What A Carve Up
I read my first copy of The Beano here, in the semi-darkness, my back pressed against the stage, trying to ignore the soundtrack of Ghostbusters which my 5 year old self found mildly terrifying. I had my first kiss here too, in that bank of seats you can just about make out at stage right. I even got engaged here, after a screening of Love Actually. My boyfriend dropped to one knee as the credits rolled and proposed; the film had been so cheesy I thought he was joking and an elderly lady sitting in front of us had to point out, as I laughed my head off at the joke, that my boyfriend wasn’t laughing.
So I suppose this is a roundabout way of saying that this place means a lot to me. Growing up in this town with nothing but a lifeless bingo hall, two fried chicken shops with dubious regard for hygiene and a scrubby football pitch for entertainment, the cinema, an abberation of glamour, is the only snippet of beauty or sophistication for miles.
I don’t have much faith in the protest working – they don’t, do they? It doesn’t matter how many people lie down in front of steamrollers or write to their MPs, the property developers will get their wicked way and this place will be turned into ’35 gracious 1 and 2 bedroom flats’ before we know it.
The developers have made a big deal out of their plans to ‘retain the aesthetically interesting features’ but, even if they keep their promise, what good is that to the rest of us who won’t get to see them anymore? They’ll be all shut away behind young professionals’ front doors.
And where will we go to watch films? The bloke from the council said we could illegally download them like everyone else. He is a man without soul – who wants to watch Uma Thurman acrobatically eliminate hordes of nihilistic baddies in the House of Blue Leaves, or watch Marilyn sing, ‘I Wanna Be Loved By You’ sitting in their pants on the sofa eating spaghetti hoops?
Not me.
Rivka Jacobs
I agree with the sentiments of this story! You make me think about the small computer screens a lot of people think is the place to view a film. Good sbort stories.
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Rivka Jacobs
The last sentence should read: “[A]Good short story.” Geez, sorry. And what I was trying to say, was, people are contrasting movie-theaters and the theater-experience now with streaming-video on their computers, watching films on ever smaller screens. And the magical, old-fashioned movie theater remains (IMO) the best place to see a movie.
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Nicolas Papaconstantinou
Nice one, Alex!
Before I moved to Southampton, I lived in a small town with a little two-screener cinema – they said it had two screens, anyway, but I don’t think anyone ever saw the smaller one – and you totally called up my oddly mixed memories of that place.
For sure, it wasn’t a particularly cheery place – already long passed its best, and run by an old couple who had clearly forgotten the joy of bringing celluloid charm into people’s lives – but they still had an intermission with ice-cream, which I hadn’t seen in a cinema since my childhood, and it was close enough and cheap enough that you could feasibly, for example, go and watch Beetlejuice on three consecutive nights, for fun.
Thanks for making me remember it. Nice story, ma’am!
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