First give me the chance to not turn my phone off

I am usually the one who holds other fellow audients to a higher standard at the movies. Whether I actually enforce it or not, I'm not above glowering in the direction of someone being rude at the movies, or delivering an extra perturbed "SHHHHHH!" if the movie has started and some people near me just won't shut up.

So it certainly puts my hackles up when someone tries to police movie behavior on me.

I was at the advanced screening of Sirat on Thursday night, which isn't actually due out in Australia for another three weeks. You may remember this was my #1 regret that I had to exclude from my 2025 rankings, so I was pretty eager to see it, even though in some respects it is "too soon" to start watching movies from 2025 again.

The expected start time for the movie had passed and they hadn't gotten it started yet, so I decided I'd play a game from the Connections archive. You know, it's the New York Times game where you have to assemble 16 words into four groups of related words. It's just the right level of difficulty, in that I get it most of the time but it beats me maybe one out of every six. I don't need to have the 99%+ success rate that I have at my other NYT game addiction, Wordle. And since I've only really started playing Connections in the past two months, I have plenty of archives to tackle -- all the way back to 2023. 

Anyway, I'd only gotten one of the four groups and made one wrong guess when the movie got started. Not the movie proper, mind you, but the few little theater-specific graphics that tell you to silence your phone and whatnot.

Which is just what I was about to do when a woman in the row behind me said, in a shrill voice:

"Can you turn off your phone? It's really bright."

I'm not sure if that was the exact wording, but whatever the wording was, don't believe for a second that there was anything polite about the way she said it. In fact, the way she said it was as though she had waited as long as she possibly could and finally had to shut down the menace in the row in front of her.

I felt like saying something back. I didn't. I just turned off the phone. Which is what I was about to do anyway. 

Actually, I did keep it on a moment longer, because right as I was motioning to turn it off, I remembered the thing that sometimes gets me on these Thursday evening screenings. I have an alarm that goes off at 6:45 each Thursday night to remind me to take out the garbage cans for the next morning, and the alarm is instructed to actually power on the phone in order to deliver me this reminder. And then I really am the asshole.

So it took me another ten to 15 seconds to get to the right spot to pre-silence this alarm, during which I imagined this woman really stewing in her juices as she interpreted my ensuing actions as disobedience of her request.

Look I would feel the same way as this woman if I actually had my phone on during the movie. But aren't we all sort of in agreement that before the movie proper starts, talking, getting up and down out of your seat, laughing, chucking popcorn at your friends, and yes, checking your phone, are all fair play?

You need to give me the chance to actually violate our social contract before you cut me down to size for doing so.

As for the movie ... well, it's wild. Sorry, I'm not going to tell you anything more about it right now, because I suspect most of you out there haven't seen it yet. But it's definitely worth a watch.

World's Greatest Dad survives world's worst smell

We were supposed to see Mike Judge's Extract last night. It doesn't come out until Friday, but my wife gets emails from a variety of sources inviting her and a guest to free advanced screenings. Since these invites aren't particularly exclusive, we've taken to responding only for those we consider geographically advantageous. The memories are still too fresh from The Great Juno Debacle of 2007, when we trudged all the way up to Hollywood, waited in an incredibly long line, and then were the first people not admitted to the screening. After that we decided we'd limit ourselves to only screenings within 15 minutes of our house.

Well, if Michael Cera movies used to be the thing to avoid (we also got shut out of Superbad under similar circumstances), now, apparently, it's Jason Bateman movies. Bateman appeared alongside Cera in the aforementioned Juno, and he appears in Extract as well. (J.K. Simmons could also be the common factor in those two films). Not that we'd know any of this, because we got shut out again last night.

It wasn't so agonizing for me personally -- I got held up at work, so my wife staked out our place in line for a full half-hour before I even got there. But I did feel a good share of agony for a different reason: I thought we were getting in for sure, so it was painful as hell to just stand there, wondering why we hadn't been let into the theater yet. See, a guy had walked down the line, counting off numbers in his head and pointing a corresponding forefinger at each of us. He got at least ten people past us before he told the rest of the line they could go home. This inspired me with confidence that we'd made the cut-off, when in fact, we'd only made the cut-off for people who had the possibility of getting in. Turns out we missed actual entrance by at least ten people, so it was a fool's paradise the whole time.

Anyway, this is my long story for explaining how we ended up seeing Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad -- for a combined twenty-five bucks, rather than a combined zero bucks -- instead.

I don't make much of an effort to see Robin Williams movies these days -- and really, who does -- but I am intrigued by Goldthwait, the former screechy comedian who's transformed himself into a director with a unique perspective. I liked Shakes the Clown pretty well, and then was really impressed by Sleeping Dogs Lie, which sensitively tackled the aftermath of a nice young woman's impulsive decision to give oral sex to a dog. If you don't believe me that a movie like this could be anything but tawdry, give it a watch.

World's Greatest Dad continues Goldthwait's tradition of taking subject matter that just seems so wrong, and then somehow making it sensitive and thoughtful. (Whereas Tom Green might use the same subject matter to poke a stick in the eye of good taste). I won't tell you too much about the movie, because most of its synopses already say too much. I was blissfully ignorant about it coming in, and I think that's why I liked it as much as I did.

