This past week, on my friend Jae's last night in Las Vegas, we decided to have an all-American experience. We decided to go to a drive-in movie. Jae had never been to one -- I hadn't been to one since my childhood.
There's a multi-plex drive-in in North Las Vegas. It sits in between a casino and a small private airport. You can see planes and helicopters taking off and landing behind the screens during the show. The projection seems to be accomplished by some sort of video system seriously inadequate to the "throw" involved -- the distance between the projector and the screen. The resulting image is very indistinct. The audio is delivered over an FM station on your car radio and sounds way worse than normal FM reception.
The whole scene has a quality of desolation. The experience is clearly designed for people who just want to say they've been to a drive-in movie. I suppose the enterprise could also qualify as what real estate speculators call "ground cover" -- something to bring in a little income on a property that will be developed more spectacularly at some future date.
We "saw" Enchanted, which was fun, even with the fuzzy, washed-out picture and the static-ravaged sound. We enjoyed the surreal spectacle of it all. This is what seeing movies in Hell will be like -- and that's enough to get you to try a little bit harder to make it to Heaven, where the movie theaters will probably be almost as good as those at the Arclight complex in Los Angeles.