Use The Silencer

Over the weekend I went to see two movies. At both movies I was surrounded by persons who did not get the memo on movie theater etiquette. Or, I did not get the memo that movie theater is now a synonym for a private home's living room. Both times I went to the movies I was surrounded by folks who were disrupting my moviegoing pleasure. When going to a movie theater I seek solace, darkness, and entertainment. This was not the case, either time.

The first film of the weekend was Mary Poppins. Yes, that delightful 1964 Disney classic starring Julie Andrews and the king of slapstick himself, Dick Van Dyke. I was expecting to have some in house disturbance given the median age of moviegoers was 6. I was mistaken. The demographic that made me forget the spoonful of sugar in my medicine was a median age of 19. Sitting directly behind me was a gang of four from the latter demographic. From the get-go they were answering cell phone calls, talking loudly among each other, and commenting on what was happening in the film. Mary Poppins may be practically perfect in every way, but if she used her tape measure on any one of these four boors, it would have measured them at "dumb ass". My partner in crime and myself patiently waited for them to calm it, stop the nonsense, spit spot, but that didn't happen. So, about 45 minutes into the movie, my partner in crime turned around and said, "The 5-year-olds in here behave better than you." There was a knuckle knock exchanged between us to commemorate the hopeful silence of the annoyers. Yet, those douches kept on, but now with whispers. I tried mind bullets on them, but they just looked back with glances of supercalifragilisticexpialidocious-ness. Damn that Mary Poppins.

The next day, I went to see The Brothers Bloom sans partner in crime. This movie is rated PG-13. I was hoping there were no tweens, teens, or twenty-somethings to ruin my experience this time. False. The theater was only a third filled when I chose my seat. I had a row to myself. By the time the movie started, my row had two pairs on either side of me. The pair to the left were many seats away, but the pair to the right were only two seats away. A tween and her mother (or an aunt, not sure. I know it was a grown-up). During this screening, the "mother/aunt" was explaining the movie to the tween. The sound in the theater waxed and waned. There was not enough waxing to drown out the explaining of the plot, or repeating of lines just said by the characters. I wanted to hurt someone. Okay, not someone, but that pair to the right of me.

It was after that second film that I thought to myself, I am glad I am against firearms because a silencer would have come in handy. I then remembered those poisonous darts I smuggled in from Papau New Guinea and what Tony Soprano once said, "A wrong decision is better than indecision." Bring me my straw!