AMC Santa Monica 7 Hanna Monday, 5/9/11, 7:35 pm

Price: $11.75 Concessions: None Audience: seven people, in a theater that seats about 225. Trailers/advertising: AMC’s First Look stuff, with ads for Gatorade, Coke, a Sprint “no talking ad” featuring a clip from The Notebook, and two ads for live transmission events from Fathom: “Their Eyes Were Dry” and a Los Angeles Philharmonic concert. Trailers for The Debt, Anonymous (which not only looks like a terrible movie, but the trailer butchers Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place”), Captain America, Warrior, Crazy Stupid Love, and The Beaver, which had a voiceover so cheesy I kept expecting the entire trailer to be a joke. But no. Projection: Digital

Another day, another Third Street Promenade theater I don’t think I’ve been to before. The first time I came to Los Angeles, I was in Santa Monica for a wedding and I had a morning to kill. It happened to be the day Pearl Harbor opened, and I went to see it (it killed time, OK?) somewhere on the Promenade. It could have been this theater, I don’t remember. Tonight, my film was in a theater up on the second floor, and I walked in during the end of the AMC First Look promo junk. I don’t know why I was surprised that the theater had gone digital; I think the entire digital revolution in mainstream cinemas has been happening while Aimee and I have primarily been going to screenings at the Goldwyn, so we haven’t really noticed.

Just to illustrate how long it’s been since I’ve been to an AMC theater, I brought my worn out old AMC MovieWatcher membership card to the screening, and when I presented it, I was told the club had been replaced by something called Stubs, which lets you not only accumulate points but also do some social network stuff and save “virtual ticket stubs.” No thanks. I guess I earned my last free popcorn, somewhere back in Boston in the 2000s.

The movie had its moments, but the movie as a whole wasn’t as good as its individual parts (the cast, the idea, the director). Too bad.