When I lived in Germany, I had an apartment in the vicinity of three tiny arthouse theaters. I used to go there all the time by myself because you could basically walk to all three of them. Saw a lot of movies I would have never seen otherwise, most of which I don't remember at all.
The theaters were never full. So it was basically just like watching a movie in your own living room. Yeah, except maybe for the handful of strangers that were there to watch with you.
Here in Amsterdam (and the rest of the Netherlands) all the arthouse theaters have joined forces with the Cineville subscription [0], which gives you unlimited access for I think 25 euros a month. I get a subscription for a few months sometimes and you wind up seeing so many cool films
[0] https://cineville.nl
Cineville is just great. It’s available in some Belgian and German cities as well.
It sometimes feels wrong to only pay €25 after watching so many movies. So I make up for it by buying things from the cinemas.
Is this maybe in Hamburg? :)
Back in the heyday, I used to work in a startup devoted to the cinema world, where with one app you could buy tickets for all cinemas - even those that did not "officially" support it.
Among them were arthouse theaters in Hamburg, which I often used for testing, as most of the time reserving a few seats would not matter as they would be empty, at least during the day. Some of them had projections of old movies, and I was like "if I lived there, I'd go every day".
Ironically, now I live between 2 art cinemas in my city and rarely go to any of them :)
yorck unlimited made living in berlin 10x as exciting
but you could always be sure that the old lady loudly crunching on every.single.crisp. was there in the showing as well
Pros: get to watch movies alone.
Cons: have to watch arthouse.
Arthouse is the only thing worth watching nowadays as the others seem to only rechew the same crud. Change my mind.
Not everyone is an avant garde movie enthusiast. Some still enjoy the fun and spectacle of action films, superhero films, Star Wars.
I am among them. I make no attempt to say they’re high concept or anything, but I leave feeling good for awhile and that’s enough for me
Cinemas around here have started showing old films and I have rediscovered the joy of going to the movies, whether it's Some Like It Hot or Suicide Club.
same! in the last couple of years i've seen these movies in a cinema: The Big Lebowski, Fargo, La Heine, Apocalypse Now, HEAT. and i already bought tickets for Run Lola Run, Clerks and Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.
it's especially cool as someone who's young and wasn't even born when some of these movies initially came to cinemas.
at the same time it's unbelievably sad that in recent years about 70% of the movies i saw at a cinema were multiple decades old.
I love Lola rennt so much. Really a one-of-a-kind movie.
When you grow up it's not only nostalgia, but the feeling that most of the ideas are really not new. I remember watching 'You Were Never Really Here', that had a huge hype behind it, and thinking "I have seen this same exact movie a hundred of times".
> I love Lola rennt so much. Really a one-of-a-kind movie.
+1, yes! watched it for the first time a couple of years ago after hearing about it and deciding to ethically download it, since then i've watched it a couple of times and at the start of this year even bought a Blu-Ray Player and a 4k Ultra HD copy* just because I wanted a physical copy to put on a shelf and watch it in an optimal quality. and as mentioned i'll go watch it in a cinema in a couple of months.
i also created a letterboxd account this year to log every movie i've ever seen. what's weird is that i've logged over 400 movies, but if i look at a graph of the years they were realeased in it's almost a perfect bell curve with the top being between 2006 - 2010.
*in these last couple months i started buying used blu-rays and DVDs and now got about 70 movies. guess this is my form of nostalgia. others got vynils, i got movies. physical media just feels different than downloaded movies. cover art, bonus material, DVD menues with soundtracks. love it...
> at the same time it's unbelievably sad that in recent years about 70% of the movies i saw at a cinema were multiple decades old.
There are literally thousands of good movies released between ~1890 and last year.
It’s improbable more than a hundred or so will come out this year that’re worth your time, and they’ll be harder to sort from the junk this close to release.
If anything, it’s amazing new movies have as large an audience as they do.
good point i guess, time allows for the good stuff to be remembered and stay relevant.
kind of how some movies like The Big Lebowski were considered flops but nowadays are cherished cult classics.
This is the issue I have with the big screen, there's just nothing I want to watch.
Meanwhile if I watch at home then there's half a century of classics that I haven't gotten around to watching yet.
Cud, I think, is the thing that gets rechewed.
I've seen Marvel movies and I think "crud" was the better word choice.