few years ago, I go to movies all the time but I go during the week and catch movies between 11am to 3pm. Theaters are almost empty, but just enough other people in the theater to feel like a shared experience. I see about five or six movies a month, and my wife goes with me about half the time. I worried that my local theater would go out of business until we went to a Saturday night movie and all 16 theaters seemed busy, will wall to wall people in the huge lobby area.

So, I hope the movie industry survives in close to its present form. I share your fondness to foreign films, BTW.

[next_xibalba]

This is why I no longer go to the theater. The norms around how one behaves in theaters have been destroyed (at least to my preferences).

[justinclift]

If you haven't seen it already, then Wind River (from 2017) is pretty good: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5362988/

Well, it suited my tastes anyway. :)

[alsetmusic]

This is why I strongly endorse buying a projector if the space allows for one. Changed the home experience. I thought I might be making a mistake when I bought my first (720p) years ago but I'd never go back to a traditional television.

[pwthornton]

Idk, a giant OLED is a pretty great experience, and the visual quality of them beats a good chunk of professional cinemas.

[ant6n]

Projecting a 100 inch picture on a wall costs a fraction of OLED at the same size.

[shiroiuma]

I completely disagree. This advice made sense 20 years ago, but today an 85" (or smaller even) OLED screen will easily outperform any projector.

The problem with projectors is that they can't display black: they're shining light through a filter, so they can't produce a true black, and the contrast ratio isn't that great. For best effect, you need an extremely dark room. With an OLED screen, black is absolutely black, because black pixels simply aren't lit up at all, and you get better contrast ratio than a projector. As a bonus, you can even watch it with the lights on.

[Auracle]

A 120” or whatever screen is still massively larger than an 85” OLED. Yeah, the picture quality isn’t as good but it’s also more like a theater, so you get that nostalgia factor.

Obviously it depends on your projector/screen choice but it’ll probably be cheaper, too. The portability is also nice.

[g947o]

Different people value different things.

If I watch a movie by myself, I would choose my $500 27" 4k monitor connected to proper speakers/headphone over a $300 55" TV without external soundbar any day. Most people probably will choose the opposite, which I totally understand.

[dboreham]

In the US there's also a non-zero chance that you'll be shot in a movie theater.

[rationalist]

There's a higher chance you will die in a car wreck or on the subway, etc, getting to the theater... in any country.

[rationalist]

Is someone letting emotions get in the way of facts?