It's a given that the Alamo Downtown is gonna show goofy, retro trailers or shorts before main features. It's one of our favorite things about the Alamo, in fact. The pleasant surprise is what you see at sister cinema Alamo North, the first-run moviehouse that shows mostly mainstreamy flicks. Instead of forcing moviegoers to endure those damned Jeep or Pepsi commercials the bastard people have taken to showing at chain megatheaters -- on top of phasing out Junior Mints from the concession stand! -- the Alamo plays an appropriately cheesy or meaningful ad, like the seventies-futurific "Logan's Run" trailer before "Minority Report," or action-packed "Spider Man" cartoons before "Spider Man," or the unforgettable animated version of "Lord of the Rings" before the recent live action "Lord of the Rings." Not that we need any further evidence of the endless recycling machine that is Hollywood, but if we want to know where we're going, we need to know where we've been. Makes you wanna crack open a time capsule and swallow it down with a Tab. Where DO they get these things?
