Hollywood Bowl

They were planning to spend nearly $500,000 on a home theater. What was an additional $35,000 to show first-run movies? When Ken and Carol Schultz began remodeling their 10,000-square-foot San Diego-area residence, they spared no expense on a screening room. The couple tricked it out with custom-built armchairs with heat and massage functions, and a Runco 3-D-capable projector with a price of about $100,000. But the most unusual feature of the theater is a $35,000 device that offers 24-hour rentals of first-run movies.

The extraordinary advances in film technology over the past few decades have given us elves and hobbits, dinosaurs and Na'vi, thrust us into Quidditch matches and the streets of Dickens' London. But nothing that has been done with hand-helds or a green screen can hold a digital candle to the extraordinary rise of nature cinematography. For the past decade, nature documentaries have been capturing life in a raindrop and death in a butterfly's wing, reminding us that fact usually trumps fiction, that beauty and meaning surround us and that high-definition television really was a great idea.

MUSIC Live it up with the whole family at the very first Pixar concert at the Hollywood Bowl. Enjoy clips of your favorite Pixar animated films including the "Toy Story" trilogy, "Cars," "Finding Nemo," "The Incredibles," "Wall-E," Up," and more while an orchestra performs the scores live. The Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., L.A. 8 p.m. Fri. Ticket prices vary. (323) 850-2000. http://www.hollywoodbowl.com.

MOVIES A "Grease" singalong? Tell me more, tell me more. The classic Travolta/Newton-John tale of jovial teenage shenanigans is an institution, and it screens on the Bowl's big projections while audiences are encouraged to slick back their pompadours and don their poodle skirts. Summer loving is all but guaranteed. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave., L.A. 8:30 p.m. Sat. $9-$75. hollywoodbowl.com

Phoenix is so casually precise in its pop that its pleasures have a way of sneaking up on just about anyone. Although the joys of Phoenix have long been kind of nerdy — its best asset is its production, the synth pads building in the back of a song, the gentle, funky guitars as tight as a well-made bed — the band successfully translates them on a very big stage. "1901" is built on a massive, ravey synthesizer stab, and "Lisztomania" has a sock-hop eagerness. At the Hollywood Bowl with the celestial acid-folk harmonies of Grizzly Bear and the Roy Orbison-indebted guitar jangle of Girls.