Yet Another Complaint About The JVL's Movie Theatres

I love movies. It's one of my passions in life. And, living in a podunk city surrounded by podunk towns, unfortunately, it's one of the few outlets of entertainment. Needless to say, I see a lot of movies.

Every weekend, I look at the movie listings, because, as I've mentioned before, I usually see a movie every weekend. This weekend was no different. But I was surprised at what I found.

At one of the area theatres, I found that, instead of bringing in a new movie, they were bringing back Shrek 3, which, as you can see from the poster next to this post, came out on May 18th.

Now, the fall months tend to be a kind of No Man's Land in terms of movie releases. Studios release all of their big movies in the summer, and save all of their Oscar contenders and anything else for the winter months. Not much product coming out in the fall. So, I can understand theatres struggling to fill up screens with stuff people want to watch.

But, there are ways to combat this. A theatre in our nearby state capital fills its empty screens with "classic" films, this week's selections being The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and Scarface. No screens going to waste there. And, if you don't want to show older movies that are already readily available on video, why not show something that's in limited release that might interest people, something like The Darjeeling Limited or In the Valley of Elah. That's stuff that's new, and, again, no wasted screens.

But, no. We get fucking Shrek 3 instead, which I'm pretty sure probably just left the theatres here in JVL a month ago. (You must remember that this is the same theatre that took a pass on The Prestige's $15 million opening so that they could show Pirates of the Caribbean 2 for one more week.)

I once commented to The Girl that the only way to improve Janesville would be to drop an atomic bomb on it.

That sounds better and better every day.