Sorta Like An Inverted Pleasantville

Blast From The Past ⇒ is a typical Hollywood romantic comedy with more jokes than usual highlighting anachronisms. Adam is the son of a family that went underground during the Cuban Missile Crisis ⇒ that leaves the bunker 35 years later to see that the world around has dramatically changed. Eve is the modern 90s California Girl that helps Adam adjust to what California has become in the interim. She falls in love with him after he swing dances with other women. Stock appreciation allows everyone to live happily ever after with lots of money.

Front Row Joe

Cinemark ⇒ is a cinema operator that has around 450 some theaters with an average of 11 screens in each. The corporation was independent at the time of donation and is so again. The corporation also owns and operates the CinéArts, Century, and Tinseltown USA lines of cinemas.

I once worked at a second-run theater that offered admission for a dollar because the real business of any cinema is to be a glorified concession stand. Movie distributors receive the lion’s share of the cut of ticket price at the beginning of a movie’s run which decreases throughout the run. With the rapid release to disc and streaming video services along with the increasing availability of air conditioning, the second-run theaters’ days might be numbered.

It was a job. There are actually plenty of stories from that place that I remember, but most of which are too boring to mention. Perhaps the most meaningful memory for me is talking with a friend before he died while he put up letters on the marquee. I also remember a co-woker finding a used condom on the floor after a showing of a kid’s movie on Easter Sunday. Neither of those co-workers were zombies.

Reclassification

A nearby first-run cinema always got promotional material, including shirts, from the distributors. This makes sense because, as stated before, the first-runs are where the distributors make their money. Usually, the only stuff that trickled-down to the second-runs were movie posters. Blast From The Past, however, was a rare movie where even the second-runners got free swag. I indulged in a shirt.

The only catch was that I was forced to wear this shirt at work for one weekend in order to attend work or keep the shirt. Compulsory wear is inherently not free. There was nowhere specific to note the lack of freedom previous the the Less Than Free Shirt Archive classification

I Worked With A Zombie (He Worked With A Zombie)

I was not shown the infamous Safety & Security Procedures Featuring I Worked With A Zombie training video on CD-i ⇒ format during my employment. I did see and ask about the unused CD-i player and television was used for and was told that it was training material that went over stuff that I already knew. I wish that I would have been paid to watch those videos because they are done so cheaply and acted so poorly. Furthermore, I would prefer if Cinemark would not put in copyright claims against uploaders so that I could conveniently point the reader to this video. Compared to the Blast From The Past trailer ⇒, I prefer the training video for entertainment purposes though I would say that full-length movie probably has more merit.

For the sake of posterity, I will provide a synopsis of the training video. There is an intro sequence that shows the title before a live-action shot places the setting takes place within a cinema with neon and checkerboard pattern interior design. A new excited about working and their co-worker suggesting that former U.S. Presidential candidate Ross Perot ⇒ might walk in before being interrupted by zombie employees that are clearly the same employees in makeup. The title is shown again. The zombie employees perform terrible customer service that the model employees have to apologize for and clean up. Even though the CD-i came out in the early 1990s, the 1987 movie Steel Dawn ⇒ is somehow still “#1 in the nation” according to the zombie box office attendant. The model employees then read from and are inspired by an employee handbook to do “whatever it takes”. The zombies are killed by the normal employees walking together with their arms interlocked towards the zombies shouting “star performers make it happen!”. The last batch of live action shows a bunch of customers appear out of nowhere to applaud the model employees. The video ends with still shots of model employees and a traditional voice-over informing the trainee of the benefits of a positive attitude.