Tarantino on a mission to save cinema

Washington

QUENTIN Tarantino wants you to know that the only way to fully appreciate his new movie is to see it under a combination of conditions that hasn't been used in nearly 50 years. Anything less and you are not truly a connoisseur of film.

He asserts that you must watch the Western The Hateful Eight at a 70mm "roadshow" screening. Is this a marketing stunt? Or just the whimsical demands of a self-indulgent auteur? After all, very few cinemas are capable of projecting 70mm film anymore, having made the switch to digital. More importantly, if you ask a typical person what 70mm means, they'll most likely shrug and get back to whatever television show they're watching.

But Tarantino sticks to his guns, and on Christmas Day, 96 cinemas in the US and four in Canada will be outfitted to screen all three hours and two minutes of his latest the way it was meant to be seen (according to …