Deluxe is deluxe

One of the most excit­ing and stim­u­lat­ing things about liv­ing in Welling­ton is the fact the our cin­e­mas are con­tin­u­al­ly rein­vest­ing in their facil­i­ties and always try­ing to top each oth­er in qual­i­ty of fit out and cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. What have we done to deserve this!?

This year the burghers of Mira­mar got the Ming opu­lence of the Roxy (and by that I mean Ming the Mer­ci­less not Ming Dynasty), Read­ings have start­ed a long process of upgrad­ing their facil­i­ty with the intro­duc­tion of the Titan XC brand toW­elling­ton and next year the Light­house comes to town with a bou­tique three screen offer­ing on Wigan Street (oppo­site Havana Bar).

Just in time for Christ­mas the Embassy has opened two more screens on the ground floor in the shells that were con­struct­ed dur­ing the 2003 “Return of the King” refurb. They’ve called them Deluxe (con­fus­ing­ly con­sid­er­ing their ground floor cof­fee bar neigh­bours are also Deluxe) and they have exceed­ed all expec­ta­tions with the qual­i­ty of vision and exe­cu­tion.

When Event Cin­e­mas took over the lease on the build­ing I must admit I was jad­ed by the big chains and the gen­er­al sense of not know­ing what to do with the place but as Jane Hast­ings, Gen­er­al man­ag­er of Even­t’s NZ and Aus­tralian oper­a­tions, said in her wel­come speech last night, “the Embassy has a way of get­ting under your skin.” So instead of sim­ply fit­ting out a cou­ple of dig­i­tal screens and reap­ing the syn­er­gies and effi­cien­cies they’ve raised the stan­dard in quite sig­nif­i­cant ways.

While the new cin­e­mas fill the old orches­tra pit — the vacant space under the main screen — the old Fringe offices and cin­e­ma stor­age has been con­vert­ed into the Deluxe Bar and it is a thing of beau­ty and won­der. Embassy Man­ag­er “D” did a fan­tas­tic job of keep­ing his excite­ment in check when I talked to him about it on Sun­day, betray­ing no hints of what was in store once the cur­tain was opened.

I have includ­ed a cou­ple of murky cell­phone pic­tures to give you an idea of how love­ly the space is. Suf­fice to say it is now my new favorite Welling­ton bar. I haven’t gasped walk­ing into a bar since going down­stairs to the stark Kubrick­ian fan­ta­sy of the Jet bar base­ment but going through the tun­nel to the Deluxe forced a sharp intake of breath.

I’ll let oth­ers describe it prop­er­ly (maybe the Fly could take a shot at it?) and I’ll lim­it myself to dis­cussing the two new screens: 70 com­fort­able seats each with the lat­est dig­i­tal pro­jec­tion onto decent-sized screens. There was noth­ing play­ing in the main audi­to­ri­um last night so we could­n’t judge the sound insu­la­tion but the audio gen­er­at­ed by the cin­e­mas them­selves was per­fect­ly accept­able.

The only tech­ni­cal prob­lem was the choice not to install prop­er mask­ing for ‘scope ratio films. last night’s Tintin was a 2.35:1 ratio film with black bars between the image and mask­ing at top and bot­tom. When I men­tioned it to Ms Hast­ings she implied that she had­n’t been told about the deci­sion and that some­thing would be done. Let’s hope so.

That was the only blip in an oth­er­wise suc­cess­ful night. Going to the movies is get­ting bet­ter and bet­ter. Now, what are we going to do about the poor old Para­mount…