Comments from Giles

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Giles
Giles commented about Showplace ICON at The Boro on Mar 3, 2020 at 5:22 pm

The soft-opening of the theater happened on February 28th, with the official opening on March 6th. ICON-X auditorium(s) One seats 226, auditorium Two: seats 200, nine and ten seat 225. I saw ‘Rise of Skywalker’ last Sunday and ‘Birds of Prey’ yesterday; and I have to say the audio calibration and specifically the Dolby Atmos sound are acoustically top notch. I also like the plush seats, that only offer the ability to shift into a one’s comfortable seating position, but also offers ‘heating’ – tres chic!

This is my first time to a Showcase ICON theater and I have to say, I really like the fact the company policy has four trailers max before a feature – not the standard over twenty minutes at the other movie theater chains.

Giles
Giles commented about Uptown Theatre on Jan 18, 2020 at 4:28 am

Off the top of my head, I know that Mazza does side horizontal masking for ‘flat’ movies on screen 1,2 and 4. The Uptown to my knowledge has also done this for 1.85 AR movies. They really screwed up last year’s presentation of ‘Missing Link’ which was a scope movie, but side masked off the left and right sides of the image. For ‘Missing Link’, in April, there was no assigned seating but by the time I saw ‘The Lion King’ in July they had added seat numbers/assigning

Giles
Giles commented about Warner Theatre on Jan 3, 2020 at 6:16 am

actually the most recent movie screenings here was in August 2016 for the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema chain exhibited a traveling roadshow showing of the “Star Wars Trilogy: A New Hope, Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi”

Giles
Giles commented about AMC Mazza Gallerie 7 on Jan 3, 2020 at 5:59 am

sorry this isn’t about the upstairs theaters, but a comment about the prior basement ‘Paris’ theater/screens. I just got from a friend an email of the original Washington Post advert for ‘Aliens’ (1986) and while I know that the 70mm engagement was at the KB Fine Arts, I didn’t realize it was also it’s sole in-town run. I for some reason, saw it when the popularity and box office success moved it to more theaters and specifically to upper Northwest DC to here. Even the largest screen was on the miniscule side, but man what an audience, the scene when the face hugger scuttles across the floor towards Newt and Ripley, everyone, including myself and a friend just completely lost it – oh the memories.

Giles
Giles commented about National Theatre on Dec 17, 2019 at 4:16 am

update to include Washington Post advert for premier of ‘Fantasia’

Giles
Giles commented about Lincoln Plaza Cinemas on Dec 17, 2019 at 2:26 am

Recent New York Times / By Alex Vadukul (article about Lincoln Plaza Cinema and New Plaza theater)

Published Dec. 13, 2019 Updated Dec. 16, 2019, 8:47 a.m. ET

During a recent screening of “Mr. Klein,” the 1976 World War II psychological thriller starring Alain Delon, volunteers at New Plaza Cinema scrambled to operate their upstart independent movie theater on the Upper West Side.

Ann Logan, 71, yelled directions to customers as she sat in her walker; Norma Levy, 76, sold tickets from rolls of red paper stubs and stashed money into a little metal box; Rita Lee, 88, helped sell refreshments at a foldout table. When the movie ended, ushers hurried to wheel walkers and rollators back to older guests waiting in their seats.

It wasn’t a sellout, but it was a decent showing for a 43-year-old French film on a chilly Saturday night.

New Plaza is a newcomer to the city’s independent cinema scene, and it’s trying to establish itself at a time when independent theaters are in a death struggle with streaming video and a generation of moviegoers demanding in-theater craft brews and plush recliner seats.

New Plaza also has something of a chip on its shoulder.

Two years ago, Upper West Siders mourned the closing of Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the dingy art house theater where New Yorkers came to worship Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Satyajit Ray. A cultural institution from the early 1980s, its concessions stand sold lox sandwiches, water leaked from its ceilings, and quarrels broke out among hard-of-hearing customers during foreign movies.

And ever since its landlord, Milstein Properties, declined to renew its lease, the theater has sat in a ghostly state on 63rd Street and Broadway with a blank marquee.

