Something to watch tonight: Tuesday 12 September

Stop Making Sense (Demme, 1984) is screening at IMAX Queensgate tonight

This recom­mend­a­tion is of lim­ited spe­cif­ic util­ity to most as I sus­pect this screen­ing is already sold out, but – the new 4K res­tor­a­tion of Stop Making Sense, Jonathan Demme’s mas­ter­piece con­cert col­lab­or­a­tion with Talking Heads, will be get­ting a wider release in loc­al cinemas from 22 September.

Tonight’s screen­ing is a bit spe­cial, though, because it is for IMAX screens only – 160 across North America alone – and it includes the spe­cial post-screening Q&A from the Toronto Film Festival fea­tur­ing the first appear­ance togeth­er of all four band mem­bers for 21 years.

My seats are in Row B – close enough to hide in David Byrne’s over­sized suit pock­et – and I am look­ing for­ward to hear­ing what the res­tor­a­tion has done for the already tre­mend­ous sound mix. If you are one of the many people who had the SMS soundtrack in their col­lec­tion, you’ll know what I mean.

Cinema sound sys­tems are still the closest we can get to the live sound exper­i­ence. The guy who restored the Elvis Presley con­cert film, Elvis: That’s the Way It Is told me that the sound at Wellington’s Paramount, which I was man­aging at the time, was the best he’d ever heard. That was because we had a live music PA for our front and centre chan­nels rather than cinema amps and speakers.

If you were ever lucky enough to look behind the screen at the Paramount you would have seen stacks of speak­ers, like a con­cert setup. Such a loss …

If you can’t wait to see Stop Making Sense in cinemas once again, you can rent the pre­vi­ous res­tor­a­tion at AroVision.

Further Reading

At RNZ Widescreen, I’ve recom­menced my quix­ot­ic quest to watch the top 50 films in the Sight & Sound crit­ics’ list of the greatest films of all time and just pos­ted a piece about the 45^th-equal title, Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.