Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Epic fail- Century Laguna Elk Grove running dead left front channel for YEARS!

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Topic: Epic fail- Century Laguna Elk Grove running dead left front channel for YEARS!

Jesse Skeen
Phenomenal Film Handler

Posts: 1517
From: Sacramento, CA
Registered: Aug 2000

posted 10-14-2019 08:11 PM

Not sure which forum this should go under, powers that be feel free to move to Ground Level if need be, but I swear you can't make this up:

I'll start with my visit to this theater to see the last "Hobbit" movie (hadn't seen a high frame rate movie before and wanted to see what it looked like.) Happened to be December 30th, 2014, close to five years ago. Maybe I remember more about moviegoing experiences than I should, but I remember the pre-show garbage was playing with sound only out of the right front channel. When the trailers started the sound seemed to be working properly, but I had a funny feeling that the left channel might have truly been dead. Not being able to tell for sure, I just figured someone would notice and fix it soon.

Exactly two years later to the day, I go to the same theater with my parents to see "Fences" and we end up in the exact same auditorium. (My mom wanted to see the movie and I insisted on seeing it there since they have proper 2.35 ratio screens, at least in some auditoriums.) Going in, the preshow audio was still playing out of just the right channel. When the trailers started, one of them had music isolated to just the front left and right with dialogue and sound effects in the center, and I could clearly tell this time that the left channel was dead. I would have left at this point, but didn't want to ruin it for my parents. "Fences" is mostly a dialogue picture anyways and one might be forgiven for not noticing the problem during that movie- but given that TWO YEARS AGO I'd noticed something at least wasn't right, you would think SOMEBODY at the theater would have caught it in all that time. If I'd been working there and done proper theater checks I certainly wouldn't have let that go for more than a day without catching it, and even then I'd feel bad for not having caught it sooner. (The first theater I ran film at had a loose connection with one of their CD players- mind you this was just for the intermission music which nobody pays attention to, but I checked EVERY DAY to make sure that was playing through both channels- often I caught one channel going dead and went behind the rack and wiggled the wire til it came back again. I paid more attention to the fucking INTERMISSION MUSIC than these people did to the actual movie.)

I reported this problem through Cinemark's feedback form, saying that it was simply inexcusable for this to go on for TWO YEARS without anyone catching it. I got an email back from someone apologizing, saying they had just fixed it. I replied back asking "How do you explain it staying that way for two years without anyone noticing?" and got no response. What truly amazed me about this was this problem was most noticeable during the pre-show, which has no center channel. Since that's all Cinemark really cares about, you would think they would at least make sure THAT was being played properly.

Fast-forward to today. I hadn't been to any movie theater in more than a year and a half, because seeing "The Last Jedi" (at another theater, not Cinemark's) was such a crap-tacular experience that I had basically decided to give up on theaters altogether. Had some free time today though, and Century Laguna had gotten some upgrades recently including recliner seating and all that so I decided to go see "Joker". As luck would have it, I again ended up in that same auditorium and guess what? The left front speaker was STILL dead! If it in fact had been fixed last time, it had stopped working again since then and once again nobody in charge noticed it. In addition the movie was 1.85, but they had left the masking open- it seems that even for proper-ratio screens, Cinemark's "policy" is now just not to use masking at all. To top it off, I could see that someone had left a light on upstairs that was shining onto the screen. This time I decided I wasn't going to suffer through another bad presentation and just left. Funny that after a year and a half of not going to any theater, the visit turned out like this when it SHOULD of course had been perfect and restored my faith in theater-going. But needless to say, this is ENTIRELY inexcusable and I will never set foot in that theater again, and basically have even less confidence in the theater business (at least locally) than I did before. If there were a truly great theater here I would go once per week regardless of what was playing, but instead I hardly go at all anymore, instead watching movies at home and putting more money into making that experience the best it can be.

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