Pinnacle Hills Promenade, the new shopping center in Rogers inspired by The Truman Show, is wonderful to mock. It features Muzak-like music via outdoor Bose speakers. It markets itself as upscale while including tenants like Payless Shoes and Dairy Queen. Sunday marked my fourth visit — and the first time My Beloved and I visited its Malco movie complex, to see Volver.
Malco already has a set-up an exit or two up on I-540, the Towne Cinema. It was the region’s first stadium-style movie house. MB and I go there for the epics; it virtually guarantee all seats afford enjoyment of such flicks’ panoramas. The Towne Cinema, though, is what we’d expect. It’s new and with a funky Deco design, but designed for teens. The lobby is jumbled and noisy, with adjacent game arcade and high-mounted monitors and speakers issuing forth loud music and movie trailers, seemingly all at once, like a sports bar with lots of TVs and a satellite dish.
The lobby of Malco Pinnacle Hills, however, was quiet Sunday afternoon. Sure it was pretty busy but … no piped-in audio. It had a different set of Deco highlights (but a center fountain with cherubs?), and the video arcade was in a separate room. Also off the main lobby was an espresso bar, though closed perhaps until evening. As we walked to our theater, we heard … instrumental jazz. It was piped into the secondary hallways and restrooms.
The trailers before Volver all promoted either foreign or indie coming attractions. Now this has 12 screens, and it is the month between Oscar nominations and awards. Seven of the other screens were for the usual Hollywood shows. But The Queen, Children of Men, The Good Shepherd and Dreamgirls all were there, too. Malco took the Pinnacle management’s memo to be upscale seriously.
Caution: State-of-the-art screens are curved. So in a film with subtitles, such as Volver, sit way back, because too close and the script is dizzyingly distorted. But my oh my, what a luxurious experience. We’ll be back.
Afterward, we trekked in 32-degree sunshine past Promenade shops, landing at the area’s first Borders Books.
This is not like other Borders, which like Barnes & Noble are designed for browsers, with lots of seating and convenient coffee bar. The bookstore has three armchairs along the middle of one wall and a fourth on the adjacent wall, all jammed near rows of tall stacks of shelves.
The coffee bar is perched on a high, open mezzanine. No one minds your taking books and magazines you are considering buying up there, but with a couple of dozen steps, it’s an unexpected trek. Seattle’s Best Coffee is served, which I’ve liked in airports and elsewhere, but in both my visits here, the house brew is regrettable.
All the clerks and the manager are very friendly. The coffee cashier apologized for everything, and needed to. In magazines, a clerk offered to help. You never get that at Barnes. But she couldn’t. I wanted the Oxford American, the regional literary favorite. She looked in vain then left to check inventory list. They don’t stock it, as yet. I know Barnes has it; I think Wal-Mart, too. -30
