The ArcLight Hollywood Inception Monday, 9/20/10, 7:05 pm

Price: $12.50 (Members Non Peak price, apparently) Concessions: None Audience: 14 people in Theater 1, which seats about 150. Trailers/advertising: Trailers for Fair Game, Hereafter, Due Date, and Let Me In. No ads. Projection: 35mm platter, which looked great, and a thunderous sound system.

The ArcLight in Hollywood opened a few years before we moved here, and has since then been the by unanimous decision the best movie theater in the area. It’s expensive, but it’s worth it. The great projection and comfortable stadium seats are important, but the best thing about the ArcLight is the culture there: the assigned seats, the lack of commercials, the prohibition on entering after the film has started, and the general slightly elevated respect for the culture of moviegoing preset there – I’m not saying no one talks and cell phones don’t ring in the middle of movies there, but it happens a little less often at the ArcLight.

The theater-going experience has been imitated, with varying degrees of success, at the Landmark Westside, but the ArcLight still does it best. I’m curious to see how well the ArcLight brand has been carried on in their two newer locations in Sherman Oaks and Pasadena, perhaps later on this week or the next time I do this Movie Week thing.

The adjacent Cinerama Dome is a great architectural feature to have as part of your movie theater, but I’m not sure how great a place it is to see a movie. I’ve seen mostly archival stuff there, Cinerama shows and Spartacus and so on, and have avoided the blockbusters that spend their opening weeks there.

I thought the film was terrific – not as confusing as (but no less complicated than) I had heard, but enormously satisfying. I was happy to be able to see it on a big screen, especially with the sound system that shook us in our seats at times.