This week, I don't want to talk about anything new. I don't want to discuss the good news about studios and European exhibitors finally agreeing on a virtual print fee. I don't want to comment on Nielsen's research showing the strong consumer appetite for 3-D films (I'll be talking enough about 3-D next week in anticipation of Journey to the Center of the Earth). I don't want to even get people's hopes up about Microsoft's supposed "manners device" that silences cell phones instead of blocking them (signal blocking was recently found to be illegal in the U.S.). I really don't want to comment on Mark Gill's "The Sky is Falling" speech from the L.A. Film Festival loosely concerning the state of art house cinema (the speech is more related to film making and financing, plus I already played Chicken Little last week).

Kids rule the multiplex. That's why they're the most targeted audience and the most targeted consumers as far as Hollywood and concession suppliers are respectively concerned. But where would the kids be without their parents? Perhaps they'd still be watching movies, but maybe not at the cinema. To see a movie at the multiplex, they need a ride from their mom, or they require the companionship of their blockbuster-loving dad. Sure, things may be a little different today, but my experience of being a moviegoing child entailed a lot of assistance and encouragement from my mom and dad.

It's hard to decide which parent had greater influence on my cinephilia, especially since I only recently recognized my mother's contributions. My father was the one who usually took my brothers and me to the movies every other weekend, and each time we stayed with him we seemed to rent more videos than could be watched in a 48-hour period. Meanwhile my mother let us watch cable, including as much R-rated fare as HBO would broadcast. At a very, very young age I was already familiar with a lot of horror, violence, swearing, nudity and other "restricted" content that the MPAA was only OK with me seeing if it was OK with my "accompanying parent or adult guardian."

In the Sun Times, Roger Ebert talks about the changing (or, more accurately, changed) crop of movie theaters in his beloved Chicago: "Just for the sake of nostalgia," he writes, "Let me name the theaters I remember: the Chicago, State-Lake, Oriental, Roosevelt, United Artists, Woods, McVickers, Clark, Monroe, Michael Todd, Cinestage, World Playhouse, Loop, Bismarck Palace and, oh, a place called the Shangri-La that materialized out of a Chinese restaurant, showed some porn and disappeared." Those were all in the downtown loop alone; as he points out, the only place to currently see movies in the Loop is at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago's newish Gene Siskel Film Center. The movie theaters have been largely replaced by "legit" theaters, and moviegoing has moved uptown.

It may not be what it once was, but I have great memories of seeing movies in Chicago. In fact, I often think of moving back there just for the movie theaters alone. I guess I should stop that sort of dreaming, because it looks like most of what I loved as recently as five years ago no longer exists.