by Justin A. Guy It was revealed not so long ago of the plans for our sickly quaint little slice of suburbia to host a brand new super deluxe Megaplex. That's twelve cinema theatres in one building. It wouldn't be the first in the area and undoubtedly it will not be the last. This new design of cinemas seems to be modulating itself across cities everywhere and in it's wake leaving no genuine movie theatres behind.   I recall a point in not so distant history when movie theatres were so epic and awesome in their grandeur that culminating a dozen of them together in a single complex would have required taking up several city blocks. So how do these Megaplexes do it? How do they fit twelve giant screens into a building about as big as my tool shed? They don't.   When the first of these trend setting cinemas opened it's doors; I enthusiastically lined up to check out their rather left of center venue. See the fact that they had something like ten theatres was unheard of. They had more theatres than block-buster movies to show; so they found room for less mainstream flicks that the masses normally forget about. So the new complex seemed like a welcoming sight to movie connoisseurs. Sadly though; we may as well have waited for the video release.   The Megaplex experience boasted of roomy, sofa-like seats with mind imploding digital sound and a revolutionary curved screen! Ooh, you don't say, a curved screen; well there had to be something good about that. After all, it was new. Nothing new can be bad. These claims must have been made with the intention of conjuring images in one's head of a cinema laboratory somewhere where men in long white coats were conducting twenty four hour experiments on movie screens. These scientists had worked tirelessly to come up with the next logical step in movie screen technology; the result: the curved screen. Don't tell the girl in the ticket booth that the only reason the screens are curved is because the theatres are so tiny that they'd never fit otherwise.   So there you are in your fluffy seat (which I have complaints about as well but the defensive neophile out there may simply think I'm bitching for its own sake so I'll digress) watching a movie that's peripheral sides are slightly blurred to any one with normal vision. See the movies haven't been corrected to compensate for the concavity of the surface that receives them, so the vertical edges are flawed and a constant irritation. Unless, I'm sure, if you're watching a movie like Armageddon, in which case all the big noises and flashing lights might provide sufficient distraction for you not to notice.   It looks to one fan like video has claimed the life of yet another media. The reason for these monstrous mini-cinema Megaplexes, is naturally the exponential growth of video rentals. Now not only can you see all these enriching Hollywood, multi-million dollar brainless productions in your home, but you can see it with "home-theatre". All those fancy gadgets you save up your pennies for, like "surround sound" and digital video discs; are the reason "going to the movies" is dying. Theatres can't compete with the suburbanite's laziness. The silver screen can't compete with wide screen televisions, a familiar couch and microwave pop corn. Though these pathetic Megaplexes try, with their coffee shops, arcades and microcosmic theatres.   I await the point when they don't even bother projecting the movie anymore and just pop in a laser disc. You'd think that by now they'd at least have tried to lower the price of a ticket or a bag of pop corn; but then, coming from people trying to shrink the "big screen", logic is obviously not part of the battle plan.