I'm so embarrassed. I was completely taken in by this site, to the point where I was about to post a very long and outraged rant to this blog, and actually sent an e-mail to Roger Ebert alerting him to this travesty. Needless to say, it's a parody, albeit a rather brilliant one. My only defense is that the page I originally happened to stumble across (after doing a Google search for "Lawrence of Arabia + IMAX") seems much less absurd than other pages on the site, if only because there really is an IMAX release of Lawrence of Arabia being prepared as we speak. (I don't know whether it will be edited or reformatted at all, and haven't found any real information about it online.)

This all comes up because I finally bought Lawrence of Arabia on DVD this weekend, only to find that it was sadly diminished on the small screen. (I'd seen it twice before in theaters, once at the dear departed UC Theater in Berkeley, and again last summer at the Ziegfield in New York.) It's still the greatest widescreen epic ever to come out of Hollywood, but it isn't the same on television; I find that I tend to play it like a CD, letting Maurice Jarre's wonderful score and the occasional pleasures of Peter O'Toole's performance linger in the background of the room. Which brings me to my point: if Lawrence of Arabia ever returns to theaters in our lifetime, and I think it probably will, see it. It's an experience that every thinking and feeling person should have at least once. Whether this upcoming IMAX release will qualify or not remains to be seen, but I'll let you know if I hear anything more about it.