Getting what you pay for at free outdoor screenings

Coco was my fifth ranked movie of 2017, and the affection has lingered enough for me to consider it a serious contender for my top 25 of the decade, which I will formulate in about 14 months.

So seeing it for the second time for free on one of those inflatable outdoor screens, on a blocked off side street, when my kids couldn't get comfortable and were both making noise about going home, but that was nothing compared to the noise everyone else was making, was probably not the best idea in terms of examining its candidacy.

It was maybe six weeks ago that I first saw the event in a neighboring community advertised, and it immediately put me in mind of the similar scenario in which I saw Zootopia for the second time. My son's school hosted such a screening in their gymnasium in early December of 2016, when I was finalizing that year's rankings and wondering if the movie was deserving of its third slot in my rankings. It was.

Sure, some of the obstacles to an unfettered viewing were still present -- squirmy kids, random noise, obstructed views. But at least having to pay for admission kept out some of the riff raff, and some of the riff raff was indeed to blame for the decidedly fettered viewing of Coco this past Saturday night.

You were allowed to get there as early as 6 p.m. for an expected 8 p.m. start. If this had been last Saturday they could have started it at 7, but we're a week into daylight savings now, meaning the sky is not truly dark enough for a movie until about 8. (As it turned out, they started at about 7:53, which was one of the evening's comparatively few blessings; seven minutes can be a big deal when you're talking about children up after their bedtime.)

The reason to get there early would have been to secure one of the bean bags the council provided, which were not the smaller bean bag chairs you traditionally think of when you think of bean bag chairs. These were the Rolls Royces of bean bag chairs, large and capable of accommodating multiple people, and able to be easily fitted in a particular direction, more like an easy chair than an amorphous blob.

We knew we were not likely candidates for those. Getting there two hours before the movie is all well and good if you're an adult, or have older children. Two hours early with younger children (mine are 8 and 4) and they turn into pumpkins before the movie even starts.

So when we arrived at just after 7, things were looking pretty bleak. Because these Rolls Royce bean bags were so big, they took up a disproportionate amount of the real estate in front of the screen, leaving less room than we needed for our improvised viewing outpost. This was going to consist of pillows, an inflatable beach lounger and a camping chair, if the camping chair would not be blocking anyone's view. But because the bean bags were so big, and claimed by only a single person in many cases, we were left looking for thin landing strips that would seriously encroach on the others who had gotten there earlier enough to stake legitimate claims.

Here we did have a bit of luck. Just as we were planning to stuff ourselves into a space that was about eight feet by three feet in the middle of four other bean bag chairs, and preparing to withstand the dirty looks of our neighbors for the entire night, I found an inexplicably unclaimed plot of land off to the side a few rows back. It was about the same depth but twice the width, and better yet, its positioning on the side allowed the camping chair to be erected in a spot where it would not block anyone's view. Glad I found it when I did, too, because two other groups descended on it just after I got there.

As the sky darkened we went to retrieve dinner from a local food establishment (yummy burgers!) and set up camp. Part of setting up camp involved the inflatable beach lounger. I'm not sure if you've seen this kind of thing before, but it's essentially a large wind sock that gets filled up with air by you running around in a circle while holding it open, and then trapping the air inside. When we first bought it, it took a long time for me to figure out how to do it. However, I've gotten a bit better and I got the air inside it, trapping it by rolling up the opening and clipping it off. It develops kind of the shape of a pair of lips, and you can then plunge a couple people into it as you would a bean bag chair.

The issue turned out to be that it's much different when you use one of these things on the beach and on the asphalt. My four-year-old's first instinct was to play in it like he would at the beach, and of course a bumped head was not long in the offing. It also turned out that in my rush to get ourselves set up, I probably rolled it up before it had as much air in it as would be ideal.

This became a problem over the course of the evening as every combination of the four of us tried to get comfortable in it in a way that also allowed our heads to be properly oriented toward the screen. Ultimately I ended up being in it with my older son for the lion's share of the running time, while my wife, the only one of us who hadn't seen the movie, took up residency in the camping chair with the younger one on her lap. But as the thing steadily deflates over time, by the end we were basically lying directly on the pavement, while I was clutching at the fabric to billow out as much of the air for a pillow as possible.