But as the city marched on with cold indifference, a band of seniors and retirees who live in the neighborhood refused to accept its demise and founded New Plaza Cinema just across the street.

They operate their nonprofit theater in a generic auditorium that they rent out twice a month from the New York Institute of Technology. A sandwich board on 62nd Street announces their presence. On weekends, they set up a volunteer recruitment table on Broadway beside a handwritten board that reads, “Do You Miss Lincoln Plaza Cinemas?”

Barry Schulman, 72, a retired television executive who helped found the Sci-Fi Channel, was selling candy bars from a wicker basket at the “Mr. Klein” screening. He explained why he joined the cause. “After I retired, I didn’t move to the Upper West Side just so I’d have to get on the subway and go to the Angelika,” he said.

The ultimate goal is lofty: unsatisfied with New Plaza merely being a pop-up cinema, the organizers want a full-time theater of their own, but securing such a space would probably cost millions. A strategy meeting was recently held over banana bread at the New Plaza president Norma Levy’s apartment in Lincoln Towers. Their big hope is that wealthy donors will bankroll their movie house.

“This city is full of wealth,” said Ms. Levy, a retired lawyer. “Three million dollars is nothing to some people. We only need one of those people. Maybe two. We’ll let them name the place. ‘The Mike Bloomberg Theater.’ Whatever. All we need is the theater, and we’ll do the rest.”

It won’t be easy. The city’s old art houses and independent theaters have been vanishing. Recent closures include the Sunshine Cinema on the Lower East Side, the Beekman Theater on the Upper East Side, City Cinemas on 86th Street, and the stately Paris opposite the Plaza Hotel. They close because of high rents, expired leases, and shifts in modern moviegoer habits.

Tellingly, as of a few weeks ago, the Paris will now be getting a second life, but only because Netflix leased the refined single-screen theater as a showcase address for its prestige releases.

As the old guard institutions fade, a slick new era of art houses is rising. The revitalized Quad Cinema in Greenwich Village sells organic wine at its bar, and the Metrograph on Ludlow Street has a restaurant that serves koginut squash salad. Last year, possibly sensing change in the air, the longstanding Film Forum on Houston Street underwent a $5 million dollar face-lift.

New Plaza’s single-screen auditorium seats 259 people. Recent screenings have included “Pavarotti” and “Tel Aviv on Fire,” and they’ve shown classics like “My Dinner With Andre” and “The Conformist.” After Philip Roth died, they ran a marathon of movies adapted from his books.

Ms. Levy declined to detail the operating costs and revenue of New Plaza, but she said they break even with their ticket sales, and that senior tickets make up the bulk of their revenue.

“Do we need younger faces?” she asked. “Yes, we do. But right now, we have an army of bright and dedicated people who have life experience. It might be time as a society to look at older people differently in terms of what they’re capable of and can create for society.”

In this brutal environment, they have one idea that might get them attention.

Woody Allen’s new film, “A Rainy Day in New York,” hasn’t had a New York premiere, and there are no current plans for its release in the United States. (It opened in September in Paris to lines spilling down the street.)

“No one in town wants to touch it,” said Gary Palmucci, 64, New Plaza’s film curator. “We did a show of hands here, and about 85 percent of people were in favor. I think we’ve decided we’re not so worried about picketers and we think it would be worthwhile to show.” He added: “We’re all over 50. We’ve lived in this world a lot. We view certain transgressions differently than college students.”

As the second anniversary of Lincoln Plaza Cinemas’ closing approaches, there lingers the thorny and awkward matter of the shuttered art house itself, which seems tantalizingly available.

Lincoln Plaza Cinemas was opened in 1981 by Dan and Toby Talbot. The pioneering couple is credited with helping start the art-house-revival movement in the 1960s with their bold programming at the The New Yorker Theater on 89th Street and Broadway (Woody Allen and Diane Keaton argue in its lobby in “Annie Hall”).

Lincoln Plaza Cinemas was the fourth and last theater the Talbots operated, and the first film to play there was Federico Fellini’s “City of Women.”

