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.
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