Ten years ago you had many choices for your evening of downtown Toronto cinema-chain entertainment. Since then, the Sheraton Cinemas closed, the Hudson’s Bay Centre Cinemas closed, the Eaton Centre Cinemas closed (or got stabbed to death) and, saddest of all, the Uptown closed, with its trio of screens for mass-market blockbuster films with ear-splitting soundtracks. All gone. Of course, those were the days when more than one cinema chain owned the market, when competition forced schedulers and distributors to seek out more varied material than the predictable pabulum offered up by the studios.

Cinephiles in the cultural center of Canada didn’t need to wait for a movie like David Lynch’s Inland Empire to come out on DVD to see it, ferchissakes.

The remaining chain cinemas in downtown Toronto are the Rainbow Market Square (with their tinny, transistor-radio-quality audio system) , the Carlton (with their television-sized screens and surly/disinterested staff), the Paramount ScotiaBank (with overblown Star Wars™ decor and all the hip funkiness you’d expect from a theatre owned by a bank — a Canadian bank), the Cumberland (whose membership package included unironic McDonald’s coupons… at a showing of Super Size Me)… And “the” Varsity Cinemas.

Something happened to the Varsity over the years. Located in Manulife Centre — which, despite its posh location, has seen better days and will see better days, on completion of renovations — Varsity Cinemas sport several “V.I.P.” screening rooms and the expected faux-bistro snack bar so popular with cinema marketers these days. But with alarming regularity, “interesting” blockbuster movie releases are sent not to the Varsity but to the Paramount ScotiaBank. If you want Shrek or Spider-Man, you’re good to go; if Blades of Glory is more to your liking, good. But go elsewhere.

Time was, too, that if you were out on Bloor Street in the evening, you only needed to walk past Manulife Centre to check out the shows and showtimes. Now you need to go inside and up the escalators — two months ago it was up two flights of stairs! — to look at the Now Showing board. I guess it’s just too damn much trouble to reconnect the pixelboard sign outside to the network:

What’s Playing?

Shabby, no? It gets worse. Posh moviegoers who know “entertainment starts here” — tattered, sunbleached poster notwithstanding — will need to hold their breaths for the upcoming, much-anticipated release of Michael Bay’s Transformers:

Photo taken 24 August 2007 (actual premiere: 4 July 2007)

And that’s before enduring endless, computer-generated ads and moronic, on-screen quizzes, the host of Canadian-bank-themed commercials, the previews for children’s movies in which a character knowingly eats shit, the hordes of chattering, idiotic teenagers, the chattering, idiotic guys impressing their dates, the chattering, idiotic women repeating dialog, the text-messagers, the cellphone-answerers, the overlaughers and the latecomers who think nothing of asking you to scootch over a seat or two so they can sit in the very spot that you secured for yourself by arriving 30 minutes early. (”No.”)

It’s no coincidence that the best DVD rental shop in Toronto — Bay Street Video — is located right across the street. And is patronized by me and Champ far more often than are the Varsity Cinemas.