07/08/03’s illustrious band:

Couch Parade

Brought to you by my most recent adventures at CONvergence, the science fiction-fantasy convention I attended this past weekend. This week’s illustrious bands will be singing the event’s praises.

At this year’s con, I spent a lot of time at Cinema Rex, the movie room. In the space of 48 hours, I saw two complete films and parts of several more, and could easily have doubled my intake. Although Cinema Rex looks like a mere hotel conference room papered with movie posters, it’s really the best-ever theater setup you can imagine. There’s a 10-foot screen in one corner, flanked by banks of surround-sound speakers only an audio-visual nerd could love -- and the con is full of them. A faithful few keep a nonstop procession of sci-fi flicks going for an average of 13.66 hours a day, every day of the con, projected from DVDs or Laserdiscs for the sharpest image.

Don’t let the technology fool you, though. Rex pays an equal amount of attention to comfort. The room is jammed with more squashy couches and armchairs than the Gryffindor common room -- or, for the Harry Potter-impaired, your favorite coffee shop lounge. There are plenty of end tables upon which to set your drink or your feet, and lamps to replace fluorescent lighting between movies. It’s the perfect place to chill for an hour or two if you’re tired from prowling the dealers’ room or skipping from one room party to another. And the sofa backs are high enough that you can scrunch down out of sight if you’re being followed by a giant, manic repo man who really wants to be your friend (see subsequent blogs).

But what’s a movie party without popcorn? Or a free soda dispenser? Or free cookies, candy, and, on opening night, free pizza? Not just any crummy old pizza, either. Cinema Rex serves Green Mill. Not even the con suite, where you can get free food any time of day or night, can compete with that.

With such quality in every detail, Cinema Rex is the king of movie houses. The only other place half so inviting is the 30-foot-long hotel hot tub, but they don’t show movies there. However, the parade of pasty-white geek flesh is almost as entertaining.

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