Had the misfortune to go and see Vantage Point at the Little Theatre last night.
I say "misfortune" not so much because the film was bad (it wasn't as good as I was expecting, but it was entertaining enough), but because it was blighted by both sound and picture problems.
As soon as the first trailer came on, there was a noticeable vertical judder in the picture. I expected someone would correct it before the main feature started, but no-one did. After putting up with it for the first ten minutes of the film, getting increasingly aggravated, I finally went to find someone to complain. In short order, someone came into the theatre and went back to fiddle with the projector, but it didn't seem to help.
Then the film just stopped, and the lights came up. No-one bothered to come in and apologise or make an announcement about what was going on though.
A couple of minutes later, the film restarted, the juddering still present, but a couple of minutes after that it stopped. Things were fine until the credits rolled, whereupon the juddering started again, making me wonder if someone had been holding the projector still the whole way through the movie.
As if the picture problems weren't bad enough, the front right speaker was playing up too. Most of the time it was fine, but every now and then the sound coming out of it would become muffled. It was annoying, but I tolerated it until the end, when I thought I'd better go tell one of the staff members about it.
"That speaker was only serviced a couple of weeks ago," the guy told me. "But yes, it does that. It's perfectly normal."
So there you have it. Crappy sound is perfectly normal in the Little Theatre. They know about it, and evidently don't really give a shit.
It's made me think twice about going to see anything else at the Little Theatre any time soon, particularly as my home theatre setup is now so good.
