The old Regal Hollywood Cinema 14 will have its grand re-opening this Friday, June 5, as the Carolina Asheville Cinema 14. Changes abound. There’s a new lobby with a kind of screening-room mezzanine where the video games used to be. There are new seats, equipment upgrades—including one digital theater that will allow the Carolina to run digital 3-D.

Last week the trailer for Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes (slated for a Christmas Day release) hit theater screens and the internet. For those not following such things, Sherlock Holmes stars Robert Downey, Jr. as Holmes and Jude Law as Dr. Watson. It’s very obviously a rethinking of the much loved Conan Doyle characters. The tone is comedic and the trailer suggests considerably more action than is generally associated with the detecting duo. Not surprisingly, this has caused much consternation among the Sherlockian set.

It’s an interesting week at the movies with Pixar’s new film Up and Sam Raimi’s “return to horror” Drag Me to Hell (wait, didn’t Night at the Museum 2 do that to me last week?) vying for our moviegoing attention. I don’t think there’s much doubt as to who is going to win this contest.

Not so long ago I happened to see a letter written to a theater chain lambasting them for the practice of bringing the lights up before the credits ended. It should be noted that the customer wasn’t some diehard cineaste who just has to know who drove the honeywagon and who catered the food. No, his complaint had to do with his personal discomfort in cases where the movie had an emotional impact on him, and he liked to be able to sit in the dark to compose himself. In other words, he didn’t wish anyone to witness his shame at having been moved to tears by what he’d just seen.

Some of you might remember Joe Chang’s film Neutral, which debuted in Asheville back in the fall of 2007. For a local work, it was unusual, in that Joe insisted on shooting the film on 35mm—something that gave it a visual richness not often seen in such productions. Neutral was—and is—also one of the very few Asheville-based films that attempts to capture something of the sense of the city itself, which is perhaps why it struck me as an “existential drama.”

Just this past week someone posted a comment expressing a preference for not going too far back in time when it came to watching movies. That’s fine. It’s a personal choice—and one that most people make. What I’m curious about, though, is how people define the term “old movie.”