The Movie-Going Phenomenon

Phenomenon is such a great word, isn't it. Rolls off the tongue much more easily than it rolls off my fingers onto the keyboard.

I have a friend who once declared that she was never leaving the house again. It seemed that whenever she did leave the house, to go do something pleasant (such as a movie or a concert), there was always at least one person in the audience who seemed completely oblivious to the noise and disturbance they were creating. Thus becoming a huge distraction and taking away from the performance at hand.

For awhile I thought she was, perhaps, a bit melodramatic. But experience has disproven that (is disproven a word?). Last night I went to see the most recent Harry Potter movie. In a theatre with maybe 25 people occupying seats, there sat, a mere two seats away from a me, what I had to assume was a father and daughter.

Watching the sixth installment of a series such as the Harry Potter franchise, is not the same as watching a sequel for something like the 26th Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Background knowledge of the previous bloodbaths is not necessarily required. Not so for HP. It helps to have read (or seen) what came before. I have read the entire series, and I have seen the previous theatrical installments.

The father, just over to my left, had not. I should have clued in to what was to come, when during the previews, he pulled out his PDA and started talking loudly about how he thought he'd turned it off. I appreciated the consideration of turning off the PDA. But I was troubled that he didn't seem to realize how loud he was speaking.

Loud.

As in, I'm-sitting-in-a-noisy-restaurant-and-need-to-be-heard-across-the-table loud.

So the movie starts and this dad has NO CLUE who the characters are what's going on. And he's asking his daughter in the same voice to fill him in. And she's whispering the answers back to him, but the concept of whispering has eluded this guy.

I wanted to go smack him, but it would have required getting up from my seat.

And I didn't have anything to throw at him.

So I let it go. And managed to enjoy the movie in spite of him.

Now if only they would stop showing commercials. It pisses me off that I paid $9.50 for a ticket to that movie and I had to sit through five minutes of commercials.

It's just wrong.