For years, Howard Milstein, who owns 30 Lincoln Plaza, has been the landlord of the cinema. Mr. Milstein, who is the chief executive of Emigrant Savings Bank, is a member of a New York real-estate dynasty that Forbes once ranked the 90th wealthiest family in America.

In December 2017, Milstein Properties declined to renew Lincoln Plaza’s lease, saying that the theater required vital repairs. In a statement the company suggested that it would reopen the space again as a cinema, although it said little else.

Outrage quickly spread through condominiums on the Upper West Side. Critics and journalists wrote odes to the cinema’s leaky ceilings and stiff seats. But the closing date held firm. Mr. Talbot, who had been ill for some time, died later that month at 91. Lincoln Plaza Cinemas’ last day of operation was Jan. 28.

“We initially called him and asked to rent the space and keep running the cinema on our own,” Ms. Levy said. “A couple days later, a lawyer called us up and said, ‘Mr. Milstein is a very generous man. But not when it comes to money.’ He explained we’d need to come to the table with lots of money for anything to happen.”

A spokeswoman for Milstein Properties said that the company is still searching for a new tenant and that its “vision is still to reopen the space as a cinema.”

These days, Toby Talbot, 91, has been busy finishing her husband’s memoirs at their sunlit apartment on Riverside Drive, which is filled with posters of movies by directors like Bernardo Bertolucci and Claude Chabrol that once premiered in their theaters.

The closing of Lincoln Plaza Cinemas remains a sore spot. “He keeps our name on the marquee,” she said. “What nerve.”

She’s rooting for New Plaza. “I give them my blessing,” she said. “I want them to succeed. This was our life’s work. Dan and I were educating people, and why should that education have to stop?”

If a recent Saturday night at New Plaza was any indication, word about the cinema was getting around. An eager crowd entered to see “Fiddler: A Miracle of Miracles,” a documentary about “Fiddler on the Roof.” Two ushers, Naomi Rossabi, 83, and Ruth Mucatel, 91, took tickets. During their downtime, they groused about going to the movies today.

“We hate reserved seating,” Ms. Rossabi said. “What if we’re stuck behind a tall person?”

“Young people are used to getting everything easy,” Ms. Mucatel said. “We know what it means to have to wait for things.”

But a gloomy note soon entered their conversation.

“I heard the New York Institute of Technology is selling off their property in the area,” Ms. Rossabi said. “We don’t know if this space will always be here for us. Some of us are worried.”

In fact, the school recently put a 12-story campus building on 61st and Broadway up for sale, just down the street from New Plaza’s auditorium. But a spokesman for the university said there’s no cause for alarm: those plans don’t involve their space, and New Plaza’s arrangement is secure at least until May.

But considering the travails of New Plaza Cinema, perhaps it still felt like too close a call.

“I hope this isn’t all just a pipe dream,” Ms. Rossabi said. “Because something magic still happens when you go to the movies.”

Giles
Giles commented about Disney's Fantasia - Washington DC theatrical premier on Dec 17, 2019 at 2:11 am

yeah, I found that rather odd the exclusion of the ‘Fantasound’ system; and for a two hour movie, the evening screenings beginning at 8:30pm – that’s on the late end if you ask me.

Giles
Giles commented about Cinemark Egyptian 24 and XD on Oct 31, 2019 at 10:08 pm

can anyone confirm if Auditorium #13 is getting the makeover/upgrade to ‘XD’ ?

Giles
Giles commented about Phoenix Theatres Union Station 9 on Oct 18, 2019 at 4:01 am

I recently saw a Washington Post ad for ‘Arachnophobia’ (1990) that denoted that it’s 70mm run was here at Union Station; that bit of information totally went unnoticed by me – who knew?!

Giles
Giles commented about Cinepolis Luxury Cinemas Gaithersburg on Oct 18, 2019 at 3:52 am

Has anyone got the specs on the theater’s sound and projector systems. No one from their Facebook team is or has imparted any info in this regard.

