Postmaster
Dark Side of the Camera
Because of the old popcorn bucket trick ;-)
Frank
P.S. I always need to buy the king-size buckets....
Err.. I´m just saying :beer:
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Going to the movies just isn't the same
- Thread starter Zander
- Start date
Because of the old popcorn bucket trick ;-)
Frank
P.S. I always need to buy the king-size buckets....
Err.. I´m just saying :beer:
Take a squeamish girl to a real nasty horror movie.
She'll spend the whole time burying her face in your...well, some part of you that offers shelter from the awfulness on screen.
J.R. Hudson
Spirit Animal
It's a passive way to get to know someone maybe ? If you're into each other, you can convene at the end of the show, if not, you can go home.
Barry
Trailers are not commercials despite the fact their marketing upcoming films
Trailers used to be my favorite part but these days, by the time they come on Im like GET ON WITH IT ALREADY !
Ki-Ki
Veteran
Moral of the thread, make your own cinema.
Seriously p1sses me off though, going to the cinema to see lots of adverts, that often repeat.
On a side note..
Me & my girlfriend went to the cinema on first date. Don't do it. Bloody hell, don't do it. Was incredibly awkward and we saw Son of Rambow. It's impossible to interact. Especially with a packed cinema. Now, what I hate most of all. Is the teenagers or clans of guys or girls coming in laughing at the scary parts in horror films. I could go on for ages, but it worked out in the end, we're still together a month later. So don't go on a first date to a cinema =)
Seriously p1sses me off though, going to the cinema to see lots of adverts, that often repeat.
On a side note..
Me & my girlfriend went to the cinema on first date. Don't do it. Bloody hell, don't do it. Was incredibly awkward and we saw Son of Rambow. It's impossible to interact. Especially with a packed cinema. Now, what I hate most of all. Is the teenagers or clans of guys or girls coming in laughing at the scary parts in horror films. I could go on for ages, but it worked out in the end, we're still together a month later. So don't go on a first date to a cinema =)
Luis Caffesse
Admin
Zander
Well-known member
Hey, there's nothing wrong with that. There are horror movies that are more funny than they are scary. Grudge 2 comes to mind.
Ki-Ki
Veteran
Thats true, indeed, fair point.
Some films are acceptable for it, but If your watching something like The Shinning, or as recently for me One Missed Call..
This is what happend for me. We were watching the film, group of 'chavs' sorry just, has to be said. Were half way down the cinema, really loud and talking. Then half the cinema jumps, and there's some 14 year old Gangster at the front laughing her ass off whilst texting her boyfriend on her mobile phone. Did I mention she was wearing a party hat?
So I look forward to seeing 18 films, since then I'm surrounded by more sensible considerate people.
Again, back on point, the adverts. They repeat them in the cinema, I actually turn my phone back on, and read old texts. If there going to have adverts, at least have new & interesting ones.
Some films are acceptable for it, but If your watching something like The Shinning, or as recently for me One Missed Call..
This is what happend for me. We were watching the film, group of 'chavs' sorry just, has to be said. Were half way down the cinema, really loud and talking. Then half the cinema jumps, and there's some 14 year old Gangster at the front laughing her ass off whilst texting her boyfriend on her mobile phone. Did I mention she was wearing a party hat?
So I look forward to seeing 18 films, since then I'm surrounded by more sensible considerate people.
Again, back on point, the adverts. They repeat them in the cinema, I actually turn my phone back on, and read old texts. If there going to have adverts, at least have new & interesting ones.
J.R. Hudson
Spirit Animal
The level of noise from kids these days is gnarly. Talking, cell phones, giggling ...
Blame the parents.
Blame the parents.
JasonFox
Internet Sensation
I blame the parents because it's usually them. When did people lose a sense of respect for others? If you want to talk to each other or yell at the screen, watch something at home. And please don't sneak in an entire meal from KFC (true story). Yeesh.
Luis Caffesse
Admin
My wife and I had an experience that really drove that point home.
