Let's face facts, Orange County: We tend to lean a bit toward the commercial side. So it's fitting that our best indie theater isn't indie at all, but part of a national mega-chain that swallowed whole the venues previously built or acquired by penny-pinching “Old Man Edwards,” the late James Edwards of Newport Beach. Our nod to Regal's Edwards University Town Center 6 applies not to the independence of the theater's ownership, but the indie fare that routinely flashes on those six screens, alongside foreign films, low-budget movie-star vanity projects and smallish Hollywood-studio releases posing as independent cinema. What elevates “Uni” above, say, South Coast Village Theater or Newport Beach's Lido is everyone from the kid filling up your tub of popcorn to the overwhelmed manager telling you which films are indie, foreign, vanity, or big-studio cast-offs. Just ask 'em.