Giles
Giles commented about Mountain View Showplace Icon on Oct 18, 2019 at 3:45 am

Can someone clarify this – are there three auditoriums featuring Dolby Atmos sound, or are there six?

Giles
Giles commented about Cinema on Jun 3, 2019 at 2:59 am

^ I also would assume ‘The Hunt for Red October’ would have been a 70mm presentation as well. I just remember being utterly riveted by the soundmix (movies set in submarines, have ALL had excellent sound design in my opinion) and the music, specifically the choral parts of the score sounding epically grandiose.

Giles
Giles commented about Avalon Theatre on Jun 3, 2019 at 2:52 am

This comment is more reference to JodarMovieFan’s comment way back in 2004 in mentioning the HPS-4000 sound system installed for ‘Fantasia’ as a re-release in 1985; and I also remember the Richard Dreyfuss/Emilio Estevez comedy pic ‘Stakeout’ being presented as such here.

What’s interesting in doing research over the system online, is that a variant and progression of the system actually never fully went away but merged and reconfigured to newer digital systems and theaters:

2010: The HPS-4000 theatres at the USS Arizona Memorial at Pearl Harbor are converted to digital cinema. John F. Allen upgrades the sound systems with all new processors as well as amplifiers and personally supervises the soundtrack preparation.

and nearer on the East Coast close to the Washington DC area:

2017 The National Museum of the the United States Marine Corps in Quantico, Virginia opens a new large format theatre. High Performance Stereo is chosen to provide the sound system. John Allen designs a new 15 channel sound system that employs 11 channels behind the 70 by 50 foot screen, plus four surround channels. This marks the first time such a large screen image has had an equally large sound image behind it. This installation has the acoustic power of 36 symphony orchestras and is the most powerful HPS-4000® sound system in the world. https://www.hps4000.com/pages/history_.html

Anyhow, I just thought this was interesting cinematic ‘sound’ history, part of which included the Avalon Theatre.

Giles
Giles commented about Cinema on Jun 2, 2019 at 9:44 pm

honestly I should have just looked up to the ‘Showcase Presentation’ list to the answers of the couple of questions I had. In regards to two specific movies with accompanied question marks, I seem to recall both ‘The Hunt for Red October’ and ‘The Godfather III’ both being shown here.

Giles
Giles commented about AMC Georgetown 14 on May 26, 2019 at 4:34 am

although this wasn’t never a problem here, AMC added blue floor lighting like they have done at Tyson’s Corner Dolby Cinema screen.

Giles
Giles commented about Regal Bethesda 10 on May 26, 2019 at 2:10 am

new news story has confirmed that the originally planned theater will not be integrated into the building complex:

https://bethesdamagazine.com/bethesda-beat/development/wisconsin-avenue-developers-drop-movie-theater-from-project-proposal/

Giles
Giles commented about AMC Tysons Corner 16 on May 26, 2019 at 2:03 am

I gather when IMAX did the retrofit, someone in corporate also had the red floor lighting removed from the Dolby Cinema screen, and while the red lighting is now gone, the ever so slightly blue light on the screen, is the new flaw but is nowhere as visually distracting as the ‘red’ lit lower corners.

Disney’s ‘Aladdin’ on the Dolby Cinema auditorium sounded loud and boisterous, but it was the first movie where the displayed image lacked a sharpness and heightened color range that Dolby Cinema is known for.

Giles
Giles commented about AMC Tysons Corner 16 on Apr 17, 2019 at 8:28 pm

After a brief closing of the IMAX screen the last month or so, the auditorium reopened today having been upgraded to IMAX-laser projection, 12-channel sound, new seating and new interior wall lighting.

DisneyNature’s ‘Penguins’ looked fantastic even with predominant colors of blue, black, and white, the occasional introduction of a vibrant color really added tremendous pop and clarity. The extra speakers placed to the rear corners, side walls and above really dropped you into the middle of the various animals with it’s cacophony of animal vocality.

The seats while not recliners are super comfortable and have a slight bounce to them.

