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Nostalgia and dreams.
Apr. 5th, 2018 10:17 pmIt's been a rough two weeks at work, and my brain is fried. Basically, we have been way more swamped than usual - and our management pulled "hey, let's make a major change in the way we handle trouble tickets, but send the only information about it in a poorly-worded email at 1:00am on a Saturday morning - and then freak out when no one is following the new procedure correctly!"
That is how our helpdesk do.
But it's ok.
I was going to go see Ready Player One tonight, but have opted to practice self care and turn in early instead.
I have developed kind of an obsession with older movie theaters since I started going back to midnight movies again. Recently it was Blade Runner and Big Trouble In Little China at the Inwood, and they will also be screening Dune in a week or so. The Inwood is a classic theater and a Dallas landmark for 70 years, and I love it. It is also the home of the best bar in the whole damn city, and they were playing Vaporwave the night I saw Big Trouble In Little China!
And it got me to thinking about all the little theaters from my youth, before 30-screen megaplexes where a thing. And it dawned on me that I hadn't even seen a General Cinemas or a United Artists theater in years. Well, it turns out that is because they were bought out by AMC and Regal in the early 2000s. And most of the little multiplexes around here were either demolished, turned into retail space, or became second run theaters over time.
My first real job was in one of those megaplexes. The smaller multiplexes as first-run theaters were already on their way out by the time I was in my teens. But they dominated my childhood.
Specific experiences come back to me - Star Trek: The Search For Spock and The Jungle Book at the Casa Linda theater - a movie house which would mean much more to me in my senior year of High School, when they ran The Rocky Horror Picture Show there at midnight on Friday nights.
I can remember seeing E.T. and The Dark Crystal as a very young child at the UA 6 (which everyone knew as The Driftwood, because it was located in The Driftwood shopping center in Mesquite.) Running out of a theater in the same multiplex, in tears, while being chased by my mom at age 9, after Optimus Prime died in Transformers The Movie.
I remember seeing Batman and The Little Mermaid at AMC Towne Crossing in 1989. Star Trek: the Undiscovered Country and Aladdin at Richardson's UA Northstar 8, as well as Jurassic Park and Street Fighter at the Richardson Square Mall. I can remember the Northpark I and II over at the Northpark Mall, where I saw Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves and Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey at 14 with my sister, my stepsister and her friends (and we had to leave early one time because one of her friends' contact lenses got stuck in her eye.)
I didn't start frequenting The Galleria mall until much, much, later, when the age of multiplexes was already over. I always wondered why they didn't have a movie theater in the mall, like so many malls did. Turns out they did - the Galleria 5. But it closed down in the early 2000s along with most of the other multiplexes. And in the words of one local historian, it hasn't been demolished, so much as entombed - walled over at one end of the food court on the other end of the ice rink - which gives me wild fantasies that it might still exist intact within a maze of tile and drywall, screening films only for a chosen select few who know the way in.
With a few exceptions, like the ones which were repurposed as retail space, most of the old theaters are demolished. I didn't notice when a lot of this happened - because like everyone else, I had already moved on to the megaplexes, like the Cinemark Hollywood theater - Dallas's first megaplex. It seemed so grand and huge at the time, but it is now a second-run theater, dwarfed by establishments such as the UA Galaxy, and Lowes Keystone and Cityplace (where I worked during my college years) and the Cinemark and AMC behemoths that sprung up to replace and overwhelm their predecessors.
And there is nothing wrong with that. I am confident that these theaters have figured prominently in the formative experiences of the the Millennial and Gen Z generations, recollected as fondly by them as I now think of the older multiplexes. I just ache sometimes that so many of the tangible things that defined the early experiences of Generation X are going away.
I'm probably going to check out Ready Player One at the Inwood tomorrow or Saturday. Contrary to all logic, it just...feels right to watch a film about the apotheosis of dreams and pop culture at one of Dallas's oldest movie houses. I'll raise a glass in the lounge to the memory of theaters past, and of times gone by. Hopefully to the tune of more vaporwave.
That is how our helpdesk do.
But it's ok.
I was going to go see Ready Player One tonight, but have opted to practice self care and turn in early instead.
I have developed kind of an obsession with older movie theaters since I started going back to midnight movies again. Recently it was Blade Runner and Big Trouble In Little China at the Inwood, and they will also be screening Dune in a week or so. The Inwood is a classic theater and a Dallas landmark for 70 years, and I love it. It is also the home of the best bar in the whole damn city, and they were playing Vaporwave the night I saw Big Trouble In Little China!
And it got me to thinking about all the little theaters from my youth, before 30-screen megaplexes where a thing. And it dawned on me that I hadn't even seen a General Cinemas or a United Artists theater in years. Well, it turns out that is because they were bought out by AMC and Regal in the early 2000s. And most of the little multiplexes around here were either demolished, turned into retail space, or became second run theaters over time.
My first real job was in one of those megaplexes. The smaller multiplexes as first-run theaters were already on their way out by the time I was in my teens. But they dominated my childhood.
Specific experiences come back to me - Star Trek: The Search For Spock and The Jungle Book at the Casa Linda theater - a movie house which would mean much more to me in my senior year of High School, when they ran The Rocky Horror Picture Show there at midnight on Friday nights.
I can remember seeing E.T. and The Dark Crystal as a very young child at the UA 6 (which everyone knew as The Driftwood, because it was located in The Driftwood shopping center in Mesquite.) Running out of a theater in the same multiplex, in tears, while being chased by my mom at age 9, after Optimus Prime died in Transformers The Movie.
I remember seeing Batman and The Little Mermaid at AMC Towne Crossing in 1989. Star Trek: the Undiscovered Country and Aladdin at Richardson's UA Northstar 8, as well as Jurassic Park and Street Fighter at the Richardson Square Mall. I can remember the Northpark I and II over at the Northpark Mall, where I saw Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves and Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey at 14 with my sister, my stepsister and her friends (and we had to leave early one time because one of her friends' contact lenses got stuck in her eye.)
I didn't start frequenting The Galleria mall until much, much, later, when the age of multiplexes was already over. I always wondered why they didn't have a movie theater in the mall, like so many malls did. Turns out they did - the Galleria 5. But it closed down in the early 2000s along with most of the other multiplexes. And in the words of one local historian, it hasn't been demolished, so much as entombed - walled over at one end of the food court on the other end of the ice rink - which gives me wild fantasies that it might still exist intact within a maze of tile and drywall, screening films only for a chosen select few who know the way in.
With a few exceptions, like the ones which were repurposed as retail space, most of the old theaters are demolished. I didn't notice when a lot of this happened - because like everyone else, I had already moved on to the megaplexes, like the Cinemark Hollywood theater - Dallas's first megaplex. It seemed so grand and huge at the time, but it is now a second-run theater, dwarfed by establishments such as the UA Galaxy, and Lowes Keystone and Cityplace (where I worked during my college years) and the Cinemark and AMC behemoths that sprung up to replace and overwhelm their predecessors.
And there is nothing wrong with that. I am confident that these theaters have figured prominently in the formative experiences of the the Millennial and Gen Z generations, recollected as fondly by them as I now think of the older multiplexes. I just ache sometimes that so many of the tangible things that defined the early experiences of Generation X are going away.
I'm probably going to check out Ready Player One at the Inwood tomorrow or Saturday. Contrary to all logic, it just...feels right to watch a film about the apotheosis of dreams and pop culture at one of Dallas's oldest movie houses. I'll raise a glass in the lounge to the memory of theaters past, and of times gone by. Hopefully to the tune of more vaporwave.
