An example: The free public preview of "The Avengers" held at the Boston Common a half week after the press screening Vellante attended. He couldn't get into this one for insane bureaucratic reasons detailed in his piece -- and, really, how dare he try to see the best possible presentation of a movie before he writes a review for his readers? -- but he didn't miss that much. The venue was the Common's faux IMAX screen (or as my friend Brett calls it, "Lie-MAX"), for which customers pay an extra $6 per ticket. The theater was packed with fans; the opening credits were applauded. Every ironic one-liner was met with delirious laughter; every climactic donnybrook with cheers.

Did anyone notice that the projection framing was so off-kilter that all the actors' heads were cut off just above the eyebrows in every shot? Did anyone care that they were seeing only about 70 percent of the movie they'd been awaiting for years?

Nah. No one noticed. And that's why AMC, Regal, and the other chains will keep charging you exorbitant fees for movies that are under-projected, mis-framed and otherwise presented so poorly their makers would weep if they knew. Why should the theaters bother to do it right? They know audiences don't care, that they're too mesmerized by the 3D digital bread and circuses on the screen to understand that they're being ripped off. I wrote about this issue last year, and while some projection practices at the Common have since improved (and others have remained), the underlying problem is the same: Not enough people at the individual theater level care -- or are in a position to be able to care -- about how a movie appears to the people who are paying money to see it.

Kinda makes you want to stay home and fire up your 42-inch plasma screen with the surround sound, doesn't it?