But not quite as much as my wife, who surprises me sometimes. Not that my wife is at all squeamish with her subject matter -- she's much more likely, for example, to watch movies about serial killers than I am. But it surprised me to learn first that she'd even seen Sleeping Dogs Lie (we were dating when we both saw it, but apparently, neither of us ever mentioned seeing it to the other), and second, that she'd liked it enough to prioritize World's Greatest Dad on her "must see" list. Not having known Goldthwait from his acting career, which consisted mostly of 1980s comedies like One Crazy Summer and the second through fourth Police Academy movies, my wife was primed and ready for World's Greatest Dad on the basis only of Sleeping Dogs Lie, and an interesting interview she'd heard with the man on NPR.

Knowing these things, I forfeited my chance to select In the Loop, which I wanted to see slightly more, and which was playing in the comfy couch theater. I longed for the comfiness of those couches, which I hadn't gotten to experience (for one reason or another) in over two years, especially since I already felt exhausted from two long days in a row. But dang it, I'm a softy, so World's Greatest Dad it was.

I guess that makes it somewhat appropriate that my wife had to sit next to the smelly old people.

I've told you before that this theater is frequented by old people. Usually, their biggest problem is their inability (or unwillingness) to control their impulse to randomly vocalize their thoughts. Last night, however, it was their smell.

I caught a whiff of it not long after I'd sat down, though I couldn't immediately identify its source. I thought it might be the young couple to my left, whose age would suggest good hygiene, but whose appearance suggested a possibility of hygiene cluelessness. To be fair, my sniffer has been more or less on the fritz for about nine days, since I first started feeling sick, so in a way it was probably a miracle that I even smelled the odor at all. Then again, that also gives you an idea how strong it must have seemed to someone with normally functioning olfactory glands.

And what was this smell? Lord, who knows. Foot cheese? Depend undergarments? Weird old-person skin lotion from the 1940s? It could have been any or all of them combined. All I can tell you is that it was pungent, and that it tended to waft.

For about the first half-hour, the smell went unacknowledged between my wife and me. But eventually I looked over and saw that she had her hand covering her nose. I asked her if she wanted to move, a question she repeated to me (when I also covered my nose) some 20 minutes later. I guess in retrospect, maybe my wife did want to move, but needed my validation of the scenario in order to convert that desire into action. But neither of us took the other's suggestion at the time it was offered -- perhaps assuming that the other viewed moving as an inconvenience -- so we sat there, basting in the rotting body chemicals from the people next door.

The amazing thing was that my wife loved the movie. Even as tortured as she was by the neighboring stench, and even though it required her to hold a hand to her face for much of the second half of the movie, it did not affect her enjoyment in this slightest. She used this as proof of just how great World's Greatest Dad truly was.

Me, I was just glad, for the first time in nine days, to have a partially broken sniffer.

Disparities of laughter

One of the most difficult things about comedy is that humor is inherently subjective. What some people find hilarious may leave others non-plussed, even repulsed.

And so any time you're watching a comedy in a big audience, some people will always be laughing, while other people will always be rolling their eyes. The really successful comedies are the ones that get most of the people on the same page. (Then again, that's also the defining characteristic of the really unsuccessful ones -- but it's the wrong page).

So I don't know if the phenomenon I experienced at I Love You, Man last weekend is actually avoidable, but that didn't make it any less annoying.

And that phenomenon was this: Where I found jokes mildly amusing, the people sitting next to me were laughing their fool heads off.

It almost derailed my ability to enjoy the film. Fortunately, we moved.

Normally, I wouldn't blame people for finding a movie funnier than I do. But in this case, I did, because it was not their only disruptive behavior. These two ladies in their 60s (what is it with eccentric ladies in their 60s?) insisted on talking at nearly regular volumes, and when I finally shushed them, one of them turned and said "Really?" in an incredulous tone of voice, as if daring me to escalate things. I felt a little rush of adrenaline, but I chose not to escalate. Instead, we moved.

And so it was that I considered their unbridled cackling to be a sign of spite and rudeness rather than an involuntary reaction to their enjoyment of the movie.

But let's say these people had not been otherwise rude. The problem would have still existed. My appreciation of the film would have still been unduly biased by their enthusiastic laughter, when I wasn't at their level yet. I would have wondered why I didn't find it funnier, and would have questioned whether it was funny enough, or funny at all. And if I didn't find it funny enough, then I'd start to see these people as idiots, and the more they laughed, the more I'd be sure that this was a movie that could only be appreciated by idiots.

The thing is, I did find it funny, just not as funny as they did -- not until the movie settled in a little more, anyway. But the discrepancy between their laughter and mine could have permanently clouded my judgment if I'd let it.

Fortunately, on the other side of the theater, I was able to extricate myself from their influence, and ended up producing small fits of my own laughter pretty soon afterward. Funny thing is, though I couldn't hear them as well, I could still hear them, and they stopped laughing as hard. I guess I'm glad I don't share the same sense of humor as two eccentric seniors.