The problem was that my four-year-old kept going back and forth between this and the camping chair, only he couldn't get himself into the lounger without making a big ruckus. Any shifting causes that rustling noise of the fabric that is also disturbing. Let's just say it was barely controlled chaos for much of the movie.

So I'll be clear that many of our problems were self-inflicted. I can imagine we were quite the disruption to our neighbors, though they didn't show it in the slightest. And though our camping chair was on the curb and was not directly blocking anyone who was positioned on the street, the use of camping chairs was fairly limited overall, and I can imagine we might have been blocking somebody who was trying to take up position outside one of the store fronts, if they hadn't already had to give up the spot because of a total lack of visibility.

All that said, we at least tried to limit our noise, motion and visibility pollution. Others, not so much.

There were any number of others near us talking freely in normal tones of voice. One particular couple with their ten-year-old daughter bothered me to no end. They were completely unsettled, taking up and abandoning a spot in front of us several times during the movie, and at one point recognizing someone from one of the groups next to us. The mother of this family had no problem trying to maintain a conversation with the mother of that family. Not consistently, but enough that it struck me as highly disrespectful to the others around her. Didn't seem to strike her that way at all.

This is to say nothing of the people streaming out of the restaurants. Sure, they had not signed up for a free street screening of Coco, but they seemed to demonstrate no awareness whatsoever of the fact that others had. Instead of curtailing their conversations for the ten seconds they were picking through us on the way to or from their cars, they just continued whatever conversation they were having and didn't seem concerned whatsoever about unleashing bursts of laughter at whatever the other had said.

But the thing that bothered me the most was this woman who happened along during the film's emotional climax. You know, the part where young Miguel plays "Remember Me" to the title character. In this scene Miguel calls her "Mama Coco" a number of times. I didn't see where this woman had come from so I didn't know if she was a person leaving the movie early, or from one of the restaurants, but as she walked by she kept imitating him -- "Mama Coco!" -- and laughing afterwards. Not only was it obnoxious, it was also weirdly racist.

Most of what made the viewing so challenging, though, were things you would expect, inevitable parts of the experience. People getting up. People picking their way through the crowd. People rummaging through bags, and blocking the view as they did so. People having to quiet crying babies. People leaving a stroller or some other obstruction in a way that they didn't realize was blocking someone else's view.

Some of this I tolerated with relative equanimity. But other times it would annoy me to no end, for a reason I can tell you because you are also a movie fan.

There are two types of people in this world. There are those who feel like they should watch a movie start to finish with as much of their attention as they can reasonably muster. This group includes you and me. Then there are those who feel like they can drop in and out of a movie. They don't care if they arrive late or leave early. They don't care if something they choose to do during the movie prevents them from hearing everything or understanding every plot nuance. They think of a movie as, essentially, background, and as much or as little of it as they get, it's all the same to them.

A free outdoor screening is probably tailored to the second group of people, and if I'm going to attend it, I probably need to realize that.

But you know what?

Even with all this -- with my kids needing me to go buy a bottle of water (which I'd forgotten to pack), with my older son needing a chocolate ice cream from a vendor at the back of the seating area, with my older son talking about wanting to go to bed only ten minutes in (he later settled in), with large amounts of light pollution from street lamps, with the lower half of my view of the screen looking more like a city skyline of heads and strollers, with having to exert a huge physical effort to crane my neck in the right direction, with regular noise pollution from trains passing on the tracks above -- I still had tears standing in my eyes at the conclusion. They weren't rolling down my cheeks like they had in the theater, but that's also the difference between any first viewing of an emotional movie and its second viewing. Having tears even standing in my eyes was a major coup.

And my wife, who had to deal with regular shenanigans from the four-year-old more than I did, and whose comprehension of plot details was more crucial because she had never seen the movie, was reaching for her tissues at the end as well. More than anything I wanted her to see it and realize she also loved it, and somehow, she did.

I think a great movie is a great movie is a great movie, and even having some idiot mock it during the climax is not enough to ruin it.

Even when everything else was conspiring against it, Coco's greatness shone through.