Our media consumption is generally too passive. Generally. Sometimes you just want to be alone and commune with the flicker and glow.
Is the Cinerama Dome still open these days?
I haven’t been in; although when I was in LA that one time I was fortunate enough to see Kinji Fukasaku’s Black Lizard in the Egyptian, with a director Q&A afterward. What a place!
The best movie theaters I’ve been to were in Budapest, Hungary, 92-95. There were so many experiments going on, no that virtually all restrictions were gone (and the Hungarian economy had been pretty “open” by Iron Curtain standards already). Lots of little pop-up theaters attached to bookstores where we watched nth generation tapes of movies in English with Norwegian subtitles, or something like that. Even small “We’re only a theater” theaters that were thrown up on a budget, tastefully, with moveable chairs and the like. And then there were the old theater palaces that had been converted for movies before WWII, grand palaces the likes of which hardly exist anymore even in America. I saw Coppola’s Dracula in one of these, a fantastically creepy terrifying experience, with the audio cranked way to high; with the light-flashes high chandeliers started moving when I wasn’t paying attention, and every over-amped thump had everybody jumping in their seats. I saw the film a couple weeks later in more modern (non-budget) theater, with normal sound amplification. The film was okay.
However, just about every theater also had a coffee-shop-cum-bar. You could drink to match the movie-poster colors!
