I just went to see a movie at "Silver City", one of those new mega-theatre complexes that are supposed to make movie-going such a thrilling experience.
It cost $11 to see a movie at Silver City. It cost about $8.50 to see a movie at most other theatres in town, except the Frederick which is, if I remember correctly, about $4. The trouble is both "The Cell", which I didn't want to see but decided I should see, and "Almost Famous", which I did want to see, are only playing at Silver City.
So first you pay $11.00. You might pay a cashier or go to something called an "Express Ticket", something that looks and operates like an ATM except that you can actually buy your tickets there, and which should be called the Cashier Unemployment and Increased Profits Machine.
There is a sign at the cashier: No Outside Food Permitted Beyond This Point. One look at the prices for food beyond this point and you will know the reason why. French Fries and a humungous Coke are $7.40. The same package is one half of that price at the Fairway Mall. Popcorn and coke, for two, will run you about $15.00. So if you take two kids to see a movie and you buy some popcorn and a soft drink, you are looking at about $50 or more.
The food, of course, is garbage. You would think that at those prices, you might get something exceptional. Not a chance. And the soft drink is only sold in three gallon tubs. I exaggerate only slightly. The coke that came with the large fries I ordered from New York French Fries must have been at least three liters.
Why are the soft drinks so big? Why can't you buy a decent sized soft drink at a mega-plex? The reasons are simple: 1) the profit margin on soft drinks is very large, so volume is not an issue-- the objective is to get you buy a drink, any drink, of any size. 2) you can't buy a drink from anyone else or bring your own-- they have you over a barrel. 3) they have to do something to convince that you are getting good value for the 3 or 4 dollars you are paying for basically carbonated water-- so they make it huge.
You can barely hold the soft drink in one hand. And it doesn't taste as good as pop from a bottle or can. I suspect it is diluted, but I don't know for sure. Maybe it just naturally tastes like crap.
The atmosphere at Silver City is like the inside of a pinball machine. Indeed, they have loads of video games and lights and plastic props and signs. If you have any illusions about going out for an artistic experience when you go to a movie at Silver City, forget it. You feel like you have entered a gigantic, noisy arcade.
I waited to pick up my daughter from a movie in front of Silver City once. I saw lots and lots of parents picking up their kids. They drop them off and then pick them up. Do they know which film their kids are going to see? Do they know that Hollywood test-markets "R" rated films to twelve-year-olds because they know that theatre chains are very lackadaisical about enforcing age restrictions (and because video chains hardly enforce them at all).
Of course, in America, an "R" rating is there to prevent your child from seeing a mother breast-feed her baby. However, decapitation, disembowelment, and other scenes of gratuitous violence are readily available to adolescents. What kind of sick society allows it's children to view every imaginable violent act under the sun, but not breasts?
The screens are pretty good and the Dolby Sound is quite impressive. All the better to whack you over the head with, my dear. When they make these previews, do they think you will obey and come see the movie if they blast you with 140 decibels of sound effects and 4,000 very, very short clips of violence or sex?
Alfred Hitchcock used to scare movie-goers by carefully constructing suspenseful situations and then building the suspense to greater and greater intensity with a series of well-timed cuts and close-ups. It's much easier for the modern film-maker: just show the viewer a dark, shapeless form, let it get closer, and then whack the viewer over the head with about 145 decibels of sound. Make sure the sounds include all kinds of scary noises that, of course, don't actually have any identifiable cause in the movie itself.
"The Blair Witch Project" used some old-fashioned techniques to really scare you: the creepy sound of rocks being piled onto each other. The sense of being lost and disoriented in an inhospitable bush.
Just in case you want to do anything about this... you need to get politically involved. You see, the movie production chains have a stranglehold over the theatres in Canada. They are allowed to control which theatres are allowed to show which movies. This encourages Hollywood to make shitty movies because they can always shove them down the throats of the movie-going public by forcing theatres to show them whether local movie-goers want to see them or not
. The system stinks. The movie studios argue that, hey, if you don't like Silver City, you can just go down to the Frederick if you want to. No, I can't. Not if I want to see "Almost Famous" or "The Cell" or "The Exorcist". All of these movies have an exclusive engagement at Silver City. Movies are not material commodities like toilet paper: you can get the same brand at Walmart or Zellers or Zehrs.
And as for those great independent and foreign films... forget it. They will never be shown at Silver City because Silver City only shows films make by the big Hollywood studios.
Worse than that-- the movie distributors force movie theatres to show mediocre films as part of a package including the mega-hits. If they want to show "Titanic", they're going to have to give a few weeks to "Rocky XIV".
There oughta be a law... very simple. Movie theatres should be independent of movie-makers. And films should be rented to theatres on an individual basis. That is called free enterprise. That's called competition.
I would bet you a million dollars that places like Silver City would disappear quickly if it were actually forced to compete with other theatres that don't cheat you with their food prices or treat you like a pinball.
[I'd probably be wrong. A lot of people prefer the loud, brassy, noisy, clutter of special effects extravaganzas, and kids probably really do like the cheesy decor. 2004-07]
