Movies have changed a great deal in the (gasp) thirty years I've been around to enjoy them. Film quality is better, sounds are clearer, colours are more vibrant, animations are so real you can get lost in them.

I love new movies and the new things they can show me, teach me, and make me feel. I was never really one for older movies (read: black and white) even though I know many, many people who love the "classics" and long for the simpler days when every movie didn't have effects added by Industrial Light and Magic. When, they say, movies concentrated more on the plot and characters and all that good stuff.

Me? Not so much. I'm a sucker for special effects, particularly good ones.

The thing I miss more about the past is old movie houses.

I remember being all of about seven years old, sitting on a creaky, velvet-covered seat on the balcony of one of the old movie houses in town. The balcony, of course, because that was where people were still allowed to smoke. I was sitting beside my grandmother, enjoying Buck Rogers or Star Trek II, I can't remember which. But every so often my eyes would stray from the screen to gawk at the velvet cutains or to my grandmother's face lit by the flickering light of the screen. I'd look up and see tendrils of lazy smoke curling up and cutting across the light from the projector. The way it danced in and around the light and the wisps of dust in the air was nearly as magical as the otherwordly stuff being portrayed on screen.

In those days, it wasn't hard to find the movie you were going to see because those old houses only had one or two theatres. But everything was bigger than life and really, really fine in that whisper-of-the-past way that old movie houses had. Already big multiplexes were opening up in malls. By the time I was a teenager, we rarely went anywhere but those multiplexes since we were usually in the mall anyway.

I was sad when I read this week that Toronto is closing down two of its best old movie houses - the Uptown and the Eglinton. And it got me to thinking about what I've missed by embracing these gaudy homes of commmercialism.

I miss the grandeur. I miss the smoke curling and carved wood and huge velvet curtains. I miss sitting beside my grandmother and seeing cheesy seventies sci-fi films. Toronto will be the poorer for closing down these houses.

Perhaps I should give black and white films another chance, after all.

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