Arclight Sherman Oaks Fast Five Saturday, 5/7/11, 8:00 pm

Price: $13.50 (and that’s with a dollar off for buying the ticket using the Arclight iPhone app) Concessions: None Audience: The approximately 200-seat theater was mostly full on this Saturday night. Trailers/advertising: as with all Arclight theaters, no ads, a godsend. Trailers for X-Men First Class, Priest, The Change-Up, and Cowboys & Aliens. Projection: Digital

Expanding from their wildly popular Hollywood flagship location, the Arclight is now a chain with four locations, all offering an excellent movie-going experience in exchange for somewhat ridiculous ticket prices. I’ve never been to any of their other locations, so I was eager to see how well the Arclight experience translated to another setting. The trek from the parking garage to the theater at the Galleria Mall in Sherman Oaks is a long one, giving you ample opportunity to observe the culture of the “Valley Mall” species. It was a lot to handle, and I can’t really see myself going there unless I was just dying to see a movie and Hollywood had closed for the day or something.

Anyway, the interior looks fairly similar to the Hollywood location, with the departure-style ‘now showing’ board and giant clock. The crowd was just different, a lot of teenagers and families, which is not generally what you see in Hollywood. I made my way past the giant Pirates of the Caribbean display (a huge wall covered in posters from all over the world for all four movies) and found my seat in the theater just as the movie started. I’d never seen any of the previous four films in this franchise, but I wasn’t too concerned about keeping up, and I enjoyed it for what it was. It doesn’t make sense to try to criticize a movie like this for lapses in realism; it’s one big lapse in realism, starting with Vin Diesel having a job as an actor. The presentation was fine, a big, crisp digital picture, which no one thinks twice about any more, I guess.