A screen wider than your imagination
We go to the pictures quite often nowadays. There's a multiplex in an otherwise more or less deserted and desolate shopping centre about ten minutes walk from home. I have no idea how the designers and promoters of the Mandarache shopping centre got it so completely wrong but they did. A couple of mobile phone shops - the only Phonehouse in the World without a queue - a pint sized bowling alley, a Chinese buffet and a couple of fast food outlets. All the rest is silence. Empty units, bored security guards and expansive Christmas decorations. But there is a ten or twelve screen multiplex. At it's busiest it fills maybe a fifth of the acres of idiosyncratic traffic system car park. Multiplexes are multiplexes. Digital dsplays for the film titles and times, overpriced popcorn, bored ticket collectors passing the time of day with the broom leaning cleaner, piped music in the toilets and those odd booster seats for the children to fidget in. Fare is Hollywood. Almost nothing els...