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Went with EB and Ksenia last night to see "The Da Vinci Code". It was kind of at Ksenia's insistence, I wouldn't have been inclined to go otherwise. It was a decent workman-like effort, with some nice flourishes put in to document what people were explaining. (But I mean in general, a book that was all implausible chase scenes and explication, how great would you think a movie based on that would be?)

And man, nothing at that cinema (Burlington) changed my mind about avoiding the movie theater for everything but the biggest of the special-effects-laden blockbusters (and maybe book adaptations that I want to be conversant about sooner rather than later.) To whit:

• The seats weren't too comfortable, plus then there was the bulk of Evil B (no offense) stuck right beside me and the guy in front of me wanting to will himself taller as the film wore on.
• Conceptually I kind of like the "slide show" cinemas have started using before the trailers, but here they've "upgraded" it so rather than static slides, they're mostly static images with moving backgrounds, or a cheesy "old movie" scratch effect (for a "freeze frame" of Ferris Bueller's Day Off... yeah, it makes so much sense to make that look like a 1920s film)... the problem is, they then were only showing 6 of these moving slides before repeating the whole lot.
• They had a pre-trailer presentation with a bunch of HBO-ish "making of" shorts. This wouldn't be so bad, except again, these places have to learn not to show the same material to the audience over and over. We saw a "making of" for that Adam Sandler flick where his remote control freezes time and then the presentation had a trailer for the same flick, and then finally another there was a trailer during the "proper" trailer time. Each trailer was about 2/3 stuff we saw before. In a way I guess it was kind of approrpiately meta-, given that the movie was partially about Adam Sandler reversing and replaying time. And the audience wishing we had his ability to fast-forward past this crap.
• There was a surprising amount of technical glitches... 2 of the trailers weren't displayed correctly at first, with the bottom of the frame showing up at the top. (The second time the problem was corrected immediately, the first time though it took a bit.) And then the movie itself had a recurring bit of scratches in the middle of the screen, every few seconds for about 10 or 15 minutes of the movie. Which seemed really odd, because after all it's a new release so you'd think the film should be close to pristine.
• And there was gunk on the screen, visible during certain well-lit scenes o the movie.

I don't mean to sound like such an old crank, but dag, yo. If movie theaters are worried about being undercut by DVDs they're doing a terrible job of fighting it. The wisdom of a cheap-ish video projector and dark room with a comfortable couch seems more obvious every day.

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Quote of the Moment

Someone's boring me. I think it's me.