Classical Geek Theatre: Cinema options need improvement

I like movies. Do you like movies? Most college students like movies. Muncie is a college town. One should be able to deduce that Muncie would be a mecca for movie watching experiences.

One could not be anymore wrong. Ball State and the surrounding area is a terrible place for a movie buff to live. There are rules about movies. The university and local businesses do not seem to understand these rules.

Lets go over them, shall we?

Rule No. 1: You should be able to see the movie. Case in point: Friday, they showed 70 percent of "Signs" at Pruis Hall.

No, they didn't start the movie thirty minutes into it and they didn't end the movie thirty minutes before it was over. They showed a full-screen (or "pan-n-scan") version of the movies. I wanted to stand up and scream. I demand wide-screen.

Lots of people don't like the black bars on the tops of their screens. That is because lots of people eat lead paint. Most movies are shot in a wide-screen format. If you try to fill the whole screen with the movie, you have to cut off 30 percent of the film. That means compromising the artistic integrity of the work.

How would you like it if you painted a picture, and I snipped off a third of it to make it fit into my 4x3 frame? A movie like "Signs" has all kinds of spiritual and intellectual meaning to it. It is an injustice to the film to show an incomplete version like that.

Rule No. 2: You should be able to hear a movie. Case in point: The Northwest Plaza on McGalliard Road.

Have you been to that place? It seems like every theater there has atrocious sound. I know that at least two of their theaters have speakers that crackle at the high frequencies.

One of the fundamental problems with the cinema business is that it is highly unprofitable to maintain a cinema. New sound systems and digital projectors cost loads of money; they don't turn profit for years. Cinema owners think that all of us have the brains of small, defenseless kittens and that we won't notice the poor quality.

I encourage everyone to only support the local theaters only as much as you have to until they provide a quality movie-viewing experience. If you can manage it, drive down to Indianapolis to see the movie in a respectable facility. And if you can't do that, at least stick your tongue out at the cinema employees and say something like "Buzz off, jerko!"

Rule No. 3: Hollywood isn't the only place movies come from. Case in point: The lack of independent films shown in Muncie.

We need an artsy movie theater, period. The Frog Baby Film Festival is a nice gesture and the University screens independent films from time to time, but I should not have to drive to Key Cinemas or Castleton Arts in Indy to see a foreign film on the big screen.

I want a quality, industry-standard cinema that shows the movies New York critics rave about. Ball State should be an intellectual community and we should have intellectual films on a more regular basis.

Now that you know the rules, take those paint chips out of your mouth and go do something about them.