Another one bites the dust

The Tinseltown Westchase has closed and will be paved over for a new business complex. This less that a month after the Greenway Three closed. Actually I hate the Tinseltown chain, their whole look and feel always felt totalitarian to me, yet I cannot accept their closing without a sense of regret.
Likewise if the River Oaks 3, the sister theater to the now defunct Greenway Three, closed next week would I really care? How do you watch movies? Mainstream theaters like the Edwards or AMC play films like Juno or Kite Runner so whether a cinema is playing art films is a moot point. The employees at the River Oaks theater have a certain cavalier attitude. Yet there's a sense of identification with their rebel stance that aligns with the quirky individualistic terms of independent cinema. Blaze your own trail.
Is it possible that people in 2008 have a shorter attention span and are thus less likely to want to spend more than a couple of hours at a cinema? You wouldn't believe how many members of Houston Film Critics Society I heard asking how long There Will Be Blood was, as if it mattered how long it took to meld with greatness. Even funnier, I was talking to someone about the possible closing of the River Oaks and they said: I love that place, why I just saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind there. Dude, that film unreeled at that location in 2004, and it is now 2008.
That pretty much says it all: We preserve the cool things in our mind as if they happened yesterday. Long live cinema, only ask yourself when the last time you actually cheered out loud in a movie theater as if you were at a sports event was. Well partner, that was too long. Welcome to the new millennium and please deliver 3-D cinema soon so that those of us who actually enjoy going out to the movies have something to look forward to.