A Brief History of Movie (Time) Frustration

Buying movie tickets these days is like smoking cigarettes. The longer you're alive and the more you buy them, the closer they are to ending your life. Do you remember when movie tickets were five dollars or even less than five dollars? I sure as hell do, and it wasn't exactly ten or fifteen years ago either. I don't recall the price of the first movie I saw in my first official trip to the movies (or at least the first one I thought I saw, I might have to Phone-A-Mom for that one), but it didn't cost NINE FUCKING DOLLARS AMERICA. NO BLOOD FOR HOLLYWOOD.

So no, I don't exactly recall the ticket price of 101 Dalmatians. I do, however, remember the admission price for Spider-Man, which was a cold Lincoln. That's it. Five dollars. Now, after some Wikipedia detective work...

Oh.

Oh my dear Lord.

Dear, sweet, forgiving Lord.

That was six years ago. Spider-Man premiered six years ago. I'm a fossil. Carbon dating aside, let's discuss the movies. It was either this or my 2008 Halloween costume ideas, to which I always receive the same reaction: "Well who the hell is that?"

I'll go ahead and throw it out into the arena, despite the hard truth that it will immediately date this post once the Georgia small font has been laid; the most recent film I've seen is J.J.Abrams' cocktease Cloverleaf, which I enjoyed. The only thing I didn't enjoy about it was the astronomical admission price of nine dollars. Nine dollars. Since when is a movie you can only view at a theater's pace, with complete and incredibly rude strangers, worth nine dollars? That is never worth nine dollars. It's worth four dollars at best.

These days, that's really the magic of the movies: the exponentially plummeting conditions of movie theaters and their clientèle. I added French as a language for Blogger just for that word, for those of you weaned on brie and Perrier and PBS rather than my hot dogs and Ghostbusters crowd. Not that I'm eating freedom fries or anything over here.

Who's with me?

Movies might be improving by way of technological advancement and a desire to stay fresh in spite of new ideas being harder and harder to come up with, but they sojourn forth into new creative realms, all the while theaters become dilapidated and their patrons devolve further and further into knuckle-dragging, text messaging, yelling-at-the-screen evolutionary throwbacks.

I never really noticed it until that pivotal showing of Spider-Man, the last movie I recall paying five dollars for, and the first movie experience I can truly remember astonishingly rude...no, wait...

Cast Away, which premiered almost ten years ago, had a more impolite audience that Spider-Man, and I believe it was the first movie where my experience caused me to associate the awful time I had with the quality of the film; to this day, I refuse to watch it because of the frequency of cell phones "blowin' up," in the theater, even in the days before ringtones, when all we had was "Snake" on our Nokias. People shuffling in and out like a doctor's office waiting room, yelling back and forth like the New York Stock Exchange's traders floor, as if they were reenacting Tim Allen bomb Jungle 2 Jungle, which was actually the highest-grossing PG movie of 1997. Are PG movies even made anymore? That was the singularity that ignited my contempt for the movie-going populace, and now countless conversations I've had over my lifetime with people who "just don't go to the movies anymore" seem more illuminated than they previously did, now that I've had time to reflect on them.

Spider-Man was in fact the first movie I recall attending where a theater manager requested that ticket holders "shift to the far left," because the showing had been sold out. This was actually the only time I had attended a movie with President George W. Bush, who, enjoying such high approval ratings in 2002, refused to shift to the far left. In disgust, he walked out, though later he praised director Sam Raimi's post-9/11 New York imagery when Spider-Man clings to a robust Old Glory at the top of some nondescript skyscraper. Presidential observations aside, this was the first film I experienced where my excitement for it had been so bottled up that I spent the entire film seething in contempt for those around me, who dared defile my precious childhood hero, who I had followed with moderate regularity since Amazing Spider-Man #350. All things considered, the crowd for Spider-Man had nothing on the rabble at Spider-Man 2, who left me so angry with their primate antics and inconsiderate cell phone usage that I saw a matinée showing of the movie the next day with my stepdad.

Let's rewind a couple of weeks though in 2004, to the film which I easily consider to the high watermark of complete retardation in the movie theater. If you'll indulge me, it really made the case for sterilization of certain members of the human race. That statement alone probably caused my readership to drop from 9 to 3. Anyway. The film was Van Helsing. It alone kept me from attending the closest movie theater to my college campus for two years. I drove 15 more minutes and paid more money only to avoid that trash heap of a multiplex.

Van Helsing is truthfully a black mark on Hugh Jackman's career, the lowest of the lows, a desolate article of trash that should have been left on the cutting room floor, but some idiot thought people would see it, and shame on me for doing so; however, I am not here to critique the film but those who were in attendance. First off, two gentlemen beside me, were, during the movie, discussing "man laws" and when it was acceptable to take the urinal beside another man. Another shining example of humanity was wearing what can only be describing as plastic body armor. Amongst the theater patrons, there was also this universal acceptance that it was okay to make and take phone calls, with complete ignorance toward everyone else in the theater! I considered that be much worse than the screaming at the screen that was taking place, though others might define that to be humanity's lowest point. Have we really become apes?

