Movie Week, Day 6

January 2nd, 2009 · No Comments

landmark

The Landmark Theatre The Wrestler Friday, 1/2/09, 5:10 pm

Price: $13 ($12 + $1 online ticket purchase surcharge) Concessions: Nothing – no time, plus I was saving room for the Apple Pan afterwards. Audience: A surprisingly full 200+ in theater 12, one of the upstairs screens that seats 250. Trailers/advertising: The International, He’s Just Not That Into You, and Watchmen, all repeats. Projection: 35mm changeover.

This didn’t start out well. As I was putting my schedule together, I knew I’d want to catch a film at the ArcLight, and figured I’d have a few choices and just slot it in where needed. As I got closer to the day, though, I realized that I’d have to catch a movie right after work on Friday, as Aimee was coming back from Boston that night. So, I found a 5:15 screening of The Wrestler, which was perfect: I wanted to see the movie, and it fit with my schedule at work; I’d just work from 9-5 instead of 10-6 that day. As the week began, it seemed the ArcLight changed their schedule and moved the film to 5:05. Cutting it close, but it would still work. As the week went on, though, and they published their schedule for the new week of films beginning today, they had moved the film to 4:00, no good for my work schedule, and to boot, had zero films starting in the five o’clock hour, even the seven movies screening there that I’d seen before.

So, I had to improvise. The Landmark Theater on the west side was also showing The Wrestler, at 5:10, so I decided to work 8:30 to 4:30, which I thought ought to give me enough time, especially if I bought my ticket in advance. The Landmark is like the ArcLight (or at least it tries to be) in that they, too, offer choose-your-own-seat tickets online. The only problem was, their ticketing system wasn’t working. I tried twice on landmarktheatres.com to purchase tickets, being told both times that the show was sold out even though I’d chosen a seat in a nearly-empty theater, according to the theater map. Strike one. I called their phone number, and when I chose the option to speak to an operator, I was disconnected. Strike two. I tried to purchase a ticket on movietickets.com, and got the following message: “Script timed out. The maximum amount of time for a script to execute was exceeded.” Strike three. I wrote to customer service, and never heard back. Can there be a Strike Four?

Turns out I had accessed the ticket purchasing portion of the site through the new beta version of their website. I’m not sure why they let you try to purchase tickets there, without telling you that you’re not actually able to, but I’ll leave that for them to figure out.

I zipped across town, found another “FAIL” meter right across the street from the theater, and ran in in the middle of the trailers. The film felt out of focus, which wouldn’t have happened at the ArcLight, but oh well – it would have taken a lot to obscure what a well-crafted movie The Wrestler is. It was compelling, fascinating, well acted, well written, an all around success. I wasn’t crazy about the ending, but overall, it was a terrific film. Just one day left…

Tags: Film · Los Angeles ·