Next month, the Hollywood Theatre's setting aside an entire weekend to offer three movies on 70mm: From Friday, April 7 to Sunday, April 9, Portlanders can see Ghostbusters, Tron, and Interstellar—all in 70mm.
1984's Ghostbusters, you might remember, is one of the finest comedies ever made—and while its recent legacy has been, shall we say, tarnished by a few misogynist shitbags who tried to smear the (perfectly fun! perfectly enjoyable!) remake, Ivan Reitman's perfect original is still some of the most fun you can have in a theater. Seeing it with what's sure to be a boisterous crowd at the Hollywood: NICE THINKIN', RAY.
Thirty-five years after it was released, Disney's Tron remains a neon-laced daydream of a sci-fi adventure, with visuals that were groundbreaking in 1982 and remain excellently surreal today. The plot is... not so great, but not a single person on the planet has ever pretended that the reason they like Tron is the plot. Bio-digital jazz, man.
And if you were lucky enough to catch Christopher Nolan's Interstellar when it opened at the Hollywood—on 35mm—back in 2014, you already know that seeing it there, on celluloid, is a remarkable experience. Along with Gravity, Interstellar is one of those ambitious spectacles that works infinitely better on the big screen—maybe because a movie with ideas this big needs a similarly sized canvas. Out of these three movies, this is the one I'm most looking forward to revisiting.
Presale tickets for these 70mm screenings will start tomorrow—Friday, March 10—for Hollywood Theatre members; everybody else will have to wait until Tuesday, March 14. I'd advise not waiting long—if tickets to Ghostbusters, Tron, and Interstellar sell like the tickets to the Hollywood's other 70mm screenings, they're going to go fast.
In related news, if you are a Tron nerd who is planning to tell me that "bio-digital jazz, man" is actually a quote not from Tron but from Tron: Legacy, please don't bother, and please take this moment to assess the choices you have made that have brought you to this point in time and space.