I left the theater in a nuclear rage, never having felt so incensed at humanity, not even after "Four more years!" or the return of American Gladiators or the refusal to release the third season of The Adventures of Pete and Pete or even, even, even the time that old man almost hit me when I was making a left hand turn on a green arrow trying to escape a tropical storm in Nags Head in 2004. It took every last cell in my body not to cause a massive accident on U.S. 1 by flipping my car and attempting to take as many lives as possible. Eyewitnesses would be inclined to validate such hyperbolic rhetoric.

It really hasn't gotten any worse since Van Helsing, but then again, it hasn't improved either. Those infamous missteps by humanity followed me throughout the years, with people texting and making and taking calls, yelling at the screen, yelling at one another, and so forth. Let's take a quick glance at some of the more stupefying instances of human behavior at the movie theaters that I have experienced:

Sunshine, 2007: This dusty nugget is taken from a trip to a Virginia Beach mall with my sister, the only theater in the area code that was playing the film. As if the rapture had taken place, the lobby and box office were empty, saved for an over-pierced blond at the front far more interested in failing an easy level Sudoku than selling me a couple of tickets. After an aggravating and deafening silence, I tried to get her attention by fitting as much of my face as possible into the cutout of the plexigrass window until she slowly reacted to me, as if she were to die if she gave me her undivided attention.

Superman Returns, 2006: Ridiculously bizarre "oohs" and "ahhs" from the audience deep-sixed this one for me, especially when the audience was astonished that Superman was weakened by Kryptonite.

Jurassic Park, 1993: Never before or since has my movie visit been interrupted by so many bathroom breaks by strangers. My seven-year-old mind was hoping that the dilophosaurus attacking a portly Wayne Knight on the screen would reverse and shoot its venomous gelatin on the "gotta go gotta go gotta go right now" crowd.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, 2001: This one actually has nothing to do with strangers. When I was in high school, a girl I was interested in told me to meet her here to see this movie, but I never found her in the theater since it was packed. I ended up sitting in the top row and had to go to the bathroom the entire time. I will always have a full bladder when I think of Harry Potter. It also, in retrospect, makes me realize how low will stoop to get a girl's attention.

Juno, 2008: A gaggle of teenagers behind me claimed every single second of this movie was "gay" or "stupid." Naturally I hoped that their parents' cars, which I'm sure they drove, exploded on the highway.

Anger Management, 2003: This movie also has nothing to do with strangers. It sucked and I wanted to see Confidence instead.

The Matrix Reloaded, 2003: I skipped school to see this movie. I've almost forgotten about heckling fanboys yelling "IT'S NOT EVEN WORTH IT!" in regards to the 30-second preview of the third movie at the end of the decade-long credits.

The sad thing is they were right.

They were so right.

I still wanted the acne on their faces to explode like C4 charges.

No Country for Old Men, 2007: Probably could've done without the "WHAT IS HE SAYING?" "whispers" made by everyone around me when anyone was talking during the whole goddamn movie.

American Gangster, 2007: Teenage girls in front of me start comparing on-screen characters to their friends. "Naw, he ain't like that!"

Finally, we can never, ever forget...

Wild Wild West, 1999: 1999 was the same year I saw The Sixth Sense and got innumerable fake butter stains on my shirt from the popcorn, and the same year I decided not to part my hair to the side, where it now sits in its current nondescript male hairstyle. Haley Joel Osment and my high school yearbook pictures would never be the same. A couple of years later, 9/11 happened, and it just so happened to be Picture Day at Western Branch High School. In a bizarre twist of fate, or at least this is how I've conditioned myself to remember it, it was announced right after the "R" last names had their pictures taken, so everyone between S-Z wasn't looking as chipper in the 2002 yearbook as they did in 2001.

ANYWAY.

This movie sucked. People totally had sex beside me when I was trying to watch it, and I was in a theater that didn't have the now-ubiquitous and fat/fornication-friendly movable armrests on the seats.

I can completely see why people don't go to the movies anymore. The allure of the cinema is completely extinguished by drooling troglodytes yammering away on cell phones, and engaging in other outright brazen displays of unacceptable behavior. Maybe Netflix is the answer. Nine dollar tickets sure aren't, especially in what is now a (SUPER TOPICAL THIS WILL BE DATED NEXT WEEK) post-Heath Ledger world. Yet I keep going back, probably because you just can't get new movies from Netflix. I don't even have Netflix, not like it really matters. So I'll keep smoking those "cigarettes," if you will. You keep reading this cigarette carton of a blog; it's just as cancer-causing as anything else.

I lied about people having sex during Wild Wild West.

I don't even think I saw it in theaters.

But I mean, it probably would've been more interesting than a paraplegic Kenneth Branagh in a locomotive wheelchair.

Should probably cut it off here.

BAILAMOS, LET THE RHYTHM TAKE YOU OVERRRRRRR BAILAMOOOOOOOOOOOSSSSSSS