Raiders Of The Lost Ark (1981) – A

One of the local cinemas where I live is showing all three Indiana Jones films over the next couple weeks. I went to see Raiders last night. It was great to watch on the big screen, but I have to say, I can’t stand the theater.

The cinema is part of the Marcus Theater chain, and for all the films I’ve seen in one of their cinemas, I have the same problems with the presentation. They run their digital projectors on some weird setting (probably default), where the video is run with some sort of ‘smooth motion’ thing going on, so a film that runs at 23.975 fps looks like it’s going 30-60 fps, like having a smooth refresh rate on a TV, but I don’t know if it was the same thing. All I can say is that it made it difficult to enjoy a film that I truly love to watch. The image also appeared to be zoomed, as there was definitely stuff missing on the sides and top, but I can’t be 100% sure how much. This paragraph probably belongs in the b*tching thread.

I also think that the projector had some odd colour settings, because it appeared to be the BD master (I could definitely see the dulled highlights and usually the orange faces), but for some reason the sand and rocks in the desert scenes looked a lot more yellow than the orange you get on the BD, and the Nazi flags looked more their proper red.