Reflections: A Night at the Movies

In the town where I grew up, there was a movie theatre named the Belgrave Cameo. A grand old Art Deco-style building complete with shiny, overstuffed folding seats and red velvet curtains that swept back as the opening credits rolled, the Cameo was a local institution that had already been showing movies for forty years by 1977—the year my dad took me there to see the original Star Wars. For the seven-year-old boy that I was at the time, this was desperately exciting—something that I think counts as one of my earliest memories. Separating real memories from constructed ones is impossible, but I swear I remember being sunk into one of the Cameo’s huge, overstuffed folding seats in the dark as the red curtains slid back to reveal George Lucas’s iconic title sequence rolling across a galactic sky. From that point forward, going to the movies at the Cameo played a not-inconsiderable supporting role in my childhood and teenaged years. First it was movies with my dad (Star Wars, Moonraker, Close Encounters of the Third Kind). Later came the sweaty, adolescent coming-of-age films with friends (Risky Business, Class, Romancing the Stone). Eventually, during the inevitable first, awkward dates, the Cameo delivered welcome refuge in the form of darkness—and relief from the need to make conversation—during movies like Back to the Future, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and of course, Crocodile Dundee.

The Cameo became an even more vital prop to my social life during my teenaged years in the early eighties, when video cassette recorders arrived on Australian shores to begin undermining the cinema business. Apparently I was the only kid in my school whose parents were suspicious enough of the brain-rotting evils of television to refuse to own a VCR. So, while my friends got to spend their adolescences watching movies while lolling about on couches at home, I was still stuck in the folding seats at the Cameo. While I’m sure that thirteen-year-old me considered this a terrible hardship, it did make the act of seeing a movie continue to feel like an occasion—one that came with the added benefit of a well-stocked candy concession stand. My mother was a dentist, and if there was a bigger boogieman than television, it was sugar. So even if the movie showing at the Cameo wasn’t any good, the concession stand made a nice consolation prize. 

When our own kids were little, we didn’t let them watch much TV—a privation for which I suppose they have their paternal grandmother to thank. But whenever we took them to visit their Australian grandparents, the trips always included at least one movie night at the Cameo, which, through some combination of location, good management, and blind luck, had not only survived the VCR, DVD, and streaming video revolutions, but thrived. By 2012, when we took the kids there to see Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, the cinema had expanded to three screens, the concession stand had started selling beer and gourmet sandwiches, and a secondhand bookstore had opened next door, which gave their TV-averse grandmother something to do when the movie got too much for her. There’s something marvelous about taking your kids to experience a landmark of your own childhood and seeing them adore it. When I go back to visit now, there’s not much about my childhood hometown that hasn’t changed beyond recognition. The Cameo is a notable exception, and I’m grateful for that. 

Sometime over the summer—our first with no kids in the house since 2003—my wife and I went to a Baton Rouge multiplex to see Top Gun: Maverick, (this a full thirty-five years since I saw the original Top Gun at you-know-where). The movie, as everyone who’s seen it will agree, is awesome—a spectacle of eye-popping flight sequences that just have to be experienced on a big screen to be fully appreciated. It was our first time back to a movie theatre since COVID-19, when like most everyone else, we let streaming TV change the act of watching a movie from a special occasion, into a displacement activity. So, it felt good to be back in a packed theater, popcorn in hand, feeling the rush and rise of a story arc ripple through the audience. Some experiences are better shared, and a good movie is one of them. All the streaming TV in the world is no substitute for that.