I haven’t been entertained like I was watching Grindhouse last night since my college film series days, when my friends and I were the ones physically attaching trailers and shorts to reels of film.

What Grindhouse represented to me, beside sheer cinematic joy, was the promise it has in this age of home theaters and the cinematic decline: not as a 70’s throwback to the good old days of single-screen movie house (which I rarely ever experienced anyway during my 80’s childhood), but as a trendsetter of what the cinema must become: a packaged experience. I will never grow tired of viewing conventional movies on the big screen, perhaps for generational reasons, but it’s becoming clear that the technological benefits are no longer exclusively available at the multiplex. James Cameron, who’s next feature film will use advanced 3-D project, is aware of this, and the rapid construction of IMAX theaters is a testament to the pushing of boundaries.

In Grindhouse , Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino are packaging cinema in another way – both with nostalgia and with film-geek-friendliness. The fake trailers are hilarious, and their pacing and narration are spot on. Various oddities are spliced in. The movies themselves are a mish-mash of old B-movies and horror films: Rodriguez’s with a strong John Carpenter and Dario Argento element, Tarantino’s with old-school car porn films that I’m actually not well versed in (but hey, at least I’ve seen Bullitt) – and a bit of 2006’s The Descent as well. They’re both over-the-top and ridiculous – Rodriguez’s more so – but pretty much entertaining the whole way through. When I spotted the couple in the row ahead of me engaging in a brief spat of oral sex, I was less disgusted than I expected, perhaps because it was fitting with what was happening on-screen.

But if my film-geek hopes here are too optimistic, and Grindhouse turns out to be the rare packaged experience, so be it. Never has spending over three hours in a modern multiplex been so fun.