“Recent theater encounter: Trailer for “Battle Los Angeles”. Some fat angry looking woman starts hissing. I shout “I didn’t pay $10 to listen to you. Save your opinions for that blog no one reads. Not even your friends.”. After that, not a peep. If you want to save our culture you’ve got to stand up to the barbarians.”
A commenter called Guan-ju, writing about an article at the Big Hollywood blog concerning the oafish behaviour of some cinema-goers. Well said indeed.
In my fortunate experience, I have generally not suffered from chatty couples, paper rustlers or smelly eaters. However, I often will be sitting in front of someone who keeps kicking the back of the chair. My usual response is to turn around slowly, and give the offending idiot my best attempt at the “Clint Eastwood stare”. Sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t. (Alas, the use of something handy, like a taser is banned in the UK. Shame. It would be brilliant). The trouble is, of course, is that if you go to a cinema quite late, a lot of the audience will be fairly merry, indeed drunk. At least in the UK, anyway. And of course the type of film will affect this: if you are watching a French art house film, it is probably less likely to be an issue than if you are watching something like Transformers or Dumb and Dumber, or somesuch. On the other hand, the louder the movie (think Iron Man 2) and the more crazy the action, the more the usual pin-heads are dumbstruck into silence.
Of course, while watching a Michael Moore “documentary”, I reckon that loud heckling is mandatory.
Years ago I used to work part time as a projectionist at a small independant cinema. The job actually entailed doubling up as a bouncer so me having a black belt in karate was a plus. One particular film that attracted a number of pea-brained teenaged lads was ‘Dangerous Minds’ which was a relatively serious film that was promoted along with the rap song Gangster’s Paradise. The amusing thing about these lads was that when you politely asked them to leave they would sit there with a look that said “And if I don’t what the F*** are you gonna do to make me”. Being physically hoiked out of their seat and lobbed out of the front door wasn’t quite the response that they expected.
Are we just complaining about inconsiderate people in general? How about on a trans-Atlantic flight to the US? The idiot non-English speaking child behind me kept kicking my seat and shouting about something during the entire flight, which behavior his parents (I assume) kept asking him politely to stop (I assume). Am I allowed to “hoik him out of his seat and lob him out of the front door”?
“Am I allowed to ‘hoik him out of his seat and lob him out of the front door’?”
Sure, if you are prepared to deal with the effect that depressurization will have on your location.
Wouldn’t that be evolution at work?
Society: protecting homo sapiens from evolution for a thousand years…
QotD there, wh00ps:-)
From my flying days: A toddler seated at the front of the economy cabin yells all the way down to Australia. The stewardess walks past and calmly said to the mother “Theres never a dingo around when you want one is there”.
If only it were as simple as saying, “please be quiet,” or otherwise calling the mannerless moron out publically. Nowadays, one trying to maintain some civility in public is setting one’s self up for a beating.
I recently read about a Marine on leave and his girlfriend who went to the theater. A bunch of misbehaving youths were bing loud and obnoxious and he asked them to be quiet. They ambushed him and his girl when they were leaving the theater and put him in the hospital for his troubles.
A friend of mine had a similar experience. He saw a woman spitting on the subway station and he called her on it. She flipped out about how it wasn’t any of his business, how somebody would take care of it, and when he asked if she had any shame at all, she immediately started spouting racial slurs before storming off in a huff.
I realize we’re trying to have a society here, but it can get ugly very fast when trying to tell people who have no sense of propriety or who have been told they can do no wrong because [INSERT JUSTIFICATION HERE] their whole lives that they are in the wrong. Sadly, if it turned violent and the person trying to do right would likely be blamed by the prosecution for instigating the whole thing instead of just calling the police.
Can we have British films with a visual sense? In fact, can we have something British which has at least some visual literacy?
Can we have animated films aimed at adults?
Can we have an end to painfully cliche characters and the endless recycling of such nauseating tropes as the male protagonist, the humourous sidekick, the snark, etc.
Can we have an end to this gimmicky 3D nonsense which is still not much better than the stupid green/red naffness of the past?
Can we have a Transformers film with little or no humans in it, and which actually follows the excellent comics, instead of the Spielberg/Bay turds?
Can Spielberg be stopped from ruining Ghost in the Shell?
Can George Lucas be banned from making films forever?
Take away the kid’s iPad and give him a PlayBook.
Cheers
I vote for losing the warning labels and letting Darwin prevail.
As for the heathens in theaters, I’ve found that a Surefire Z2 combined with “You want to be the star of the show? Here’s the damn spotlight” is sometimes misunderstood, but usually not. And I’m pretty sure that flashlights are still legal in the UK.
Of course, while watching a Michael Moore “documentary”, I reckon that loud heckling is mandatory.
While true, no self-respecting person would ever be watching that in a theatre. If you’re watching it in a theatre, that implies that you’re giving Michael Moore money. Steal it off the internet, and give it a proper MST3K treatment with some buddies.
In the ‘States, movie theaters are usually too dark for that sort of thing to work.
Alamo Drafthouse doesn’t tolerate any nonsense:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L3eeC2lJZs
(NSFW Language: This is the uncensored version, there is a censored version too.)
That, to a Texan like me, is stunning. Not that people go to the movies drunk (I’ve done it myself) but that drunks cause trouble at the movies. I’ve seen the best behavior at cinemas that also serve alcohol (like the Alamo Drafthouse, or my local house, Studio Movie Grill). Fewer kids and teenagers.
It seems to me that the problem ya’ll have isn’t that people get drunk and cause trouble. It’s that troublemakers use drink as an excuse.