So how is a person supposed to avoid letting a laughter disparity ruin an otherwise good movie?

Well, the best strategy is to try to pick your theaters demographically, since this experience proved that it doesn't work to pick a movie according to probable audience demographics. In our diverse society, there are probably very few theaters that are frequented exclusively by certain age groups, but there are certainly theaters that skew one way or another. For some reason, the Landmark Theater in West LA, on Pico, skews old. I guess it's not that surprising -- the neighborhood is reasonably affluent, and this theater is newly refurbished within a couple years, which resulted directly in a hike in ticket prices. We love this theater, so we like to make excuses to go, but we can usually see the same movie for two dollars cheaper and a bit closer to our house. Unfortunately, I Love You, Man was not playing at favorable times at those closer theaters, so we ended up at the Landmark, without needing to have our arms twisted very far.

But you can't just avoid going too high-end -- too low-end is also a problem. We also go to The Bridge at the Howard Hughes Center, which is perhaps the closest theater to our house (although we're dead smack at the nexus of about five equidistant theaters, none more than three miles away -- ain't LA grand?). The Bridge refurbished about five years before the Landmark, meaning the initial shine has worn off a bit, the ideas of "theater fabulousness" seem slightly out of date, and a more middle to lower middle class has become the regular patron. I enjoy most movies fine here too, but certain incidents stick out -- like the time we saw Monster House in 3-D, and people were yelling at the screen. It's a kids' movie, people.

Perhaps a bit easier to control is the time you go to the movies. If you're trying to avoid eccentric old people, that 11:55 p.m. showing will certainly do it. Whether you'll stay awake through the closing credits is another story. I'm 35, and I think my days of going to 11:55 movies are behind me. But the matinee show, although cheaper, is sure to bring in those who eat their dinners at 4:30. Our showing of I Love You, Man started at 12:20.

Maybe the only way you can get a truly pure and unfettered perception of a comedy is in your own living room. With no one else around to either laugh too hard or laugh too little, there's been no baseline set for how funny it is. You laugh at what you find funny, and you don't at what you don't.

But I'd never trade the thrill of seeing a really good comedy with a really good audience. If it works out just right, the joy you feel at the jokes on display is kicked up a notch by the mutual intoxication passing between viewers. Sometimes you'll even look around at each other quickly and share a brief moment of bonding -- you've both discovered something that creates the exquisite release of hard laughter. And after all the laughter is done, and people walk out of the theater, it's with goofy grins on their faces, just a little bit dizzy from the experience. More bonding ensues in the form of knowing glances and the residual high.

Hollywood has been in a pretty good stretch, comedy-wise, but being able to genuinely laugh at a movie is certainly not something we should take for granted. As quickly as it came upon us, it could be gone again, maybe for years.

So do your best to avoid having that experience tainted. You'll thank me for it.

Overheard at the theater

I attended a screening of a movie called Lymelife on Thursday night, my third such screening on the heels of seeing Departures early last month. My wife gave me a really good route to get to the theater, so I arrived 15 minutes early. I'd eaten a small dinner, but there was no place within easy walking distance to grab a supplemental snack, and I'd already parked, so I just went in early.

I was trying to read my Entertainment Weekly, but this was one of those screenings where a lot of people knew each other, and I was finding it hard not to be distracted by the other conversations going on around me, as I sometimes am. The one closest to me was particularly hard to ignore, as it featured a British guy sitting in the row in front of me, talking to a guy and a woman sitting next to me. The last two were not British. To follow up on the logic of my last post, I'm racist against British guys, so I thought the fact that he was British was worth mentioning.

Anyway, two dowdy women in their mid- to late-60s came up to this British guy to ask him if he wouldn't mind moving over, because they needed two seats. A fairly ordinary request, you will agree.

Except that there were already two seats open next to the guy. As well as two seats in the row in front of him, which was still a perfectly optimal distance from the screen.

Unwilling to be bullied by the strange whims of two eccentric ladies, he pointed this fact out. He did indeed have another open seat on the other side, but rightly, he didn't see the logic behind relocating.

One woman, the less bizarre of the pair, seemed perfectly happy to occupy the seats adjacent to the British fellow. But the first woman stood firm. "I was just thinking about your left eye, how you have trouble seeing out of it," she told her compatriot.

"I'll be happy to move if you just tell me why I need to move," said the British guy, who by this point was looking quizzically around him, and for confirmation of the weirdness of this situation from his friends in the row behind. When the ladies' attention was turned elsewhere, the British guy asked his friends, "Am I being punk'd?"

I'm no physicist, but I can find no way that these women's viewing angles would be significantly altered by the guy sitting directly next to them, or with a buffer in between, regardless of the condition of anyone's left eye. The request simply didn't make sense, unless they had some issue about being seated next to this particular guy. He did have a bit of an air of danger about him, his hair closely cropped almost to the point of being totally shaved, and his outfit a bit London punkish. But if that was their concern, they could have just sat in the row in front of him.

They ultimately accepted the seats next to him without further argument.

I will never understand the peculiarities and inexplicable deficits of the human brain.