It’s basically only acceptable to talk during a movie in three cases – first, when the movie is so awful that it’s subjectively awful and no living thing can find any enjoyment in its viewing; second, when it’s a horror movie, because the sort of fun, pop horror that you want to see in a theater is practically a dialogue with the audience; and lastly, the sort of fist-bump dudebro explodey action film of which The Expendables is the perfect bannerman.
It’s either extremely bad luck, auditory dementia, or some kind of shadow conspiracy whose goal is the slow and subtle disintegration of my psyche, but whenever I go to the movies, there’s always someone sitting near me saying inane things. Whether it’s someone asking “who are all those guys and why do they look the same?” during the Smiths Vs. Neo fight in The Matrix Reloaded, a little girl plaintively asking her mother what those men are doing to that girl during a 10:30pm screening of Last House on the Left, a man commenting incessantly on the quality of the cars driven by people in Thor, or the woman leaving The Social Network who insisted that Trent Reznor was the frontman for Metallica. Like a mild headache or a constant craving for the taste of gin, theater-talkers are typically not awful enough that they detract from my ability to go to the movies and enjoy them. Natasha might even opine that my fondness for going to the movies is actually just a byproduct of the joy that I take in being enraged by others, and I suspect she might be right were that her opinion.
If she’s right, then The Descendants was the most fun I’ve had at the movies in years. There were ten people in the theater when Natasha and I went to see it last Wednesday and, you guys, eight of talked so much that they seemed to miss important plot points in the film because they were too busy talking. I know that I’m prone to hyperbole, but this is no exaggeration.
In the row behind us, two middle-aged women chatted ceaselessly throughout the film. Their commentary was occasionally punctuated by a rondo of “Oh No”s that started whenever something mildly interesting happened. It became so omnipresent that at one point, in response to Shailene Woodley’s declaration that she had ordered mahi for George Clooney, I found myself saying “Oh no” aloud.
It got so bad that I started having improbable revenge fantasies about what I was going to do to these people. These may have included making two middle-aged women think that they were being haunted by ghosts.
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Years ago, when I went to see Total Recall, some prudish twentysomething expressed shock at a flash of Sharon Stone’s breast. “Whoa! That’s not what I came here to see!” he shouted at the screen.
During Dracula, an older man described so much of the film to his female companion that I concluded she must be blind. (She wasn’t.)
Some teenyboppers chattered away through The Fellowship of the Ring up to the scene in Rivendell when Bilbo went all Gollum on Frodo over letting him have the Ring, at which point they all screamed. My date and I had a good laugh.
Finally, as the end credits of The Two Towers rolled, having just watched nearly three hours of Orcs and Ents and Wargs (mysteriously transformed from giant wolves into giant, rabid guinea pigs) and assorted denizens of Middle Earth, one man stood and announced “Man, that was one f***ed-up movie!!!” The rest of the theater laughed in agreement.