"Hey, you wanna go to a movie?"

The suburbs has always occured to me to be such a cookie-cutter place. The houses, the food chains, the supermarkets, the cars, the whole lifestyle is so same. It hides under the facade of a wealth of choices when in fact it's just a repundant place over and over again.

I grew up in the epitome of Suburbia in Southwestern Ontario, aka the GTA and I still live in the suburbs. There is nothing but houses and car-park garages with little kiddy families for 15 minutes biking. After that, there's a plaza: rebundant with the likes of a Loblaws, a McDonald's, Roger's Video, Blockbuster, Country Style, Second Cup, William's Coffee Pub, Tim Horton's, Ho-Lee-Chow, Swiss Chalet. There's a (I hope) privately owned pizza shop and Chinese restaurant but that's about it. It's like living in the countryside without the scenery nor the serenity. But wait...what's that tucked into the corner? Empire Theatres!

Yes, the cookie cutting has not stopped at theatres! Yesterday I took an hour of my precious time out of my day to do some statistical analysis of the GTA's movie theatres. I saw a whole page of the newspaper dedicated to film/theatre listings so I just based it on those. Here are my results:

• GTA has 52 theatres owned by 5 companies (Cineplex, Rainbow Cinemas, Alliance Atlantis, AMC, Empire Theatres)
  
• Cineplex has the most theatres--37
• a small number of movies dominate a large number of theatres
• 12 movies are shown in ~40 of the theatres
• of those, 7 are of a series (Fantastic Four, Shrek 3, Ocean's 13, POTC 3, Live Free or Die Hard, Spiderman 3, Evan Almighty sort of)
  
• 38 other movies are shown in ~1-2 theatres
• for all of the GTA, 50 movies are screened
  

If these stats don't scare you, I hope this will:

• there are 537 screens in total
• that goes to say that a total of 50 movies are shown on 537 screens! Why isn't this number higher? Why in the world can't there be 537 movies showing across the GTA?
  

Conclusion: The movie-going experience has now boiled down to nothing but a monopoly of theatre brand names sucking up money for movie "sagas" in which the whole production company can just get more of your money's worth. These movies have, in my opinion, little to no artistic merit. They have loads of entertainment value but if we now base that value on explosions, comic-book characters (which should be stuck inside comic books except for Frank Miller adaptations), sequels, prequels, trequels, quadquels, stupid retellings of the Bible and fairy tales...

The facade of the suburban movie-going experience ridiculous and shameful. I know downtown has other screenings and has indie films and stuff, but then again I worship downtown and it has everything. I don't get why people today, myself included, are so brainwashed to vomit $10 to see this kind of crap. The box-office numbers are in the millions and budgets for Hollywood movies are in millions, billions.

Meanwhile, at the local library, I saw a great collection of foreign language movies.