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…