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February 15, 2006

The Last Picture Show

There’ll be murder. The Whitewater has only gone and pulled its plans for a multiplex cinema in the new shopping complex. Not only that, but they inadvertently caused the closure of Newbridge’s only other picture house, the Oscar Cinema. Newbridge has been left without its trousers on if you get my meaning. And as with any situations involving no trousers – it can be embarrassing. I mean here we are – Newbridge – a town that’s growing like a child who eats all his greens and we don’t even have a cinema. How are we ever going to beat Naas in the rivalry for town that should be capital of County Kildare when they have the only cinema in Kildare? They even screen The Rocky Horror Picture Show every Friday for crying out loud! How can we even hope to compete with that?

The answer, a lot of people seem to be saying, is to just go to Dublin. What’s the big deal, they say? Just drive up to LiffeyValley and shut up, they say. Why are you asking me anyway, they say, I’m only the janitor? It’s like this folks. Imagine the scene. It’s the late eighties. After falling out of trees all morning, all my friends and I want to do is catch the Saturday matinee of "Ferngully: The Last Rainforest" in the Oscar. We swindle a fiver off our parents, walk down the town to the cinema, load up on E colourings and watch a movie. Bing, bam, boom. Just like that. So what is it like for the kids of today? Well after falling out of virtual trees on the Playstation all morning, the Newbridge kids of today have to persuade their parents to jump in the car, spend an hour or so in traffic getting to LiffeyValley, pay roughly fifteen euro for a ticket and a tub of popcorn and spend the next three hours watching Harry Potter. And people expect parents to make this pilgrimage to Dublin every week? Are you out of you’re mind or just fabulously wealthy?

Newbridge needs a cinema like monkeys need bananas. What else are the young people of Newbridge supposed to do? In case you haven’t noticed Newbridge isn’t exactly a metropolis of recreation. I guess young people could take up sports like skating and roller blading but then again they have no skate park and are looked upon as if they have multiple nasty diseases. Maybe they could get involved in the arts but then again the great resources that we have in the Riverbank Arts Centre are being neglected by people who have the power to put them to good use. I guess young people could start a band, as it seems to be the one area that Newbridge serves well. Ironically though that fact is only because of the dedication of the various young singers and musicians who put a lot of effort into organising gig’s for everyone. Apparently the Whitewater proposes to build an 8-screen cinema separate from the complex on what effectively would be a corner site at the Athgarvan road junction. Assuming they get planning permission for that, we’ll be looking at another year or two before that’s even built. Maybe longer, who knows? Without a cinema there won’t be comedy. There won’t be fantasy. There won’t be romance. One things for sure though – there’ll be murder.

Downhill from here by Liam Geraghty appears every week in the Kildare Nationalist (pg.6)

Posted by LiamG at February 15, 2006 06:52 PM