The Perils Of Movie-Going…
When you go to the movies as much as we do, over the years you end up with a few really memorable experiences – and by ‘memorable’ I don’t mean ‘good’… occasionally, we run into some truly obnoxious types, whether they mean to be or not.
Here’s the top 10 worst movie going experiences we’ve had to date. They’re funny now, but… at the time, not so much:
10. We’ve all had them – the kids kicking the back of your seat. We’ve had that happen more times than we can count…
9. The row of ‘tweenie girls that, when in groups, feel they can talk and laugh as loud as they want during a movie without consequence, and if you try to politely ask them to quiet down, they mock you openly and it only makes matters worse…
8. The pack of teenage boys that sat behind us during Jurassic Park. One had seen it already and before every surprise, blurted out what happened next because he thought he was cool… Luckily we had seen it before too, otherwise I might have committed hari-kari…
7. The group of guys at the back of the theater who thought it was hilarious to pass gas at top volume and laugh at it during A History of Violence… and when they got bored with that, they started smoking – IN the theater.
6. The loud psycho that talks to the screen and claps really loudly after big moments. This happened again recently when we saw Iron Man… but it’s happened many times throughout the years…
5. Having the theater be hit by lightening during Underworld, causing a blackout halfway through the movie at a very exciting scene, then sitting in the pitch dark for 20 minutes until people with flashlights came in to tell us we had to evacuate. That night made me realize that being in a lower-level theater in a large complex is a total fire hazard because it took us more than a half hour to make our way out. If there was a fire, we would have been toast.
4. Sitting next to a row of people who don’t speak English and having to hear the one person who is elected ‘translator’ proceed to translate the entire movie at full volume so said row of people could hear her. I forget which movie that was, but it’s happened more than once.
3. There’s always that one family that’s too cheap to get a babysitter and decides to bring their 2 or 3 or 4 year old to a horror movie, and wait until the second or third time their poor kid is scared out of their mind and ends up screaming and crying non-stop, before finally leaving the theater.
2. We had a couple of meth-heads come into We Own The Night well after it started and they sat down next to me. One turned and asked me at full volume, “What did we miss!?” I thought she was kidding, but she wasn’t. It seemed her boyfriend was deaf so she then narrated much of the movie to him in her super gravelly gin voice, and occasionally would talk to the screen. She actually had a lot of people laughing when, at a very quiet, poingient scene, blurted out “wow.. that is f#@king DEEP, man…”
And the #1 worst movie going experience is…
1. Man on oxygen, sucking on dentures and clearing sinuses non-stop through entire movie… This happened when we went to see Arlington Road. It was a packed theater and there were literally no seats left, or we would have moved. I felt bad for this man – obviously he wasn’t trying to be noisy, but I have a thing for pretty much every noise he made and he sat right next to me. It got so bad that every now and then, I would bury my face in my husband’s shoulder and start crying out of pure frustration. And every time he’d tell me we should just leave… but I kept saying ‘no’ because I wanted to know how the movie ended… And to this day, I don’t remember a dang thing about that movie, so it was essentially two hours of self-inflicted torture.
So, there you go… good times. When you do anything often enough, your chances of having something annoying happen go up, so what can you do, except laugh at them… eventually. After the rage wears off. ;)
