Going to the movie theater can be enough of a hassle, but it’s possible that projectionists are ruining the experience more than you think.

Not only has going to the movie theater gotten more expensive and proven to at times be a genuine pain, but oftentimes, even the filmmakers’ integrity is at risk, with poor projection one of the culprits.

In a recent Vulture article titled “Bad Projection Is Ruining the Movie Theater Experience”, the writer makes the case that sloppy work on the part of the projectionists is putting off cinephiles across the country. One cited example is 2D versions of movies being projected as 3D. The result, a projection expert points out, greatly dims the light, resulting in dull, drab images. “It’s a polarized lens that cuts a picture’s brightness by a third…They just have to push it to the side when they switch to 2-D, but theaters forget to do it all the time. You can tell when it’s happening because if you look at the port-window glass, instead of a single image, you’ll see two, with one stacked on top of the other.” Something to be on the lookout for the next time you see such a movie at the theater…

There, too, is what’s called the “keystone effect”, which anybody who has been in a lecture hall has probably experienced. It’s when the projected image doesn’t form correctly on the surface, typically showing up more as a trapezoid than a rectangle or square. At movie theaters, projectionists also have the duty of properly framing the film, but in some instances, they don’t know what they’re doing or even that that’s part of the job description. Many people who saw M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village upon release–this writer included–noticed boom mics throughout the movie, a result of poor framing. As if the movie itself wasn’t bad enough!

But at some point the movie has to leave the hands of the director and head to theaters. Consider that Quentin Tarantino ensured nearly 100 screens were fitted to handle the 70 mm projection of The Hateful Eight. It’s not as if he can sit at everything screening to ensure it goes off without a hitch. If a movie receives a poor projection, the experience is botched and often the film takes the blame. Picture the projectionist at your local cinema. Do you truly trust them to help offer  the best night out for the audience? Of course, any number of things can go wrong at the theater (Magazine Dreams’ Sundance premiere prompted walk-outs after the subtitles didn’t work), but the more that can be done to protect the experience and the integrity of the film, the better.

Have you had any bad movie theater experiences related to projection, screens, etc.? Tell us some of your stories in the comments section below!

With Michael B. Jordan making his directorial debut with Creed III this weekend, we wanted to know what film by a first time Actor turned Director has been your favorite? Some came out of the gates with Oscar Glory (Kevin Costner/ Robert Redford) while others found a passion they haven’t looked back from (Ron Howard/ Sofia Coppola). If you don’t see your favorite listed, please let us know what (and who) it is in the comments section.

UPDATE: I have rightly been called out for listing Braveheart as Mel Gibson’s first film when he actually directed a film prior to that called The Man Without a Face in 1993. So I guess the results are slightly skewed, but really, wasn’t Braveheart the first Mel Gibson directed film we all saw?!

In 1977, a movie you might have heard of called STAR WARS came out and thoroughly shifted the kind of movies Hollywood considered blockbusters. Until then, the idea of an epic sci-fi fantasy grossing hundreds of millions of dollars was considered laughable, and the genre was regarded as B-movie material at best. Star Wars changed that thinking, and suddenly studios were bending over backwards flooding theaters with their own sci-fi epics. This led to Star Trek getting a crack at the big screen, with the original crew headlining a movie that, at the time, was one of the most expensive movies ever made. In this episode of Revisited, we dig into Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Flashback to 1978. Star Wars was still making a mint, and Universal took the pilot episode for a Star Wars-knock-off series they developed, Battlestar Galactica, and released it in theaters. It made a stunning $41.8 million internationally, a considerable number considering it was just a TV episode that had already aired on TV. Universal pulled a double when a few months later they released the pilot of ANOTHER Star Wars knockoff they made, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and it made $21 million. Clearly, the appetite for science fiction was strong, and by 1979, theaters were flooded with Star Wars clones. There were brilliant ones, like Ridley Scott’s Alien, which subverted the formula, and then entertaining flicks like Disney’s The Black Hole, and even the James Bond movie, Moonraker, which takes a hard turn into sci-fi in the finale, sending 007 to space and even including Star Wars style laser battles in the finale. There were also dozens of Italian knockoffs like Starcrash and The Humanoid. 

Into the fray came Paramount Pictures, who must have thought they had the inside track as they owned perhaps the biggest sci-fi property of all, Star Trek. While the series had only run three seasons on tv, when it was sold into syndication, the show became a monster cult hit, to the extent that the waters were tested when Paramount produced an animated series that played to surprising critical acclaim. Plans were made to produce another big-budget TV show called Phase 2, which was supposed to front a Paramount-branded TV network, which never came to fruition. The first season was set to run thirteen episodes and would have included all of the original cast except for Leonard Nimoy, who was in a legal battle with the studio over the use of his likeness in merchandise. He was to be replaced by a Vulcan character named Xon, to be played by David Gautreaux, while Persis Kambatta was hired to play Ilia, the ship’s navigator. 

