Progressive Boink

[Patrick]

best/worst unnecessary reaction during a movie:
in the first five minutes of The Descent where two people's faces are impaled by one log, and the stranger beside me yells "DAAAAAAAYUMN, NOW THAT'S HOW YOU START A MOVIE!" while his girlfriend looks on in disgust

[Alicia]

- People who laugh immaturely, like when 2 gay guys kiss, for example.

When I saw Across the Universe, this group of people kept laughing every time they started singing. It's a Beatles musical, what did they expect?

[David]

Guys that must let every one know how not gay they are by being offended by male nudity or homosexuality in a movie.

When I saw Watchmen, this one guy had to say, "REALLY?" or "EWWWW" while visibly wincing every single time Dr. Manhattan's penis was on screen. The same guy had to say "ITS ABOUT TIME!" when Silk Spectre got naked.

[Patrick]

Guys that must let every one know how not gay they are by being offended by male nudity or homosexuality in a movie.

When I saw Watchmen, this one guy had to say, "REALLY?" or "EWWWW" while visibly wincing every single time Dr. Manhattan's penis was on screen. The same guy had to say "ITS ABOUT TIME!" when Silk Spectre got naked.

fun fact: he is gay

[Zack Hoagie]

AWWW FUCK YEAH DUDE FUCKING DANIEL PLAINVIEW JUST CRACKED THAT FUKKIN DUDES HEAD OPEN WITH A BOWLING PIN STEEEEE-RIKE

[DGMacphee]

- people who "resolve" the plot to a movie after ten minutes. yes, that is true. if the dude had just bought a new rug from a carpet barn then he he wouldn't have had to deal with the big lebowski or the nihilists. why didn't the coens think of that?

Related to this, people who figure out the big plot twist an hour before it happens. Happened to a friend who saw The Usual Suspects. Some guy yelled out "The cripple did it!" halfway through.

As you can imagine, my friend was furious!

[Andy]

the devil was unable to trick that fine gentlemen, and he simply wished for no one else to be tricked! he is a community hero!

[DGMacphee]

his reward is a punch in the face

[Mally]

I've stopped going to Harry Potter movies on opening nights because of that inevitable nerdy kid who has to announce every single character's appearance as it occurs. "DUMBLEDORRRREEEE! That's Dumbledore. But a different Dumbledore. The other one died in real life. See how his beard is darker? Dumbledore."

[BackLegFrontKick]

Effing bluetooth headsets. Whenever I go to a crowded movie someone always has one RIGHT in the corner of my eye, so every ten seconds or whatever I see that little blue flash and my head immediately jerks to see what it is, I can't help it. I always wind up asking them to take it out, turn it off, or at least switch ears. I think only ONE person that I've done this to ever understood why this would be annoying to me.

At Watchmen, it was a fully loaded theater, and the guy next to me was one of those deals where the manager comes in and asks everyone to move to the center of their row to fit in every ticket. So the guy next to me obviously got separated from his friend. Then, during the previews, starts texting with this ULTRA-bright screen. So I flat-out said, "you're not going to be doing that the whole movie, right?" And he just sheepishly put it away. And during the whole movie he just keeps TWITCHING and you could TELL that it was just KILLING him that he couldn't text and/or talk with his buddy the whole time. I'm pretty sure he moved onto the stairs a few rows ahead of me for about thirty seconds at one point so he could text/read things his buddy sent him, then he came back.

All of these instances involve people that are at LEAST in their mid-thirties. I hate it, but at least younger people never existed in a world without this technology. These oldersons should know how to deal with this stuff in public.

[Personal favorite thing someone next to me in a theater ever said: Matrix 2, when Neo pulls the bullet out of Girl's chest or whatever it was, this Hispanic guy next to me says, in complete hushed awe: "Daaaamn, that dude's powerful." He sounded like the stereotype sidekick character from the George Lopez show. He was so utterly genuine in his reverence that I almost feel bad when I repeat that line for my own amusement (sans accent, I'm no monster.)]

[Lindy]

Bluetooth headsets are just as irritating outside of the theater only for different reasons.

[Captain Hot Stuff]

Not really a movie-watching habit, but assigned seating is the most irritating fucking thing ever. We're not children, we can sort it out ourselves. I don't want to show up to a movie with friends and find that there's only an archipelago of single-seats scattered across the theatre, and I don't want to have to fuck around in the dark trying to find the right aisle. A cinema that introduced assigned seating back home Lost Themselves A Customer, and when a friend and I went to see Inception (which we had been anticipating for a very long time) in Mongolia we were asked to move three (!) times because the tickets were in Cyrillic and we couldn't read them. This includes someone who showed up 20 minutes into the movie, and was just a single person, and wanted us to move so she could have one of the seats. Why don't you go sit in one of the singles rather than splitting us up? Also why don't you show up on time? AARGGHHH

[Andy]

That sounds like the worst movie idea ever.

[Captain Hot Stuff]

So is assigned seating done in America or what? I can't imagine where else Australia would get the idea from. If not, it makes me love America all the more (fun fact: the English speaking world is the only place that has proper toilets. Even mainland Europe is... weird).

[B]

No, it's not done here. Assigned seating at the movies is for the birds. I wouldn't see a movie if I couldn't choose where to sit.

[David]

I'm pretty sure the one time I saw a movie in Austria there was assigned seating but it was not enforced as the theatre was mostly empty.

I can see some benefits to assigned seating but the negative things outweigh them by quite a bit.

[Alicia]

They have assigned seating in IMAX theaters or "director's halls" in Los Angeles ($12-15 range). I actually like it, because you can choose your seat online before you see a movie - so you either get to pick an excellent seat, exactly where you want to sit, or you know that a theater's full so you pick another time to see it. Usually only 1 to 2 people are a few minutes late, but most people seeing a movie in IMAX seriously want to see it, so there's not really a problem of people walking in after the movie's started. They probably also have a cutoff time as to when you can enter these theaters.

[Terry Cheesecake]

We used to occasionally do assigned seating for films when I first worked in the cinema. It tended to only be for films that would sell out though so we could cram in as many people as possible. They don't seem to do it anymore though.

(fun fact: the English speaking world is the only place that has proper toilets. Even mainland Europe is... weird).

I have visited many countries in mainland Europe and in none of them have I had trouble finding a "proper toilet".

[Alan]

assigned seating was normal for cinemas when they first started up. I worked at an old theatre from 1912 the past 3 summers and they had assigned seating up until the 40s or so.