COMMENTARY – Theater-going advice for stupid people.

Looks like I’ll be postponing my Animal Crossing article another few days in light of several events over the weekend that I feel are more deserving of commentary. A friend of mine celebrated his birthday this weekend and for some reason threw his party on Friday, and we went to the theater to see Daredevil. So let’s see if you caught all that. We went to the theater on the opening night of a movie on a holiday Friday, Valentines Day no less. There was not a parking spot within three blocks. People were parked behind the theater, at all the surrounding restaurants, on the sidewalks, in the handicap spaces, in the fire lanes, in the road, legally or illegally there was a vehicle just about anywhere someone could slam on the brakes and throw it into park. What are all these people doing here? Well, watching a movie obviously, but what brings them all here now? Surveying the lobby while I waited in that endless line for overpriced popcorn, I broke the crowd down into three distinct major categories. Well, there was also the freak playing Dance Dance Revolution like he was having an epileptic seizure, but we’ll save him for his own special commentary later. The date couple was one of the more obvious and prominent groups, seeing as it was Valentines and all. How much more uncreative can you get than taking your chick out for the old “dinner and a movie” routine? I understand this is a tried and true method for getting to suck face for two hours in a dimly lit room, but if you’re serious about the girl and are interested in anything more than getting in her pants, then put a little more thought and ingenuity into your date than dinner and a movie. There are so many other things you could be doing together that would do far more to improve your relationship than sticking your tongues in each other’s mouths in the dark. If you’re too much of an idiot to think of anything else, then it is recommended that you don’t breed and pass on your obviously mentally inferior genes anyway, so you should forget the whole dating thing now and stop crowding the theaters. The second noticeable group were the “opening nighters”. These are the people who waited in line for a solid month to see Star Wars, not thinking that they don’t sell more tickets than they have seats for in the theater, so the guy who showed up five minutes before the movie started who bought his tickets earlier that week is sitting but two rows behind you and is laughing at you. What’s so important about seeing a movie the night it comes out anyway? Will it somehow be better or different than if you saw it a week or two later? Are you deathly afraid that you will get to work on Monday and somebody at the water cooler will ask you that dreadful question, if you saw some new movie or other over the weekend, and you’d just have to hang your head in shame and admit that you haven’t? Or perhaps you’re just one of those people who has to be first in everything, and you can’t stand the thought that, heaven forbid, someone saw a movie before you. Whatever your case, it’s pathetic. Go read a book or something. Maybe a dummy’s guide to computers so you can stop using AOL. If being the first person to see a movie is that important to you then I suggest you seek counseling. But you better hurry to book the good times with the psychiatrist, before someone else beats you to it. The last and by far most annoying group were the theater rats. A close relative to the mall rat, these adolescent punks anywhere from 9-15 years old were underfoot everywhere you went. It was like an infestation. How did they all get here? They obviously can’t drive. But in all fairness, I can’t rightly blame the kids. Children are stupid. No fault of their own, it’s a simple lack of life experience. To them, hanging out in crowded places like theaters and malls is “cool”. If the mall or the theater weren’t crowded, it would probably cease to have such popularity among them and they’d flock to whatever the new “cool” locality was. Who’s really at fault here are these children’s parents. They don’t feel like taking the time to raise their own children, so rather than spending time with them, they drive them to the “cool” places and dump them off. Then when they hit high school they wonder where their kids picked up the drug habits, the foul language, and the disrespect. I’m sure you aren’t thinking that all the rated R movies they snuck into when you dumped them off at the theater while they were young impressionable children had anything to do with it. You may find this regrettable and unfortunate, but unlike some animal that can spit out offspring and then kick it out on it’s own a few months later, you are stuck with your children for 18 years. You are responsible for everything they do during that time, and if your children turns out to be delinquents because you neglected to spend enough time with them and they learned everything they know instead from the TV, movies, or their likewise misguided friends, you have no one to blame but yourself. You’re probably the same people who didn’t listen to me about not dating if you can’t think of anything better to do than dinner and a movie and went ahead and had children anyways, and now you don’t know what else to do with them either. Well that’s what you get for not listening to me. So there you have it, you can add the movie-going experience to the list of things that would be better if everybody listened to me.