james and i went to see the 25th anniversary showing of wargames last night. unfortunately the print hasn’t been remastered and all the reds are faded to hell (i think the opening credits were redone, as they appeared in a jarring arterial blood) leaving behind a much drearier blue-gray world than i remember.

despite the overall image quality, all was fine until the screen inexplicably went dark (right about the time the kids were fleeing helicopters at falken’s¹ goose island getaway), and the movie was replaced by the windows status bar you see above. (apologies for the image quality; the iphone isn’t the greatest at low-light photography.) apparently the flick was being streamed via satellite from cali, and they experienced a total systems failure.²

joshua never would’ve let that happen. he would’ve called back.
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¹ mildly amusing: someone set up a stephen falken myspace page. slightly more amusing: a 1990 overview of wargames in the journal “teaching sociology.”

² although we were told by the theater manager that the outage was nationwide, apparently those who were watching at tyson’s got to see the whole flick (albeit in subpar conditions), while at least one other theater - in indiana - also lost the feed.

some low-level hilarity ensued in the theater, as everyone took the malfunction with surprising good grace (or perhaps not so surprising: the theater was at maybe quarter capacity, and the audience comprised of thirtysomething technogeeks taking in a vintage flick at 7:30 on a thursday night.) there weren’t even too many groans about the technological errors in the movie, such as when lightman pulled the cord out of his phone and watched the game timer continue to count down on his monitor. and we did get 2 free tickets each as consolation, which was good.

james’ comment: “too bad no one has the movie on their ipod.”