Two nights ago I went on a date to see "The Lake House". Very good movie by the way... I made a conscious effort to avoid the "ghetto" movie theater that always has faded edges around the screen and horrible audio. So, I make it to the "better" theater in town - and there are only two theaters in Grand Forks, ND.
I sit down in the theater and notice that the masking is set to 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen. I'm thinking, well they'll probably change it once the movie starts. Well, I was WRONG.
The 1.78:1 movie began playing on a 2.35:1 masking set up, so a good portion of the bottom end of the movie was barely visable (due to it being projected onto the black masking). I end up getting fed up with the whole experience so I get up to find and speak with the manager. She had no clue what I was talking about so she went up there to try to fix it. Immediately after I sat back down someone was up there trying to reconfigure the setup. She ended up REMOVING the lower half of the movie with some mediocre way of blocking the light. The lower half was still cut off during the entire movie.
I can't wait to get the heck out of backwoods uncivilized North Dakota and move back to California where we (and almost every other state in the US) have good movie theaters. Yet another reason why I like watching movies on my own movie theater!
End of rant.