Then, Star Wars came out, and Paramount opted to make Trek their next big franchise, hoping to outdo Star Wars. They hired Robert Wise, the director of West Side Story, The Sound of Music and The Andromeda Strain to direct, with a budget that was supposed to be capped at $15 million, which was five million more than Star Wars and would eventually run to almost three times that number. 

The original cast had already signed on to Phase 2 and were easy sells on Trek as a feature. Still, Paramount Studio Chief Michael Eisner decided to dump Xon, with the actor getting a bit part in the film instead, enticing Leonard Nimoy back as Spock. To accomplish this, Eisner cut him a check for the back royalties Nimoy had been asking for and said he essentially got on his knees and begged for the actor to agree to play the part. Persis Kambatta was kept as Ilia, but she would get a new love interest, Will Decker, to be played by Stephen Collins. 

What’s interesting about Star Trek: The Motion Picture is how oblivious Paramount, at the time, was about what made a good Star Trek movie. Rather than give the crew any villains, the decision was made to go in a more heady, cerebral direction, with the Enterprise being called into action to investigate a mysterious alien cloud called V’ger. One can tell this was originally the premise of the Phase 2 saga, and it would become a recurring thing as far as Trek pilots would go, with The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine also having these obtuse, action-free pilots that fans, for the most part, dismissed.

What’s especially egregious about The Motion Picture is how under-used the original cast is. James Doohan as Scott, Nichelle Nichols, Walter Koenig and George Takei have little more than bit parts, and even the holy trio, Kirk, Spock and McCoy, are sidelined, with the focus of the film being on the two young love interests, Decker and Ilia, and their romance. The original cast is given little to do but react to the effects on-screen. 

As for the VFX, they would lead to the film going massively over budget as the original team contracted to deliver the VFX could not deliver. Veteran FX specialist Douglas Trumbull, who had done the fx work for 2001: A Space Odyssey, was hired and given an unlimited budget, with the only caveat being that he had only months to deliver, as the studio had a contractually mandated release date in December of 1979. Eventually, John Dykstra, one of ILM’s pioneers with Star Wars, was sub-contracted but has since gone out on his own. They made the release date, but barely, as Robert Wise had no opportunity to test the film and fine-tune it, and he always considered it unfinished. The film was unexpectedly a decent-sized hit grossing $82 million domestically, but considering the budget, it only earned a profit after the international box office lifted it to $139 million. It would be the only time in the franchise’s history, until the J.J. Abrams-directed reboots, where a Star Trek feature would be considered an A-level film, with all future films being handled by the TV wing of Paramount, with Harve Bennett replacing series creator Gene Roddenberry as the franchise’s creative guru going forward.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture earned mixed reviews from critics, but many fans disliked it, even going so far as to call it the “motionless picture:” Watching it now, the movie is dull, with only Jerry Goldsmith’s incredible score, really standing the test of time. His theme for the film would be reused as the Star Trek: The Next Generation theme, and it’s rightly considered a classic. Much of the dialogue is cheesy, with the script a patchwork of contributions by writer Harold Livingston, Alan Dean Foster and Gene Roddenberry himself. The film haunted Robert Wise for decades, and it wasn’t helped by the myriad of editions floating around. One of the “extended editions” which ran on television and was released on Home Video. Wise hated this edition, which ran twelve minutes longer and featured unfinished, amateur-level FX. In 2001, Wise was finally able to complete the film when Paramount agreed to finance a definitive director’s edition, which, among other things, allowed him to redo many of the VFX with CGI. He also remixed the soundtrack and made numerous substitutions and additions throughout the movie, removing bad takes that he thought featured dodgy acting and making an altogether more polished version of the film, which largely won over fans who had found it underwhelming. 

It proved to be something of a last hurrah for Wise, who died a few years later, in 2005. However, the fact that the new CGI for the director’s edition had only been done in standard definition proved to be a major headache as home media moved into HD, 4K and beyond, with the director’s edition unreleasable until a major restoration was done by Paramount Plus, who released it exclusively on their streaming version and later released it on Blu-ray and 4K. As the movie exists now, it remains a bit of a curiosity for fans, but it is considered an aborted launch for the franchise, which would only take off with the release of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in 1982. Persis Khambatta and Stephen Collins’s involvement with the franchise would be short-lived. Khambatta’s bald look in the film became a sensation when the movie came out, but when she grew her hair out, she was unrecognizable, which might have hampered her career a bit. She’d go on to a well-received role in Sylvester Stallone’s Nighthawks and then would appear in the action flop MegaForce. However, she would be faced with numerous health challenges, and the former Miss India passed away in 1998 at only 49 years old.

By contrast, Stephen Collins, for a while, had a very successful career, leading the cult TV show Tales of the Gold Monkey and eventually moving on to massive success on the family show 7th Heaven. His career would end when, during a contentious divorce, a tape would be leaked where the actor appeared to admit to the sexual abuse of a minor. He would eventually reveal to People Magazine that he had actually abused three minors in 1973, 1982, and 1994. 

