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Update: My projector bulb blew 20 minutes into movie night, so we watched Plan 9 on a cracked phone screen
So last Friday my buddy Greg brought over his copy of Plan 9 from Outer Space, which he paid $3 for at a flea market in Bakersfield. About 20 minutes in, my projector bulb popped with a sound like a wet firecracker. We had two options: call it a night or huddle around my cracked Galaxy screen and finish the movie on YouTube. We picked the phone. And you know what? I finally got why people love this film. The cardboard tombstones, the zipper visible on the alien's suit, the pilot who clearly just walked off a soundstage couch. On a big screen those flaws scream at you, but on a 5 inch screen they felt cozy, like a campfire story. Greg kept pausing to point out boom mics and I laughed harder than I have at any new comedy this year. If a movie can survive a phone screen and still make two grown men lose it at 1am, maybe it is not actually bad. Has anyone else had a tech fail force them to watch a movie in some weird low quality way, and did it change how you felt about it?
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the_jason27d ago
Read a piece a while back about how bad movies hit different in bad quality. Some film writer was saying VHS and late night TV gave trash cinema a second life because the fuzzy picture made everything feel like a secret instead of a joke. That tracks with what you're saying about the phone screen. There's actually a name for it, rooms where the flaws stop being flaws and just become part of the charm. Your broken projector basically did you a favor, since Plan 9 was never meant to look crisp anyway.
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