Here we go with another Dead Sea Scrolls newspaper article that first appeared about 36 hours ago on the N.Y. Times website, making it barely worthy of comment due its withered condition and sad lack of relevance to the constantly evolving here-and-now. Written by director-screenwriter Nora Ephron, it nonetheless reads like a fairly acccurate piece of reporting, and amounts to yet another reason why it often seems like a more sensible idea to watch a DVD on your big-ass flat-screen rather than fork over $10 or $11 bucks at a neighborhood theatre. Ephron had a bad experience at Manhattan’s AMC Loews Orpheum 7, at 86th Street and Third Avenue…and I’ve been there. Oh, have I been there! And I know that indifferent ticket-taker as well as I do my brother (who’s currently living in Norwalk, Connecticut). But I have a different attitude than Ephron’s when it comes to pointing out that the framing or the focus isn’t right, or that the sound is too soft. This is where the fun starts, you see. It’s a game…heh-heh. You have to go up to those chunks of two-day-old Wisconsin cheese wearing those polyester AMC lounge shirts, and you have to be Sam Jaffe in Gunga Din. You have to smile and bend over slightly and apologize for being such a complication in their lives, but could they please ask the “projectionist” (i.e., the kid keeping an eye on the platters and other facets of the theatre’s totally automated projection system) to adjust the blah-dee-blah? And after the kid in the booth has either ignored your request or failed to tweak the projection so that the movie you’re trying to watch looks roughly 75% as good as it did when you first saw it at an industry screening room (or at an all-media theatre screening), you get to go back to the same ticket-taker or some dead-head assistant manager and be Sam Jaffe all over again. And all this back-and-forth, which can eat up as much as four or five minutes and sometimes a bit more, is what moviegoing sometimes is these days…what movies are like every so often if you’ve been unlucky enough to walk into the wrong plex at the wrong time. I’ve been saying for years there are three moviegoing realms — the first-class one you take for granted if you’re a journo-critic going to industry screenings all the time (or if you pay to see films at Hollywood’s Arclight), the second class one you get when you go to a not-sublime-but-pretty- decent theatre, and the unaccceptable third-class one in theatres like the AMC Loews Orpheum 7 (or even the AMC Empire on 42nd Street, where the projection standards vaguely suck also from time to time). In any event, Ephron’s piece almost made me forgive her for directing and co-writing Bewitched.