Put your Palace Cinema wine glass in the cup-holder carefully

Showing all posts tagged: cinema

Put your Palace Cinema wine glass in the cup-holder carefully

25 June 2024

Whether they are a part of an on-going series of light-hearted clips by Australian cinema group Palace Cinemas, remains to be seen, but the two I’ve caught to date, on their Instagram page, have been pretty witty.

The first is in response to the apparent problem of patrons nicking the cinema’s wine glasses. Why would anyone do that? An Australian chain of discount stores sells six wine glasses for less than five dollars. So why take the cinema’s? It should also be noted the cinema’s glasses have their logo emblazoned upon them. People visiting your house are going to know where they came from.

Fun fact: the wine glass clip cleverly riffs off the old Piracy is a Crime ads, that used to screen, some years ago now, prior to cinema screenings in Australia*.

The second clip is a glimpse of a cinema employee’s work day. Just be careful with the cup-holders…

* Interesting, I tried to click through to the Piracy is a Crime video through a DuckDuckGo search engine result. I was greeted by a “www.youtube.com is blocked” error message. YouTube is of course owned by Google/Alphabet. Are they blocking access to the video platform via competing search engines?

The Mysterious Disappearance of the Grosvenor, Paul Brennan

22 March 2022

The Summer Hill Grosvenor Theatre, was a grand old cinema that once stood in the inner west Sydney suburb of Summer Hill. The cinema opened in October 1930 and could seat over two-thousand people in its auditorium.

As a cinema though The Grosvenor had something of a chequered history, frequently changing ownership, and opening and closing on numerous occasions. For a short time between cinema operators, the building served as a warehouse. The Grosvenor finally closed as a film-house in 1969, and the building, after becoming dilapidated and vandalised, was demolished a few years later.

The Mysterious Disappearance of the Grosvenor is a documentary made by Australian cinema historian and film distributor Paul Brennan, and brings the The Grosvenor back to life though intricately rendered CGI recreations. It seems inconceivable today to sit in a room with two-thousand other people watching a film.

A short clip of Brennan’s work From Station to Door, offers a glimpse of a long vanished way of life, when a trip to the movies would have been an occasion, a night out on the town, even. This coming from someone who would rather stay at home and stream films.

The two closest classic art deco cinema experiences that come someway to replicating the scale of The Grosvenor that I can think of in Sydney would be the Ritz Cinema, in Randwick, and the Hayden Orpheum Picture Palace, in Cremorne.