Movie Reviews: the Ithaca Blog Way

In the planning stages of Ithaca Blog, the question came up of whether, in covering life in Ithaca, we would review food and movies.

Food, surely. It provides a legitimate, perpetual excuse to get out and meal up. ("Mealing Up", in fact, will be the name of the section, starting soon.)

But movies? If you need a good movie review online, you can go to the New York Times. Instead we thought we would review movie theaters.

You know, when they review cars, they don't review what they looked at while they drove . They review the conveyance they were in.

Same with us for movie theaters. We want to know about the conveyance experience.

We want to know about the air conditioning. This is important. How ironic would it be to go see Al Gore's movie about global warming while sitting miserable in an un-air conditioned, windowless steambath? Very ironic.

On the other hand, you don't want to be sitting there with overactive air conditioning turning the sweat in your t-shirt to tiny ice crystals. It makes it hard to relax. It's already hard enough to relax with Al Gore.

And how are the concessions? First-rate, second-rate, or rank? This is important if you're in a rush and you need to know how sufficiently you need to meal before the movie. Can you save time by having coffee and a brownie at the theater? Will you be happy with that decision when you pay, and more importantly, ingest?

These are the questions. Having raised them, we are happy to answer them, in our next installment in Ithaca Blog: reviews of what we found this week at our downtown cinemas, Cinemapolis and Fall Creek, in the first week of August 2006.

Stephen Burke
for Ithaca Blog