Giles
Giles commented about Cinema on Apr 15, 2019 at 6:36 am

Unless it happened during the “02/18/76 (repertory film festival showings)” or the latter end of the 1970’s, I remember my dad taking me here to see ‘Camelot’– at a young age I was very entertained.

The 1989 engagement of ‘The Ten Commandments’ was aptly impressive here, but I can’t seem to recall if it was a 35mm print or 70mm print, I think it was the former.

Out of curiosity, when DID the Cinema get it’s 70mm projector and what was presented as such, every bit of info I’ve noted seems to suggest that ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ was the debut of the system – is that true?

Giles
Giles commented about AMC Northpark 15 on Mar 23, 2019 at 3:38 pm

Theater also has a Dolby Cinema auditorium and IMAX (laser)

Giles
Giles commented about AMC Montgomery 16 on Feb 5, 2019 at 10:30 pm

I simply had to see Peter Jackson’s documentary WW1 movie “They Shall Never Grow Old” here and it was a fantastic experience on their widescreen screen here! Warner’s must have mandated 3D screenings of this because almost all of it’s screening in auditorium #6 are just that, and it’s exemplary – the Dolby Atmos mix was equally impressive – this is one of the movies where every element: the restoration of the footage, the 3D imagery, the soundmix, the subject matter all came together to such tremendous visual/auditory effect

Giles
Giles commented about AMC Montgomery 16 on Jan 30, 2019 at 10:04 pm

^ even though the Uptown doesn’t have an Atmos setup, ‘Ready Player One’ on the big large screen was epic and a highlight of last year.

Just this last past week though Arclight has really stepped up it’s game with trying to put as many movies on the ‘widescreen’ screen and it’s second Dolby Atmos auditorium. While ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ at the Uptown was sensational, Arclight’s return engagement of it on the widescreen screen, and specifically the movie’s Dolby Atmos mix was an auditory experience in it’s own respect and trounced the 5.1 mix with its music and key audio moments traversing over one’s head.

I’ll admit, now being an AMC A-List member, and trying to beholden to not spend money I really don’t have ~ I miss Arclight tremendously. ‘The Favourite’ I saw here in early December was head’s and above far superior to AMC Shirlington’s presentation. 7.1 surround sound, the black box / low lit auditoriums, the three trailers before the feature (and not the standard barrage of twenty minutes of trailers at AMC [and Regal]) all exemplify how and why seeing a movie at the Arclight is my preferred way and environment in experiencing a movie.

Giles
Giles commented about AMC Dine-In Rio Cinemas 18 on Jan 30, 2019 at 9:25 pm

^ to answer your question regarding the projectors for the Prime auditorium, there are two Christie 4K projectors. The manager told me they can present 3D features, yet for ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ I saw today, it was 2D. As to the sound ~ wow! color me impressed (far better than what is calibrated and presented at Tysons).

He also told me that the 12-channel sound system is already implemented and installed in the IMAX auditorium but the changeover to laser, won’t happen til after ‘Captain Marvel’ but in time for ‘Avenger’s Endgame (April 26th).

Giles
Giles commented about AMC Courthouse Plaza 8 on Nov 26, 2018 at 5:55 am

I just went to this theater last week to see the new ‘Fantastic Beasts’ sequel on screen 8, which I remember being the largest, but with the new beds, er, I mean recliners the seating has been reduced dramatically to 151 seats. I don’t know what they did with this auditorium but I remember seeing ‘Starship Troopers’ here and I could have sworn the screen was larger than what I recently saw. The 3D screening had enough light output to make the image and movie have great dimensionality but the overall size of the screen didn’t have wanting to see another movie here. Also when this auditorium had SDDS sound, the audio presentations were top notch, here though the sound was so subdued and unimpressive (this might have been the fault of the movie’s actual soundmix).

Giles
Giles commented about Odeon Luxe London Leicester Square on Nov 18, 2018 at 4:58 am

so I apologize if this question has been asked and answered but did Dolby make the screen larger during the conversion to Dolby Cinema? A 48 foot wide screen seems rather small in this day and age