It may be a silver
screen but the space in front of it is a bear pit. Erin Scott questions why
multimillion dollar films can be wrecked by a 70p bag of crisps.
Was there ever a time when you could just go to the cinema
and enjoy the film?
It’s always been a problem but I have recently realised that
I just cannot remember the last time I saw a film in the cinema and there
wasn’t someone being completely inappropriate.
Well, I can, but that
was at 1pm on a Monday when there was no one but a friend and myself in the
cinema.
I think one of the worst cases of this has been when seeing
‘The Impossible’ which, for those of you who don’t know, is about the Boxing Day
tsunami in 2004.
During the film two women sat there and laughed, yes laughed,
as a family that were torn apart by the tsunami tried to find their way back to
each other.
The premise of this I found to be completely soul destroying
that two people could just laugh at such a tragic film.
Another recent exposure to clearly unmitigated stupidity was
during the Quentin Tarantino film ‘Django Unchained’ a critically-acclaimed
film portraying the journey of a slave and a bounty hunter tracking down some
of the country’s most wanted criminals as well as trying to free the slave ‘Django’s
wife.
This being a Quentin Tarantino film it involved large amounts
of profanity and violence.
However, despite being enough to please critics this film
was not enough to please the man on the row behind me who decided the film was
“so f*****g boring” that he felt the need to fill his time either shouting racist
comments at the screen or at some points having the audacity to sit there and
flick popcorn at me before announcing “This is bulls**t” and leaving about 40
minutes into the film.
Being a massive film fan I find this behaviour to not only
be a completely incomprehensible waste of £8, but also just barbaric, why are
you even at the cinema if you cannot sit still for two hours?
So, for those of you who are unaware of cinema etiquette
here’s a few pointers: Do not take a young child to a 3 hour musical about
France before the revolution that involves topics such as prostitution, death
and child abuse, they will not enjoy it and neither will anyone else, thanks to
you.
Don’t sit there and text - I know the cinema adverts about
it are annoying but they’re true.
Don’t stand up the second the film is over, I am actually
interested in the actors and crew, not to mention half the films now have clips
after the credits.
It is not compulsory, or even acceptable, to scream during
horror films.
It is okay to laugh during a comedy but not if you’re
laughing like you’re in a crowded bar, and what part of you thinks it’s okay to
sit there and eat crisps or rustle sweet bags every 5 seconds? If you want to
do that, go to the theatre.
Fact file:
The top 3 highest grossing films of 2012 made a combined
gross of nearly two and a half billion pounds worldwide.
The average price of a 2D cinema ticket in the UK is £6.