We're in the theater and the couple sitting right next to me is chatting it up during all the trailers. Okay, it bugged me, but it's the trailers...right?
Well, the movie starts and they just keep on chatting... and I don't mean whispering... I mean chatting the way you would if you were sitting at a restaurant.
So I finally turn to the woman and say, "Excuse me, but could you please keep it down?"
Trying to be as nice about it as I could seeing as I still had to sit next to her for the next 90 minutes.
You know what she said to me?
Completely sincerely and annoyed she said, "If you didn't want to be around people maybe you shouldn't have gone out tonight."
I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone.
Mark Harris
Pain in the ass
My wife and I had an experience that really drove that point home.
We're in the theater and the couple sitting right next to me is chatting it up during all the trailers. Okay, it bugged me, but it's the trailers...right?
Well, the movie starts and they just keep on chatting... and I don't mean whispering... I mean chatting the way you would if you were sitting at a restaurant.
So I finally turn to the woman and say, "Excuse me, but could you please keep it down?"
Trying to be as nice about it as I could seeing as I still had to sit next to her for the next 90 minutes.
You know what she said to me?
Completely sincerely and annoyed she said, "If you didn't want to be around people maybe you shouldn't have gone out tonight."
I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone.
You should go to the movies with me, Luis. I turn to them and say: "Shut your f*cking mouth." in no uncertain terms. I'm not worried about having to sit next to them for the next 90 minutes, because however big an asshole they can be, I can pretty much always be twice the asshole. One time I even got an applause from the rest of the crowd for telling one really loud dude to shut the f*ck up.
I tell you when the apocalypse comes and law and order break down and it's just me with a leather jacket, a motorcycle, a mohawk and a shotgun, just wait to see what I do to people who talk in the movies...
Ki-Ki
Veteran
(you really humiliated that guy then)
One main difference between America & the UK, American's clap / cheer in the cinema sometimes. British dont, not sure why, and not insulting either side. I think the only time there was an applause in a British Film i've seen was Pirates of the Caribbean 2. So I've got to go to the US one day just to experiance that. =)
JasonFox
Internet Sensation
If you only come for a day, barbecue is a much better experience.
Barry_Green
Moderator
Wait -- they clapped in Pirates TWO??!?! Man, talk about your cultural differences!
Zander
Well-known member
I've never clapped nor have I have been around people who have clapped at the end of a film except for when it was a screening and the creators, cast, and/or crew was there.
JConnors
Veteran
One of my friends was in South Carolina years ago and watched Independance Day on July 4th the day it came out, he said there was cheering going on at the end of the movie and even a U-S-A chant. That's hillarious cos it's such a bad movie. "Now that's what I call a close encounter".
I've been to movies were people have clapped at the end.
Luis Caffesse
Admin
Yeah - that's easy to do when you're this guy:
Somehow I don't think I'd get the same response as you.
Batutta
Major Contributor
Best Guy Talking in A Movie Theater story ever, from Harlan Ellison--
New York. Early Seventies, maybe '73 or '74. I was in the city on business. Business taken care of, I got together with a friend, a writer from Texas who loves movies as much and as indiscriminately as I do. The ritual: the movie crawl. Load up on junk food, start at the first movie theater on the downtown side of 42nd Street, and just work our way from Times Square to 8th Avenue, cross the street, and work our way back to Times Square. Days. Endless days. Twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours straight time in the dark. We eat in there, sleep in there, piss and daydream in there. Hot dogs, popcorn, slabs of cheese, munchies, French bread, anydamnthing. And we see them all: the good flicks, the bad flicks, the kung-fu operas, the porn jobs, the superfly stomp the paddy flicks . . . all of them. One after another, till our eyes turn to poached eggs, staggering from theater to theater like refugees from a Macao opium den.
