#InTheLoop | Watch Huge Movies on a Huge Screen
BY QEDC It's In Queens
The 70-mm film format allows for bright, vivid images and rich sounds that are perfect for spectacle movies. Directors are using it less and less due to the universal transition to digital film, but there’s still hope.
The Museum of the Moving Image will project six 70-mm films on Sumner M. Redstone Theater’s enormous screen as part of the annual See It Big! summer series from Friday, Aug. 5, through Sunday, Sept. 4.
Two Disney classics — Sleeping Beauty (1959), the first feature animation to be released in Super Technirama 70 format, and Tron (1982), the groundbreaking sci-fi thriller featuring innovative early CGI – are on this year’s list. So are two retro Hollywood works by filmmakers who continue to shoot on celluloid: Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2021) and Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019). The other gems are Brainstorm (1983), one of only two films directed by recently deceased visual-effects master Douglas Trumbull, and the first Top Gun (1986).
Tickets are $20 with discounts for seniors and students.
Here’s the schedule.
Brainstorm: Aug. 5 at 7 pm; Aug. 6 at 3:15 pm; and Aug. 7 at 4 pm.
With Christopher Walken and Natalie Wood (who died during the making of the film), this thriller centers on a device that can record thoughts and dreams. It features stunning visual effects to portray telepathic experiences, cutting between widescreen and standard size.
Licorice Pizza: Aug. 13 at 3 pm; Aug. 14 at 1:30 pm; Aug. 20 at 5:45 pm; and Sept. 3 at 4 pm.
With Sean Penn, Tom Waits, and Bradley Cooper, this film follows some misfits who form an unlikely attachment during a never-ending summer. They drift dreamily, sometimes dangerously, through a series of entrepreneurial misadventures.
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood: Aug. 13 at 6 pm; Aug. 14 at 4:30 pm; Aug. 19 at 6:30 pm; and Aug. 21 at 3:30 pm.
Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film revisits Los Angeles in the late 1960s, when the Hollywood studio system was fading and hippie subversion was ascendant. The all star cast includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie.
Sleeping Beauty: Aug. 20 at 3:30 pm; Aug. 21 at 1:30 pm; Aug. 27 at 1:30 pm; Sept. 3 at 1:30 pm.
When released in 1959, this was most expensive animated film ever made. It features art direction inspired by medieval and Renaissance painting and tapestries and music adapted from Tchaikovsky.
Tron: Aug. 26 at 7 pm; Aug. 27 at 3:30 pm; Aug. 28 at 1:30 pm; and Sept. 4 at 1:30 pm.
With traditional and computer-generated images, this groundbreaking feature follows rebel computer programmer Kevin Flynn as he is scanned and transported into an autocratic universe of zipping vectors and shiny surfaces, somewhere inside the mainframe of an arcade game.
Top Gun: Aug. 27 at 6 pm; Aug. 28 at 4 pm; Sept. 2 at 7 pm; and Sept. 4 at 4 pm.
Tom Cruise, Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer, and Meg Ryan star in this box-office smash with head-spinning aerial cinematography.
Museum of the Moving Image is located at 36-01 35th Ave. in Astoria’s Kaufman Arts District.
Top image: Tron/Disney; bottom image: Brainstorm/Park Circus