"District 9"... Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek Auditorium ?... Saturday August 17th 2009

The Alamo's franchise location at Lake Creek continues to try hard to please. When I saw that their web site's ticket purchasing software by Ready Theater Systems (for which they continue to charge us $1 per ticket to use) was not working, I called their box office, and they were delighted to take my credit card information over the phone and put my tickets into Will Call. Win-win for both of us, since I didn't pay $2 in fees for two tickets, and they still got to sell tickets ahead of time.

Genre favorite District 9 was a hit at this cinema, its formerly-THX-certified acoustics helping a lot versus the Alamo's Village location. Despite the movie seeming to be really loud, the room did not interfere with the intelligibility or clarity. The picture was fine, pretty sharp edges with nothing major projected off the edges. I was concerned that the movie was loud... at first I was certain that the staff must have turned up the sound level beyond cinematic standard. Eventually I got used to the volume level and it seemed fine. I've never had that reaction before at an Alamo. (usually it's a bad Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich film at the Gateway that's simply too loud)

Also, these guys know how to pour a Guinness! No inch-thick foamy head to contend with. Check out the picture expertly taken by my wife -

"Julie & Julia"... Gateway Auditorium 9... August 14th 2009

As I settled into my fourth row center seat among a packed house of 90% women, I thought "hmmm... Gateway... what could go wrong?" My question was answered.

After their obligatory video material sponsored by Sony, the film material started about 7 minutes behind schedule. An odd moment of darkness in the theater as the film projector started up was ended when the house lights came up briefly! And when they went back down, to my surprise the Gateway was running this film without any trailers - it went right into Julie & Julia. The film had a few breaks in it during the first few minutes... so I'm thinking they must have had some sort of projection accident with the film and torn it a couple of times.

The film was projected a couple of feet off-center to the right; the left edge was all blurry, and one could see the picture projected onto the right edge of the front wall. Come on Gateway, fix the projector!

The digital sound cut out a couple of times, pretty much in the middle of the film. The Gateway has Dolby Digital readers mounted in the basement position, where the film comes out of the bottom of the projector all hanky-janky before immediately going into the sound reader; not the best situation for getting a reliable data stream. (but hey, it's easy to thread!)

This movie does not tax any sound system, and I have no comments to make on the sound except that it was mediocre.

The rest of the audience enjoyed the film, which was I guess a sort of Ratatouille with real people instead of rats!

Evening ticket cost - $9.00

"Moon"... Arbor Great Hills... Auditorium 7... Sunday August 2nd 2009

Things started off well when, noticing my Austin Film Society t-shirt, the lady behind the ticket counter knocked $1.50 off my ticket cost due to me being a member! I didn't realise Regal did that. Nice.

I got myself some of their fairly decent popcorn and sat down in the auditorium which was about 1/3rd full. This is one of only two screens showing Moon in Austin. I immediately was struck by how bad the trailers looked. A trailer for The Road looked pretty awesome, but not because of the presentation here! It simply looked out of focus to me. I had my glasses on this time so I know what I'm talking about.

The movie started, with a few quiet buzzes from the soundtrack, as the digital sound kicked in. This auditorium has pretty bad picture, I have to say, the picture was outside the screen on three edges. The screen is almost as wide as the auditorium in this room, which there's nothing wrong with, but when the projector is set up so badly that the film is almost on the side wall, you've got problems! The opening credits were off the edge of the screen, projecting onto duvetine. I wouldn't want to be the person whose name was wrecked by this. Furthermore, the focus seemed soft throughout. I do not think this was the film. There were a few shots in the film that felt deliberately softer in focus, and at this location they were really looking kinda blurred.

The print was getting on a bit, as when Reel 1 was coming to and end, there was the occasional splodge on the picture, and the soundtrack broke down to a very plain-sounding optical for a second or two. I didn't notice any other aberrations in the soundtrack, and otherwise the film didn't seem to have too many scratches or other marks. However, the film was shaking from side to side at the top of the picture - visible most clearly during the end credits, where you'd see people's names emerge at the bottom edge in fairly stable fashion only to exhibit and odd vibration by the time they were leaving at the top. And, the fact that the film itself was off the edge of the cinema screen meant I'll have to wait until the blu-ray version to see the entire picture!!! Come on Regal... fix this picture.

Sound was adequate... there were a lot of low-budget indicators in the soundtrack (for example, library sci-fi sound-effects from some very old commercially available libraries), and I'm not sure there was a lot of bass extension in the soundtrack to be conveyed here - so, it's not such a bad thing that we didn't feel much.

Evening ticket cost w/ AFS discount = $8.00.