Hey there,
Well as promised in my previous blog entry, Jemima and I did indeed venture once more to Glenelg to take advantage of the free session of Gone with the Wind on the final day of screening at Glenelg Cinema. It’s a sad day. Not least because I put my resume in there about 6 months ago and they stringed me along for 5 months telling me they were hiring soon… hehe, how ironic, seeing as though I just got a job at the Palace Nova cinema… Glenelg would have been a great place to work though. I’ve been wanting to work there for a long time. Pretty much ever since my good friend Tim Wray started working there back in 2003. I remember one occasion seeing him at the candy bar. I asked if he could give discounts. He very professionally said “no” before smashing a choc-top ice-cream onto the counter and selling me the defective product at a massive discount. And he told me it was such a great place to work; great pay and not that much work to do. That’s the problem with great work places: if there’s not much work to do it means business isn’t going to well, and inevitably you’ll probably lose your jobs when the place closes down, just like me at GameTraders Mitcham. No one ever came into that shop! Here’s a close-up of my head…
But I have so many memories from the Glenelg Cinema. Heck, I’ve been going there as long as I can remember. Before Greater Union Marion opened in 1997, if we wanted to see a movie it was generally either Glenelg or Noarlunga. There were cinemas in the city too, but we generally kept to the suburban ones. My earliest memory at Glenelg was in 1994. My grandma, who at the time was living in West Lakes, took my sister Alice and I to see The Little Rascals. However it was sold out, so we sat in the adjacent mall (now demolished) trying to work out what to do. We eventually decided to see The Mask, starring a little known Jim Carey. I had a great time! And to this day I have never seen The Little Rascals.
Another good memory was from one of the last days of Year 10 in 2002. For some reason, the Year 10 co-ordinator thought we were all mature enough to go see Molokai, a movie about a priest going to a leper colony in the mid-1800s. Boy was he wrong. Kids were yelling and laughing and throwing popcorn and shining laser pointers on the screen and at the back of teachers’ heads. And that was probably the last time I ever bought a tin of Kool Mints. You can’t get them in tins any more. Real shame. Oh there used to be this brand of potato chips as well that they don’t make any more. I forget their name. They were similar to Kettle Chips. Very oily and irregularly shaped. Fantastic. I think I’m starting to sound old?
Something else I remember about Glenelg for no reason other than I have a great memory… I saw all 3 of the Mummy movies there. The first one in 1999 with my then friend Robert Elkson, the 2nd in 2001 with my then friend Craig Markham, and then the 3rd in 2008 with my then (and now) girlfriend Jemima. And it was with her that I saw the 2nd to last ever screening; the 1939 classic Gone with the Wind. We were the youngest people there by about 4 generations. And everybody gasped and applauded when Clark Gable uttered that famous line, the line you sit through the proceeding 4 hours to see, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” A fitting phrase also for the profit-driven go-go world of commercialism, in regard to the Glenelg Cinema. Hey, don’t get me wrong, I love making money. I just wish they would replace the Glenelg cinema with a newer, better cinema, instead of just tearing it down and turning it into some boutique shops and a multi-storey car park. Oh well, we’ll always have the memories…
Kind regards,
Cinema’s David M. Green
Probably ate too much popcorn…
