Given that I can't drive while recovering from a dislocated/fractured shoulder, I can't really get out to the movies at night, unless it's by walking or public transportation, neither of which are necessarily exciting options.
Fortunately, I have also missed two weeks of work, which means I've had my days to myself.
So this past Wednesday I caught a double feature in the theater, which timed out just about perfectly to encompass my kids' entire school day, including transportation to and from the venue. Dropped them off, saw two movies, picked them up.
The second was a movie I wanted to see (
Brightburn) while the first was a necessary bridge to get me to the second (
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum). The unnecessarily and indulgently long running time of the first (130 minutes) was why the double feature managed to suck up my whole day.
The way I felt about the movies was consistent with my anticipation of them. I really liked
Brightburn (four stars), but
John Wick 3 (1.5 stars) continued that series' diminishing returns, as I knew it would. What a trudging, numbing succession of bludgeoning violence.
There are two reasons I'm telling you about this double feature.
The first was that it's been a long time since I've felt this harassed by a theater staff. I'm not going to call out the particular theater because their staff is usually quite nice, but this time I had someone who was taking her job a little too seriously.
As I was checking my phone while the
Wick credits rolled, this woman came up to me and asked to see my ticket.
After the movie was over. She was asking because there had been more people in the screening than tickets sold, and I guess she wanted to catch me in the act of being the extra person. Even though I didn't pay for my ticket (critics card), it was a legitimate ticket, but she looked at it for about 30 seconds before returning it to me without so much as a gesture of apology. Maybe she spent so much time because I was not sitting in my actual assigned seat, but it was a 10 a.m. screening with seven people in attendance. Who finds their assigned seat?
But I was not done with this woman. Or, I should say, she was not done with me.
During
Brightburn, she swept through, I guess for quality control reasons (and probably to check to see if the number of people in
this screening matched the number of tickets sold). On her way back up through, she made her way down my aisle to tell me to take my feet off the seat in front of me.
Seriously?
Granted it's not traditionally "polite" to have your feet on the seat, but I thought theaters had long since stopped enforcing whatever policy they may have about this. They know that the seats are too small and that some of their taller/larger patrons may not be able to get comfortable without getting creative. Or they should know, anyway.
It's unclear to me whether she would have done this regardless of who I was, or whether she had some residual axe to grind because she was suspicious of my attendance in the first session, or whether she even recognized I was the same person. But in any case it annoyed me.
I thought of saying something afterward, but who can be bothered.
The second thing I wanted to tell you was something funny, and something that worked in my favor.
Although I didn't notice it at the time, during
John Wick I lost the No Sugar Coke I'd carried in in my winter jacket pocket. I didn't open the drink because most of that movie occurred before noon, and I was more likely to need it during the second movie. But it was only by total dumb luck that I, in fact, had it available to me at all.
I figure it fell out of the pocket and under the seat, because that's where I found it, on the ground, when
Brightburn started.
How did this happen, you ask?
This is no small theater where I saw these two movies, boasting about ten screens. But for whatever reason, they programmed the 10 a.m.
Wick and the 12:50 p.m.
Brightburn both on screen 4, just to the left of the concession stand. So after getting about 20 minutes to catch up on my baseball scores, I found myself walking back in to the very same auditorium.
And because my natural instinct about where to sit in a theater is so keen and so consistent, I chose the
exact same seat -- at which point I saw the can of soda lying on the ground behind the seat, not yet having even realized I had lost it.
Three very particular and very unlikely things had to happen for this to be possible:
1) The two movies I had randomly selected for my double feature needed to be playing in the same theater.
2) I had to choose the same seat.
3) The theater staff -- maybe that nasty woman -- had to have missed it when they cleaned the theater between screenings.
In any case, I was really glad I had it, as I purchased a large popcorn as my "lunch" to eat during
Brightburn. Without that drink, the salt in the popcorn would have left me seriously dehydrated. I was already imagining a replay of my viewing of
Kick-Ass, another R-rated superhero movie, nearly a decade earlier, when a salty popcorn sans drink nearly drove me to distraction. (Somehow I managed to really end up liking that movie as well.)
I'd almost suggest the reason the woman shamed me regarding my feet on the seat was because she was annoyed I had smuggled a soda into the movie, but then again, if she'd seen the soda she surely would have cleaned it up.
Sticklers for the rules rarely let anything slide.
Who knew that National
Lampoon’s European Vacation would be a trendsetter 34 years after its release?