I don't remember the name of the particular theater, but it was on the uptown side of 42nd Street, close to Broadway. It was something like four in the morning. My buddy and I were almost totally cacked-out. I remember the double-bill, however. The lower half, the B feature, was Fear is the Key, a really dreadful action-adventure turkey based on a crummy Alistair Maclean novel. The main feature was Save the Tiger, a contemporary drama starring Jack Lemmon. He won the Oscar for the role in that film.
And there we slumped, way the hell up in the balcony, our knees jammed under our chins, best seats in an almost empty house. Four ayem. Two rows below us -- and it was steep up there, what I'm talking here is damned near per-pen-dic-u-lar -- some black dude was juiced out asleep, lying across three or four seats, snoring.
My buddy the Texas writer is dead asleep, having polished off a recent meal of three boxes Good'n'Plenty and a frozen chocolate covered banana on a stick. And, blessedly, Fear is the Key ends, and Save the Tiger begins.
About ten minutes into this serious, sensitive study of a garment center guy who is killing himself with floating ethics, and from the very first row of the balcony, below and to the right of us, but still very high above the floor of the theater, I hear a shrieky black voice start mouthing off. Dialogue straight out of ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR MISUNDERSTANDING.
"Muh-fugguh! Gahdamn muh-fugn stupid piece'a ****. Dumb sunbish cah-suckin' piece'a **** garbage . . . Leroy! Hey, you sumbish niggah prick Leroy! Le's get th' fuggoutta here, Leeeeeroy!"
Clearly, the critic in the first row of the balcony found this deeply penetrating study of middle class morality as seen through the dissolution of Jack Lemmon's knock-off sweat shop less than relevant to his existence as a mid-Twentieth Century denizen of the shitty slum to whence he would wend his way once this stupid kike film about muh-fuggin' honk paddy bastids ended. Which wasn't soon enough for him. "Leeeee-ROY!"
I had the feeling that Leeee-ROY was the terminal case lying over the seats two rows below us. Out of it.
Well, I peer through the gloom and see the dude down there in the front row of the balcony, his feet up on the brass rail, his partner beside him, silently watching the film but not stopping the noise. And I watch the two of them for a little while, hoping the third member of the group, good ole Leeee-ROY, will bestir his ass and go rejoin them there sepia Athos and Porthos, and maybe just maybe vacate the site quietly so I can watch the goddam muhfuggin' movie.
But no such luck. The critic only gets wonkyer, yelling at the top of his lungs. Leeee-ROY don't twitch a bun.
And just as the critic is reaching a pitch that will cause sonic tremors, squealing sunbish and muh-fugguh at the top of his lungs, from behind me I hear The Voice of Doom:
"Shut your face, nigger, before I come down there and kill you."
Pause with me for a nanoinstant. This was not one of those angrily shouted shutups one encounters all-too-frequently these days in pillbox-sized Cinema I/II/III/IV closets filled with slopebrowed, prognathous-jawed pimplebrains who jabber endlessly as though they were still in front of the tube in their living room. This was -- trust me -- the most blood-curdlingly threatening voice I have ever heard. It was the kind of voice one suspected would accompany the body attached to the moving finger writing mene mene tekel in letters of fire. This was an abominable snowman, a tyrannosaurus, a behemoth, a stone righteous muh-fuggin' killer. Deep, resonant, commanding, powerful . . . and very very black.
I don't want to belabor this but whoever or whatever was sitting back up there behind my Texas buddy and me, it was bad.
Beside me, I felt the hand of my Texican partner on my wrist. Softly, he asked, "What the **** was that?"
"Voice of Doom," I said. "Pretend we're black. Better still: pretend we're at another theater."
All this happened in a second. And only an idiot would have talked back to the owner of that voice. Guess whose name was in the envelope in the category of Most Outstanding Performance by an Idiot? You got it: Leeee-ROY's buddy with the scoop shovel mouth.
Is violence important in this life?
The critic started shrieking, "Who said that? Who said that gahdamn **** t'me? You c'mawn down here, nigguh, I'm gonna cut'chu! I gonna cut on you, nigguh muh-fugguh!"
