I could post a David Poland-style piece about all the things I’m thankful for today blah blah, but it hit me the other night how enormously thankful I am to be able to see movies at a truly great movieplex that really knows how to make a film look and sound as good as it gets. That would be the Hollywood Arclight, which I hit every week or so or at least two or three times a month. A visited a couple of nights ago, and I popped my head into four or five cinemas just to check out the projection quality and sound levels, and everything looked and sounded perfect. I mean wowser, as in “how much better could this be?”

I was at the Key West Film Festival last weekend, and I have to say that the projection standards in that town’s main theatre didn’t hold a candle to what the Arclight delivers. (Too small screen, so-so sound.) The Arclight sound alone is a knockout, but also the light levels and the sharpness of the image on each and every screen. The Arclight experience (including the Sherman Oaks and Culver City plex) is absolutely first-class and top-of-the-line, and on this day after Thanksgiving (11.24) I’m truly thankful that I live in a town where I can routinely bask in this level of presentation.

Yes, I’m thankful for my friends and my sons and the many blessings of sobriety and the success of Hollywood Elsewhere and comfort of knowing how to write well and the fact I’ve led a life that has allowed me to repeatedly stroll the grand boulevards and back streets of Hanoi, Rome, Paris, New York, Zurich, Munich, Telluride, Prague, London and Boston as well as the winding country roads of Tuscany, northern rural California, Fairfield County and the Berkshires, but I am really, truly double-somersault happy for the pleasures of the Arclight. Thank you, God…thank you for this delight, this radiance, this completeness.