Cineplex Entertainment’s Great Digital Film Festival is no doubt going to delight geeks, nerds and cinema buffs starting January 30th all across Canada. This year has a lot of comic book properties being played out and that shows where the direction of pop culture cinema has been and will be headed. With movies ranging from Alien to the X-Men, the latter is going to be a mega-marathon that will start from the latest film, Days of Future Past, and go backwards to the original — all happening on Saturday. For Dick Tracy and Dark Man, this year marks their 25th anniversary!
“The best way to see any movie, no matter what hands-down, is to see it in the theatre,” said Canada AM film journalist, Reel to Real co-host and author Richard Crouse. “I like seeing movies on the big screen — the way the director intended it.”
The experience is all in the sound and vision, and to see it in any other way, 3D and IMAX screens included, really depends on what the filmmakers really wanted for the product. Thankfully, no funky glasses are required in this celebration but for folks wondering what to see, Cineplex theatres has 16 films to choose from and 5 days for people to see as many or as few as they want. Tickets start at $6.99 and drop to $6.50 when more films are added.
With titles like Aliens, Monster Squad and Dark Man — movies people have not seen for a long time — showing this year, what’s next will have folks curious in what can happen next year. Who knows, maybe even the definitive Cabal cut of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed (i.e. the movie Barker really wanted to make instead of cut up by the studio) might get considered if the demand is there.
For horror enthusiasts, they can thrill to added movies like Hellboy and Pan’s Labyrinth to get their kicks alongside comic book favourites like all the original three X-men films along with First Class and Days of Future Past.
Programming a balanced schedule is not as easy as some people may think. Crouse sat down with Cineplex director of Event Cinema, Matt DeVuono to figure out a schedule that includes sci-fi and the pulps. Through a series of lunches and formal meetings, they worked out a list of films that they are both passionate about bringing back to the big screen.
“Your passion always wins out over anything else because these are films we truly love,” said Crouse.
Coming back due to popular demand is Kill Bill, shown in a way that Quentin Tarantino originally wanted it seen, as one big 4 hour-long movie. The team behind the projectors is going to attempt to honour what this filmmaker wanted as closely as they can. As for how the transition will work, only those people attending this screening will know.
For another film, sometimes the difficulty is not just with getting the rights to show a movie again, but also in finding the right edition.
“I know that Matt has been trying to program Blade Runner for years because the company was never able to get rights to the wide-screen final cut. It was put on the back burner for a few years until we were able to program it in this year,” said Crouse, “And my involvement took five months from the start to the beginning of this festival. Next year, should we do it again, I think that it’ll have to be a bit longer. We’ll dig even deeper into the vaults to see what else we can come up with that people really haven’t seen.”
For ticketing information and locations, please visit Cineplex’s website.