And he did go on. And on and on. "Oh ****," I murmured, slumping down even deeper in the seat, till my knees were up around my ears like a grasshopper. Beside me, my Texican buddy was praying in High Church Latin, Yiddish and Sufi, all at the same time.
I do believe that the joker down in the first row of that cockroach-ridden movie house was the single dumbest sonofabitch I have ever encountered; and what happened next was the swiftest, most deadly moment of violence I have ever seen.
Motormouth was still working over the conjugation of to cut when suddenly and without warning there was a rush of wind past me, down those steep steps, fast, fast, so damned fast I couldn't make out whether it was a human or a yeti or simply some terrifying force of nature, and all I saw was a dark blur as something BIG went smoothly down to the front row, something GIGANTIC moved into that row . . . and that stupid sonofabitch joker just stood up, still working his wet jaw . . . as if he could do something against that HUGE dude come to silence him . . . and that monstrous black fury just grabbed Motormouth by the shirt front and yanked . . . and pitched him headfirst over the rail.
I heard a terrified scream as the guy fell, and then a sickening crack! like the snapping of a T'ang dynasty chopstick, and then there was silence.
The only sounds were Jack Lemmon talking about what emotional violence he was suffering.
Shut up, Lemmon.
No one in the theater moved. There weren't that many people anyhow. Just my buddy and me and sleeping Leeee-ROY and the buddy of the guy who'd taken the dive . . . and that humungus shape. In the balcony. And if there was anyone down below, they weren't saying anything.
The diver's buddy didn't move or look around or say a word. He just sat there staring straight ahead, as if he could not possibly have found anything more interesting in the universe to think about than Jack Lemmon's problems. The dark shape moved back up the aisle . . . I didn't look left or right . . . I saw nothing, Jim, nothing . . .and it went up past me and was gone.
I watched that entire flick in silence. No one moved to see if the diver was still alive. After a moment's wait the diver's buddy slipped out of the balcony like oil washing down a gutter, and gone. From below . . . nothing.
And when the film was finished, and the lights came up, we rose, and turned slowly. The balcony was empty. Leeee-ROY was still tabula rasa. Just us, all alone. I looked at my buddy from Texas, and he looked at me, and without saying a word we walked down that precarious stairway and came to the railing and peered over.
The diver lay across the back of a shattered seat. He was bent double. Stomach up. His spine was broken. He didn't move. The theater was empty. We walked back up the aisle, through the upper vestibule, down the winding staircase, into the lobby, and out. We didn't look back. No one could help the diver. We wanted to get away.
We never spoke of it to each other.
It was sudden. Not a word. Not a second threat. No false heroics like two stumblebums in an alley outside a bar. No feinting, and no swinging. He just threw him; launched him out into eternity. And walked away from it. Because he was being disturbed in a movie.
Violence, real violence, not the Jack Armstrong nonsense we all play-act at . . . genuine, mindless violence is very important.
Because there is no knowing when it will strike.
And there is no escape from it.
I warn you, it's terrible.
http://harlanellison.com/iwrite/mostimp.htm
New York. Early Seventies, maybe '73 or '74. I was in the city on business. Business taken care of, I got together with a friend, a writer from Texas who loves movies as much and as indiscriminately as I do. The ritual: the movie crawl. Load up on junk food, start at the first movie theater on the downtown side of 42nd Street, and just work our way from Times Square to 8th Avenue, cross the street, and work our way back to Times Square. Days. Endless days. Twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours straight time in the dark. We eat in there, sleep in there, piss and daydream in there. Hot dogs, popcorn, slabs of cheese, munchies, French bread, anydamnthing. And we see them all: the good flicks, the bad flicks, the kung-fu operas, the porn jobs, the superfly stomp the paddy flicks . . . all of them. One after another, till our eyes turn to poached eggs, staggering from theater to theater like refugees from a Macao opium den.
