A revived Tigard movie house and a brand new Vancouver multiplex make suburban filmgoing as good as staying in town.
With its plethora of independent cinemas, multi-screen art
houses and offbeat brewpub theaters, the city of Portland boasts what might
well be the most diverse moviegoing opportunities in the country.
But the suburbs line up more or less with the rest of the United States: big multiplexes showing the latest Hollywood releases and serving the predictable popcorn, candy and soda.
This month, however, filmgoers in Portland's suburbs got a pair of boosts that make the experience of seeing movies outside the city limits just as exciting as anything going on in town.
In Tigard, the tiny Joy Cinema, which had been showing Bollywood movies until a recent shuttering, has reopened as a beer-and-pizza theater that will program a mixture of second-run Hollywood hits and quirky cult movies.
And in Vancouver, the locally-owned Cinetopia chain has built its most ambitious project yet: Cinetopia Westfield, a massive multiplex with the largest screens in the region and some of the most technologically advanced projection and sound systems in the country.
In size, cost and ambition, the two enterprises could not be more different. The single screen Joy, which has been showing movies since 1939, seats about 450 and has been given a fresh coat of paint, some new concessions equipment, a digital projection system (to go alongside the existing film-based projectors), and the usual sorts of upgrades you'd expect when a new tenant comes in and wants to spiffy up a place. Call it $10,000 for the renovations and anywhere from $30,000 - 75,000 for the new projection equipment.
The new Cinetopia, which is located in Vancouver's Westfield mall, seats as many as 2600 in front of 14 screens (which are divided into 23 seating areas to accommodate alcohol sales in some theaters). With the same sort of state-of-the-art visuals and, especially, audio for which the other Cinetopia theaters (located in Vancouver and Beaverton) are noted, and with a full restaurant and bar in addition to regular moviehouse concessions, it cost an estimated $21 million to get up and running.
Each theater is the vision of a single, driven entrepreneur. In Tigard, the man behind the Joy is Jeff "Punk Rock" Martin, a longtime Portland musician, record label owner and scene-stirrer with a love of cult movies. He's gonzo enough to dream of showing "a dream twin-bill of 'The Omega Man' and 'Rock 'n' Roll High School,'" he says, but he's realistic, too, about what he's doing.
"With a single screen, you've gotta show the hits," he explains. "But we're definitely gonna show the other stuff liberally. I'd love to do a Sam Raimi festival, or show 'Plan Nine from Outer Space' in 3-D. It's a business. If we mix the big movies and sprinkle in the fun stuff, we'll be fine."
True to his word, Martin is showing second runs of Hollywood films ("Cabin in the Woods" most recently) and some grindhouse classics, such as Russ Meyer's brassy 1965 "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!," which was featured during a soft-opening last weekend. He's also programming at least one trailer for a cheesy old-time movie before each and every show. And tickets are a bargain: $4 for all shows and all times, and a $1 night once a week.
At the other end of the metropolitan area -- and the other end of the financial and moviegoing spectrums -- Cinetopia Westfield, like its siblings, is a dazzler. Four of the screens are said to be the largest in the entire Pacific Northwest: an 80-footer and three 70-footers, all equipped with digital projectors that produce images with four times the resolution of Blu-ray. All of the theaters have high-end Dolby 7.1 sound systems from Meyer Sound, and one boasts a stunning Dolby ATMOS sound system, with 64 speakers each providing two audio channels, so that you can pinpoint a sound anywhere in the theater, even overhead, where speakers are installed in the ceilings.
In addition to the full-sized auditoriums, the new Cinetopia boasts five Movie Parlors, which put a luxurious sheen on the living room-viewing experience -- patrons sit on sofas and easy chairs in a home-like setting and can order a full menu of food and drink from waitstaff. These more intimate auditoriums are also equipped with the newest projection and audio systems and are decorated with digital screens on which the imagery is changed to reflect the film that's showing. And they can be rented for parties and private screenings.
Rudyard Coltman, the Portland-area attorney who dreamed up and funded the Cinetopia concept seven years ago, describes all of this technology with the excitement of a kid showing off a new toy. "I want everything to look and sound as good as it can," he says, "because I want people to see the movie the way it was made to be seen. We're not going to let projector bulbs go dim until they die or play the sound lower than the volume that it was mixed at."
Most Cinetopia tickets are in line with those at the national theater chains -- $10 for adults and $6 for kids at evening shows, with discounts at matinees and for seniors, students and servicepeople. For some shows and some auditoriums, prices can run as high as $18.50. That's pricey, but it's inarguable that the experience of a Cinetopia screening is more (there's no other word, really) cinematic than you usually get at an ordinary multiplex. During a tour last week, I sampled two films I'd seen recently at other theaters -- "Prometheus" and "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" -- and found the projection brighter and sharper (both 2-D and 3-D) and the audio massively crisper, clearer and louder.
Over the years I've come to brag about the Portland movie scene as the most vibrant in the nation. Draw a line from City Hall to the Hollywood Theatre, I often say, and you form the radius of a circle that contains more screens dedicated to independent, arthouse and experimental film than to Hollywood fare, a higher ratio than in any city of comparable size in the USA. Now, however, I'm going to have to adjust my geographical parameters when I throw down that gauntlet. With the addition of the revived Joy and the third Cinetopia, from downtown to the suburbs, pound for pound, Portland just might have the best selection of movie theaters in the country.
