Tonight I'm letting my nephew Matthew fill in on the journal with his account of the first night of sales of the movie Titanic at the local Media Play.
Hi,
Well, I just recently got home from the dreaded, infamous Titanic night at work . . . open 24 hours to sell the most overly hyped movie of the decade. Not only that, but there was also a costume contest, a karioake contest, Titanic trivia, and ballroom dancing. Yeah, I can practically see either the cringes on your face in sympathy for me or the evil grin forming over the knowledge that I had to put up with all this. I was schedule from 10 PM to 7 AM, the graveyard shit shift along with 9 other unlucky Media Play employee souls. Surprisingly, only about 10 people were in the whole store when I arrived about 10 minutes early. However, as the witching hour approached, the freaks began to show up in droves. This aggravating, stinky guy and his little brother (who used to shop at the mall every weekend when I worked there) came and they were dressed up: he was dressed as a captain and his little brother was dressed as a drowning, 3rd class passenger victim. Obviously, they won the costume contest, since the only other person there that was dressed up was one of our co-workers, Pleona. So, Stinky and his dwarf brother won a basket full of crappy promotional merchandise that we couldn't get rid of (items included a lame mini- basketball, a Cliffs Notes CD of "hip, alternative" music, candy, screenplay of "Sense and Sensibility", and Spice World nail polish . . . wow, whatta bargain!).
The ballroom dancing was a complete failure, as was expected by many. Either no one wanted to ballroom dance or they didn't know how . . . probably more like a combination of the two. Steffans, the manager in charge of all these corny Titanic events, eventually got a few people to ballroom dance, but for some unknown reason, the ballroom dance music disappeared and "Rapper's Delight" started playing. I was completely baffled at the DJ's reasoning behind this! So, the yawn-worthy ballroom dancing evolved into a group of people doing the bus stop or something. Now, the karioake contest was a nightmare in itself! The second girl that attempted to sing "My Heart Will Go On" did a fairly decent job, but she was no Pavoratti. The third girl was actually pretty good and won the contest (again, her prize was a basket of crappy promotional items). However, the first group to sing were three 13 year old girls . . . talk about tone deaf!! As they screeched and wailed through "My Heart Will Go On", I was practically ready to rip out my own heart to keep from living through that horror! By the time all this lameness ended, it was time to ring up the videos.
There was quite a line, but it only took a grand total of 45 minutes to ring up everyone. By 1 AM, I could have swore that the place was so deserted that tumbleweeds were bouncing around the store. As the dust settled, we all went to our respective stations for the night and did our busy work. For me and Joyce, that included a pull-down of almost 3, 000 books. Around 3 AM, we all took our break, which was eating spaghetti that Joyce made for us all. Afterwards, a group of us (Joe, Christie, Chris, Richard, Jonathan, and I) sat outside for the remainder of our break. The remainder of the night/morning (or from 2AM to 7 AM), there was a grand total of 4 . . . yes, 4 . . . customers. However, there were 3 other people that just came in Media Play to look around . . . don't you people have homes?!? I had my own little personal visitors: my friend Dwight stopped by after he got off work at 1:30 to talk to me for a few minutes and buy a copy for his Mom, and another friend, Kat, also stopped by after he got off work to see how it was going and visit with Christie and me. Being the huge anime fan that he is, he bought a Sailor Moon shirt to wear to Dragon*Con this coming up weekend.
I was really hoping that the newspaper reporter that showed up would ask for a comment or quote from me. I was very eager to vent on this little guy all the ridiculousness (is that a word) surrounding this movie. It just seemed to be one of those nights where I really wanted to get into an argument with someone. I did, however, get to release a little of that urge on three occasions. The first occurred during the trivia contest when the three 13 year old banshees were attempting to name all of Leonardo DiCaprio's movies. After they finally spit out "Quick & The Dead" and couldn't remember any more, I shook my head in dismay, cupped my hand around my mouth, and blurted out, "Hey!! You forgot 'The Basketball Diaries' and 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape?', which are probably his two best movies! Way better than 'Titanic'!". Steffans grinned at my response, and one of the girls said, "Oh, yeah, those, too!". She's probably never even seen them.
The second incident occurred when we were on our break, and Chris was yammering on about how great "Titanic" was. I had to interject into his little fanboy praise when he mentioned that Billy Zane was a great actor. I told him to name one other movie Billy Zane starred in that was actually a good movie that he acted well in. His rebuttal: "The Phantom". Umm, if you haven't seen "The Phantom", I have one word of advice for you: DON'T! That was one of the sorriest movies ever. We went back and forth about "The Phantom", until he started naming obscure Zane movies or lame big movies in which Zane had a bit part (remember him in that Marisa Tomei/Robert Downey JR movie, "Only You"? . . . if not, you didn't miss anything!). He must be the president and sole member of the Billy Zane fan club or something! I partially agreed with him on "Demon Knight", the first Tales from the Crypt movie, but still, it wasn't spectacular.
The third incident happened right before we left when Joe and I got in a discussion over wide screen and pan&scan versions of movies. Joe flat out said that pan and scan was better and wide screen sucked. I disagreed, cause in my opinion, wide screen is way cooler and besides, I hate that lame, jerky scan over movement of pan and scan versions! Joe seemed to get mad and said that he wanted his whole screen full and didn't want some stupid black bars at the top and bottom. He then said something about he felt like he was getting robbed of his money since the whole screen wasn't occupied. I told him how cheesy and crappy that pan and scan movement looked and the wide screen give that whole cinematic effect; he huffed and said, "Whatever, man, that is just a waste of extra money to get that!". A few of us laughed and I told him that wide screen doesn't cost any extra (or at least it doesn't at our store!). Anyway, funny little pointless argument.
All in all, my prediction for tonight was fairly close. I predicted that the store would be completely deserted by 2 AM and there would be a few people stopping in after 6 AM to pick up the movie on their way to work. Instead, the store was pretty much empty by 1 AM and no one else showed up before the night crew left. The funny thing is that when I got home, I wasn't tired at all! That is why I jumped on writing this e -mail. I figured that typing and reading for awhile would make me somewhat drowsy!! Again, another successful prediction . . . cause . . . my eye . . . lids . . . are kind . . . of . . . heavy . . . zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
The End,
Matthew
