Evaporating cinemas by MATTHEW HAYS So comes the grim news: due to its financial restructuring, the Cineplex chain is shutting down 20-odd cinemas across the country. Sadly, this number includes the Montreal venues in the Faubourg and Egyptien. While none of us would really shed any tears about the recent closure of the Atwater cinema--that place, with its rotten seats and lousy sightlines, probably should have been abandoned years ago--these two other losses are somewhat more depressing. Both cinemas featured fairly comfy seating and decent-sized screens. And both were conveniently located. Alas, there are too many screens in the city (part of a continent-wide phenom), a symptom of too much growth on the part of greedy cinema-chain owners who have expanded without thought to what a too-much supply would do to the market. The corporate suits have now bought into the notion that the only way people will go see movies is if they're baited with the prospect of pizza, pinball, pretzels and titanic screens. Lest this turn into another lament about the state of our cinemas, let me state that there's nothing terribly wrong with the new breed of venues, perhaps best exampled by the Paramount. The seats are comfier and the screens are big (though technical difficulties continue and the place often seems to cry out for some fine-tuning). But I do worry about the kind of films we get to see in the megaplexes. Faubourg and Egyptien often ran foreign-language films and mid-range-budget movies, something the gagaplexes tend not to do. Imagine if your only option when entering the cinema is seven screens playing Saving Silverman and the remaining eight playing Hannibal. This doesn't bode well for consumers' freedom of choice. And things only stand to get more extreme, as the Forum will reopen this spring with some 17 screens and an Imax to boot. This development will undoubtedly only force more of the smaller cinemas out of the marketplace. Let's hope the Forum complex will commit to showing a varied diet of films so we won't continue to feel increasingly limited. In the meantime, thank your lucky stars for the folks at Cinéma du Parc, Ex-Centris, the Goethe- Institut and the Cinémathèque québécoise. Thanks to the careful curatorship of these institutions, Montrealers are not left to savour only Saving Silverman and various other bits of pap. Don't get me wrong: I like a big-budget no-brainer as much as the next person (hey, I'm still waiting for the fourth Chucky sequel), but that doesn't mean that's all I want to be able to see. Stay tuned. The cinema carnage clearly isn't over, and the next year will undoubtedly hold various other seismic shifts. Speaking of good stuff that's off the beaten path, Wong Kar-Wai's latest film, a bizarre little romance called In the Mood For Love, opened last Friday with French subtitles and opens this Friday with English subtitles. Kar-Wai has done it again--this one is well worth the visit to the cinema.: COMMENTS: mhays@mtl-mirror.com