I don't remember the name of the particular theater, but it was on the uptown side of 42nd Street, close to Broadway. It was something like four in the morning. My buddy and I were almost totally cacked-out. I remember the double-bill, however. The lower half, the B feature, was Fear is the Key, a really dreadful action-adventure turkey based on a crummy Alistair Maclean novel. The main feature was Save the Tiger, a contemporary drama starring Jack Lemmon. He won the Oscar for the role in that film.
And there we slumped, way the hell up in the balcony, our knees jammed under our chins, best seats in an almost empty house. Four ayem. Two rows below us -- and it was steep up there, what I'm talking here is damned near per-pen-dic-u-lar -- some black dude was juiced out asleep, lying across three or four seats, snoring.
My buddy the Texas writer is dead asleep, having polished off a recent meal of three boxes Good'n'Plenty and a frozen chocolate covered banana on a stick. And, blessedly, Fear is the Key ends, and Save the Tiger begins.
About ten minutes into this serious, sensitive study of a garment center guy who is killing himself with floating ethics, and from the very first row of the balcony, below and to the right of us, but still very high above the floor of the theater, I hear a shrieky black voice start mouthing off. Dialogue straight out of ONE HUNDRED DOLLAR MISUNDERSTANDING.
"Muh-fugguh! Gahdamn muh-fugn stupid piece'a ****. Dumb sunbish cah-suckin' piece'a **** garbage . . . Leroy! Hey, you sumbish niggah prick Leroy! Le's get th' fuggoutta here, Leeeeeroy!"
Clearly, the critic in the first row of the balcony found this deeply penetrating study of middle class morality as seen through the dissolution of Jack Lemmon's knock-off sweat shop less than relevant to his existence as a mid-Twentieth Century denizen of the shitty slum to whence he would wend his way once this stupid kike film about muh-fuggin' honk paddy bastids ended. Which wasn't soon enough for him. "Leeeee-ROY!"
I had the feeling that Leeee-ROY was the terminal case lying over the seats two rows below us. Out of it.
Well, I peer through the gloom and see the dude down there in the front row of the balcony, his feet up on the brass rail, his partner beside him, silently watching the film but not stopping the noise. And I watch the two of them for a little while, hoping the third member of the group, good ole Leeee-ROY, will bestir his ass and go rejoin them there sepia Athos and Porthos, and maybe just maybe vacate the site quietly so I can watch the goddam muhfuggin' movie.
But no such luck. The critic only gets wonkyer, yelling at the top of his lungs. Leeee-ROY don't twitch a bun.
And just as the critic is reaching a pitch that will cause sonic tremors, squealing sunbish and muh-fugguh at the top of his lungs, from behind me I hear The Voice of Doom:
"Shut your face, nigger, before I come down there and kill you."
Pause with me for a nanoinstant. This was not one of those angrily shouted shutups one encounters all-too-frequently these days in pillbox-sized Cinema I/II/III/IV closets filled with slopebrowed, prognathous-jawed pimplebrains who jabber endlessly as though they were still in front of the tube in their living room. This was -- trust me -- the most blood-curdlingly threatening voice I have ever heard. It was the kind of voice one suspected would accompany the body attached to the moving finger writing mene mene tekel in letters of fire. This was an abominable snowman, a tyrannosaurus, a behemoth, a stone righteous muh-fuggin' killer. Deep, resonant, commanding, powerful . . . and very very black.
I don't want to belabor this but whoever or whatever was sitting back up there behind my Texas buddy and me, it was bad.
Beside me, I felt the hand of my Texican partner on my wrist. Softly, he asked, "What the **** was that?"
"Voice of Doom," I said. "Pretend we're black. Better still: pretend we're at another theater."
All this happened in a second. And only an idiot would have talked back to the owner of that voice. Guess whose name was in the envelope in the category of Most Outstanding Performance by an Idiot? You got it: Leeee-ROY's buddy with the scoop shovel mouth.
Is violence important in this life?