Happily, the main cast, while under-served in The Motion Picture, was only at the beginning of their new silver screen adventures, with the series eventually launching Leonard Nimoy as one of the hottest directors of the eighties when his reluctance to continue to play Spock was parlayed into a deal to direct the third and fourth films. The series would reach its creative peak with the Genesis trilogy, comprised of the second, third and fourth films in the series, which would continue until the Next Generation cast eventually took over. While Star Trek: The Motion Picture isn’t a favorite among fans, it remains an interesting curiosity.

Ever since Rocky took the world by storm in 1976, people have been enamored with the idea of an underdog fighting his way to victory. There is something about two people entering an arena and just seeing who is the best. Movies help us find the themes and metaphors we can use for this mentality in our everyday life. If you’re in a funk and then play the Rocky theme, you suddenly become more motivated than ever to get over that mountain called life. With Creed III hitting theaters, it’s a great time to look back at some of the best films in the genre.

Tommy returns home after a stint in the Marines to find his father has cleaned himself up. They begin training for an upcoming MMA tournament offering the sport’s biggest payday. Tommy’s estranged brother Brendan also enters the tournament, and the two end up on a collision course as each fights his way to the top. An interesting MMA film that finds a way to examine the drama of a broken home and how the characters can work toward healing.

A​ martial arts team is assembled for the United States to compete in a Tae Kwon Do tournament in Korea. Everyone on the team has to put their personal problems aside to co-exist, but that is easier said than done. While they combat the other teams in the tournament, they must also keep an eye on each other. This film is reportedly UFC legend Chuck Liddell’s favorite martial arts movie.

O​ne of my personal favorites on the list. This film is supposed to be based on the true story of an American soldier named Frank Dux. He goes AWOL to enter a secret underground tournament called the Kumite. The world’s best martial arts fighters show up to compete but quickly find that the tournament is serious business. The reigning champion has no problem killing his opponents to keep his title. While Frank dodges officers sent to drag him back to the military, he begins a relationship with an American journalist who wants to report on the famed event. A Jean Claude Van Damme classic that any fight fan should check out. Even though it is kind of a cheese-fest, Bloodsport is still one of the best fighting films of all time.

Y​ou’re about to say this is a hockey movie, not a fighting movie. Well, I would say it is actually both. A struggling hockey team is on the verge of closing. The coach/player, Reggie Dunlop, decides how to help the team get attention and a wider audience is to bring in the Hansen brothers. A group of goonish hockey players likes to start fights and cause violence on the ice. It quickly catches on, and the team sees a much-needed boost. The fights in this film are a lot of fun to watch, bringing about its own sort of comedy. Maybe not as serious as Creed III but still a great fighting film.

D​iana is close to being kicked out of high school for fighting. She is introduced to the boxing world as she searches for something to grab onto. Her father disapproves, but she finds that she has natural talent as she keeps training. In order to claim her future, she begins to push herself further into the world of boxing and hopes to find everything she’s looking for. This film was Michelle Rodriguez’s first film and put her on the map. This movie actually has a lot in common with Creed III.

Based on the true story of Micky Ward. His older brother Dickie got some boxing acclaim when he faced Sugar Ray Leonard back in 1978. Now Dickie has fallen into a life of drugs and crime but still trains Micky. As Micky sees those around him falling to the wayside, he decides he needs a change if his boxing career will ever move forward. This causes a rift in his family as his mother is his manager, and his brother has been training him. Can he move forward without them?

A​nother JCVD classic. In this one, he plays Kurt Sloane. He is the corner man for his kickboxing champion brother Eric. Eric ends up paralyzed when he steps into the ring with Tong Po. Kurt thinks Po injured him on purpose and seeks revenge. He wants to train to fight him in the ring, but no one will take him. Finally, he finds an old kickboxing trainer who lives alone in the mountains. His methods are unconventional, but Kurt sticks with it to learn what he needs to avenge his injured brother.

Martial Arts Expert Michael Jai White takes over the title role of George Chambers from Ving Rhames in the first film. Chambers goes to Russia but finds he is sent to prison for bogus drug possession charges. The warden says that if he fights in the underground fighting league within the prison that he will help him get an early release. He turns him down at first but is soon forced to agree. He begins to train to take on the reigning champ with the help of another prisoner who has knowledge of how to win. In order to get out of Russia with his life, he has to win. This underseen movie is great and earns its status as one of the best fighting films.

M​aggie wants to train with the best to become a professional boxer and finds legendary trainer Frankie Dunn. At first, he refuses to train her. His personal life has been in tatters as his relationship with his daughter has fallen apart. When he sees she has natural talent, he finally relents. The two form a powerful bond that helps each of them to get what they want most in life.

C​hampion boxer Billy Hope is on top of the world when his wife is shot during an altercation with another boxer. After her death, Billy begins a spiral of self-destruction, leading to his daughter being taken away from him. He knows he has to rebuild his life and seeks out trainer Tick Wills. If he is going to get his life back on track and get his daughter back, he knows he has to start at the bottom and fight back to the top.

Are you excited about Creed III? What are your favorite fighting films? Let us know in the comments.