Everything is demolished in the end. Some stone ruins last forever, but it's one of life's big existential moments when you realise most of the places you grew up with are not going to be there forever.
It's just a fact of life that we all have to deal with, but that doesn't mean it still isn't a total bummer when they go. Especially when they had the decor and luxury of the cinema.
The one cinema I consider the high bar for all others is the one that I spent the most time in as a kid - the mighty Majestic on Timaru's Stafford Street. And it is bound for destruction in the near future. It's just not quake safe enough, and while I'm really going to mourn the second hand bookstore two doors down when it goes - that shop was my everything - I ache over the fact that the dark red carpet and plush decor of the classiest place I'd ever seen is a part of history.
It lasted into the 90s, and then turned into the best Video Ezy store in the country, and it still smelled like popcorn, but that all ended when Outlander came out.
I should be used to the destruction of this wonderful places like now. The State Cinema - the other big theatre in town - was the one that had all the GY-rated blockbusters like the Star Wars and Indiana Joneses, and vanished and was replaced by the world's shittiest mall in the 80s.
And the cinemas of Christchurch - all those wonderful old theatres in Cathedral Square, all vanished just as I really became a movie nerd (the last film I ever saw in the square was Altman's Short Cuts) and most of the others were gone before the city shook itself apart in 2011. And any that had survived that long soon turned into stairs to nowhere.
Some of the Dunedin ones evolved, and I'm still a little shocked that the glorious St James - where I once saw both Police Academy 3 and Mad Max 3 - still has its starlit ceiling as part of a multiplex. The one in the Octagon - where Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom blew up my world - was bowled for another multiplex in the 90s; and I saw Jurassic Park in one that turned into a useless carpark two months later. The one I really miss is the Odeon with the sweet wooden panelling, where I saw Salo and Shawshank, and it vanished into demolition 20 years ago.
I mourn all the great cinemas I never went to, both throughout the country and out in the wider world. The multiplex concept killed so many of them, the convenience of multiple screens leading inevitably to oblivion for the old picture palaces.
Because even the worst theatres I ever went to, the ones with the sticky floors and the tattered curtains, were still impossibly glamorous and fancy to me. I was a working class kid, and never went to no opera or ballet, but I was often dropped off at these cinemas, and they were the most luxurious places I could imagine.
They were full of stories made of light, and delivered in a place so big dialogue would echo around the cavernous space, and everything smelled of popcorn. They had fancy armchairs to relax in before the film started and cheap glass chandeliers that looked like the real thing to me.
There's still so many great cinemas left around the world, but so many are also gone forever. It used to be the easiest way to get a little opulence in your life, instead of getting shoved down the corridor to Screen Six.
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