The critic started shrieking, "Who said that? Who said that gahdamn **** t'me? You c'mawn down here, nigguh, I'm gonna cut'chu! I gonna cut on you, nigguh muh-fugguh!"
And he did go on. And on and on. "Oh ****," I murmured, slumping down even deeper in the seat, till my knees were up around my ears like a grasshopper. Beside me, my Texican buddy was praying in High Church Latin, Yiddish and Sufi, all at the same time.
I do believe that the joker down in the first row of that cockroach-ridden movie house was the single dumbest sonofabitch I have ever encountered; and what happened next was the swiftest, most deadly moment of violence I have ever seen.
Motormouth was still working over the conjugation of to cut when suddenly and without warning there was a rush of wind past me, down those steep steps, fast, fast, so damned fast I couldn't make out whether it was a human or a yeti or simply some terrifying force of nature, and all I saw was a dark blur as something BIG went smoothly down to the front row, something GIGANTIC moved into that row . . . and that stupid sonofabitch joker just stood up, still working his wet jaw . . . as if he could do something against that HUGE dude come to silence him . . . and that monstrous black fury just grabbed Motormouth by the shirt front and yanked . . . and pitched him headfirst over the rail.
I heard a terrified scream as the guy fell, and then a sickening crack! like the snapping of a T'ang dynasty chopstick, and then there was silence.
The only sounds were Jack Lemmon talking about what emotional violence he was suffering.
Shut up, Lemmon.
No one in the theater moved. There weren't that many people anyhow. Just my buddy and me and sleeping Leeee-ROY and the buddy of the guy who'd taken the dive . . . and that humungus shape. In the balcony. And if there was anyone down below, they weren't saying anything.
The diver's buddy didn't move or look around or say a word. He just sat there staring straight ahead, as if he could not possibly have found anything more interesting in the universe to think about than Jack Lemmon's problems. The dark shape moved back up the aisle . . . I didn't look left or right . . . I saw nothing, Jim, nothing . . .and it went up past me and was gone.
I watched that entire flick in silence. No one moved to see if the diver was still alive. After a moment's wait the diver's buddy slipped out of the balcony like oil washing down a gutter, and gone. From below . . . nothing.
And when the film was finished, and the lights came up, we rose, and turned slowly. The balcony was empty. Leeee-ROY was still tabula rasa. Just us, all alone. I looked at my buddy from Texas, and he looked at me, and without saying a word we walked down that precarious stairway and came to the railing and peered over.
The diver lay across the back of a shattered seat. He was bent double. Stomach up. His spine was broken. He didn't move. The theater was empty. We walked back up the aisle, through the upper vestibule, down the winding staircase, into the lobby, and out. We didn't look back. No one could help the diver. We wanted to get away.
We never spoke of it to each other.
It was sudden. Not a word. Not a second threat. No false heroics like two stumblebums in an alley outside a bar. No feinting, and no swinging. He just threw him; launched him out into eternity. And walked away from it. Because he was being disturbed in a movie.
Violence, real violence, not the Jack Armstrong nonsense we all play-act at . . . genuine, mindless violence is very important.
Because there is no knowing when it will strike.
And there is no escape from it.
I warn you, it's terrible.
http://harlanellison.com/iwrite/mostimp.htm
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egproductions
Veteran
Certain theaters are better than others. Don't go to one in a mall unless you want unsupervised kids ruining your experience. I like to go to the last showing after a workday and see a movie that has been out for over a week. The theater will be all yours.
Yes you can build a home theatre that is close to the experience of a real movie theater but going out is half the fun.
I don't know if it was mentioned yet but does anyone use the optimum rewards card to get free tuesday night or reduced price ticks? I hear its great but didn't get my card yet.
Yes you can build a home theatre that is close to the experience of a real movie theater but going out is half the fun.
I don't know if it was mentioned yet but does anyone use the optimum rewards card to get free tuesday night or reduced price ticks? I hear its great but didn't get my card yet.