Remember the end of Close Encounters, when the Mothership lands and everybody stands around gawking for about twenty minutes at this immense, glowing, noisy, awe-inspiring thing? Well, maybe you thought such things only happened in the movies, but in a day or two a spectacle of similar proportions is scheduled to land smack dab in the middle of Irvine.If half the stuff in their press-release is to be believed, the Entertainment Center at Irvine Spectrum is going to be like nothing of this Earth. We're talking 250,000 square feet of food, fun and ostentation, featuring the likes of Barnes and Noble, Diedrich coffee, Blockbuster Music, Out-Takes Digital Photo Studio, a Sega City virtual reality arcade, an oasis food court done in the style of a Moroccan market, and an open-air bazaar of kiosks, pushcarts and street performers.
At the center of all this hubbub will be the Big One, a 21-screen,156,000 square-foot Edwards movie house that will be the largest of its kind on the planet. The marquee alone is a whopper, 2 miles of neon tubing held up by twin 80 foot icon towers. If that's not sufficiently disorienting, the lobby should be enough to put you in an absolute dither. Imagine 15,000 square feet of Italian marble, brass, neon, more neon, and "futuristic video walls." This theater is so huge there's even an electric tram (I swear to God, that's what it says here) to transport patrons from one end of the place to the other.
With all that going on the actual movies would almost seem an afterthought, but such is not the case. The four major auditoriums will feature all the latest mindless Hollywood extravaganzas every ten to fifteen minutes on screens three stories high, while the smaller theaters are tailored for more esoteric fare, foreign flicks, independents, art pictures and the like. The real jaw dropper arrives this December, with the opening of the fabled Imax 3-D system. This glamorous, 500-seat old-style movie house will feature a screen 65 feet high and 90 feet wide. Visitors will be given lightweight 3D headsets with liquid crystal infrared lenses (none of that red eye/blue eye junk here) and the folks at Imax promise an entertainment experience unlike any other.
The center opens Wednesday, Nov. 22 at 11 a.m., but for you more conspicuous consumers out there there will be a very glitzy preview reception Tuesday night, Nov 21st, from 6-9 p.m. This shebang will feature Moroccan food stations spread throughout the center, a hosted bar with an assortment of wine, beer and refreshments, street entertainers and musical performers, fireworks, merchant tours and open houses... everything but dancing bears with balls balanced on their noses. The reception benefits six local charities and cultural organizations, including Homeaid Orange County, Human Options, the Orange County Education Foundation, the Irvine Valley College Foundation, the Irvine Barclay Theater and the UCI Center for Health Sciences.
