Hey, fellow Chicagoans and beloved out-of-towners! If you're sick of waiting on cinema to get over its winter doldrums, The Music Box Theatre has whipped up a vat of chicken soup for the movie lover's soul!
The 70mm Film Festival kicks off tonight with a big-screen double-bill of heady, classic masterpieces: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo at 6:30pm, followed by Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey at 9pm.
What's so special about 70mm film? For starters, it's film, and that's becoming a bigger and bigger deal nowadays. As cineplexes convert to digital presentation exclusively, and boutique theatres such as The Music Box become cineaste safe-havens, watching movies in this format with a large audience will soon be as rare and as culturally revered an experience as Woodstock was to my parents' generation.
Second, all of the films playing tonight through the 28th are presented in the way they were meant to be seen. You'll get to enjoy West Side Story, Lifeforce, The Master, Hamlet, and a handful of others with a clarity and level of detail that is, quite literally, twice that of traditional 35mm projection. And let me silence the blu-ray/home theatre argument right now with a gentle reminder that not all of these films are available in high definition.
So there you have it: excuses = banished!
Tickets are $9.25 for individual screenings and $70 for a limited-edition festival pass (check out the event's Web page for more information). Please join me in supporting these beautifully presented motion pictures, and be on the lookout for special 70mm Film Festival episodes of the KtS Podcast!