Today I watched “Jay Kelly” at the Egyptian theater in Hollywood. However, I can’t give you a review of the movie because I missed parts of it since it was projected on 35mm film. Unlike directors like Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan, I DON’T like watching movies projected on film.
About 3 decades ago, my first long term job was working as a film projectionist at a multiplex. One of the things we would almost always do is check every film print before it was shown to an audience just in case there was a problem with the presentation. Most of the movies I watched at the job were movies I would have never watched if I didn’t need to. Some of them were terrible including the WORST MOVIE I’VE EVER SEEN. It was called “Bashu”. It was in a foreign language. It had English subtitles…sometimes. I’m still not sure why it didn’t have subtitles throughout. Plus, the subtitles were sometimes in broken English like a foreigner who doesn’t speak English well. I just learned more about the movie by reading about it on IMDB (link) than I did when I watched the movie.
Watching movies that I didn’t care about helped me check the film print. I didn’t care about the story, so I paid closer attention for film scratches, dirt, splices (due to film breaks), other picture issues, sound issues, etc. After a few years, every time I saw a movie I would regularly notice the issues, but it wouldn’t distract me unless there was a lot of them (which there were at some 2nd run movie theaters). I could even see a slight jitter that would happen on some types of film projectors.
Once I started watching movies shown digitally, it was somewhat surprising that I WOULDN’T see issues like dirt or scratches but I quickly got used to it. I believe the only movies I have watched on film in the last few years is when I saw Christopher Nolan movies like “Interstellar” and “Oppenheimer” on 70mm IMAX film. For those movies, I made sure to watch them on the very first day so there wouldn’t been much dirt of scratches.
I’m not saying that “Jay Kelly” had bad projection, but there were the occasional spots of dirt or a momentary film scratch. Every time one appeared; it would take me out of the movie. I would lose track of what was happening in the scene.
Plus, I don’t know if the sound was analog or digital audio (there were digital audio tracks that were put onto 35mm film like DTS, Sony’s “SDDS” or Dolby’s “Dolby Digital”) but the sound only seemed to be coming out of the speakers behind the screen. The theater even has speakers across the ceiling, but I didn’t hear much sound coming out of any of the surround speakers. It was a little odd not having sound playing all around the movie theater. I guess I’m used to sound systems like Dolby Atmos audio.
In order to give a full review of the movie “Jay Kelly” I’ll need to see it again, which won’t be easy since it’s a Netflix movie that’s only playing in a limited number of theaters before it starts playing on Netflix in a week or two. In two days, the latest Netflix movie – “Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery” will replace “Jay Kelly” on a lot of movie screens.
LOS ANGELES FILM REVIEW 