"The Brothers Bloom"... Metropolitan... Auditorium 4... July 19th 2009

Thankfully, Regal must have moved their print of The Brothers Bloom from the Arbor 8 down to the Metropolitan instead of sending it back to the distributor. Regal are still the only cinema chain showing this movie in Austin right now.

As we walked into the auditorum (a little late), a trailer for The Hurt Locker was showing, and the sound was fantastic. Much better than some trailers get! Really did its part to make you want to see the film.

I guessed the feature presentation would be scratched up, and I was right. The picture was bright enough though, and the sound system was in fantastic form. This is not a loud, blockbuster movie, but the music track in particular was delightful to listen to, and the low noise-floor of this auditorium really turned it into a hi-fi experience. Picture edges were not too blurry or mis-projected. As the credits rolled up I noticed some characters in the credits' typeface were not that easy to see... perhaps a problem of overall brightness & focus.

A corollary of being at the end of the reel on a much-played print, the digital sound gave up a few times at the very end - once during the film and the rest during the credits. The symptom was a very short fold-down to mono played from the center, though seemingly without a large drop in volume. Not too bad a performance.

Matinee Ticket price... $7.00.

"Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince"... Metropolitan... Auditorium 14... July 18th 2009

Some friends of mine who are relatively new to Austin are moving to the South side, and I wanted to introduce them to their new local theater, the Metropolitan (yes they are lucky!). Unfortunately I made the mistake of not planning properly and we did not get to see this new Harry Potter film in auditoriums 7 or 8. This blockbuster being on multiple screens throughout the Metropolitan, we ended up in auditorium 14, which doesn't suck (if you want the short version of this review), but it isn't... the biggest.

We were enthusiastic about seeing the movie on its opening weekend and planned to get there plenty early. It turns out we were over-reacting... the screening was not sold out and we were the first in line. This wasn't bad, the place was sparkly-clean and did not smell bad whatsoever (sometimes that is an issue for theaters). We were let into the auditorium after the last of the previous show's patrons had left, and when we went in, the credits from the previous screening were still showing, so we knew we had a while to wait. The theater's movie trivia slides loop was playing, and as we dutifully paid proper attention to them, we noticed they were looping every two minutes! Folks, that is not very long. Forget predicting the answers to the questions... It got to be a joke to predict the next slide.

Anyhow the video marketing show started up, and as the Sprint "silence your cellphones and pagers" end-frame started to hold, I noticed it was 3:14pm, four minutes after the advertised movie start-time. At this point, the music faded away and the 2/3rds-full theater crowed proceeded to wait in silence for another solid four minutes. My buddy and I were trying to call the box office to tell them to start the movie! Eventually, at 3:18pm, the film trailers started up.

I have no particular complaints about the presentation, except to say that since it was on film it was generally suffering in a couple of normal ways - soft edges to the picture, and it was rather dim. Jitter and weave were minimal, shutter speed was set correctly, and there were no scratches to speak of, though some reel-changes (ironic in these days of horizontal platters) were pretty obvious. The sound was epic - the large room helping to add a nice, and not domineering, reverb to the soundtrack. The room had a low noise floor, though Harry Potter And The Half-Blood Prince is the kind of movie that will rarely showcase it. I think the sound had a "soft" edge to it, a sort of obscuring, preventing the real soundtrack from coming through. This could be a limitation of Dolby Digital (if indeed that was the presentation format) which stores a 640Kb/s lossy-compressed data stream on the film for 5.1 audio. Digital projection, which uses the original master mix directly from the re-recording stage without any compression, will be a pleasant upgrade.

Next time... auditoriums 7 or 8 !!!

Ticket price... $7 plus a ludicrous $1.50 Fandango ordering fee - bah.