Rant of the Day.

I went to see a film at the Silver City yesterday. It has stadium seating. I was sitting about halfway up. Several times near the beginning of the film someone down near the front pulled out some sort of digital device which had a lit up display about 4 inches square. The person was texting or something. It was incredibly distracting.

What is it with people being so inconsiderate as to not clue in that they are bothering the people around them? And why were they doing whatever they were doing at all? They had just paid $11.00 to see a film so one would think that would be their priority. The movie had just started so not enough had played for it to become apparent whether it was a bad movie or not yet.

If had been sitting closer I would have thrown some of my overpriced popcorn at them.

Annoying Customer.

I had a first time kind of complaint Friday night. There was a guy who came early for The Spirit. He went over and bought a large popcorn. We have these little yellow kiddie popcorn bags we leave at the seasoning cart which are usually used for people to take some extra seasoning in or split up a bag if people want different seasonings. This guy then proceeded to fill up a kiddie bag with popcorn, put seasoning on it, then put it into a plastic bag. He repeated this with the entire large bag then got it refilled. My staff member and I both thought it was kind of funny, if bending the rules some. I certainly hope he's not on a low salt diet, the seasonings are basically flavoured salt.

At the end of the film the projectionist told me people had been changing seats away from the guy because he was eating his popcorn so loudly it was really distracting. Part of it was the crackling of the little bags and I guess the rest was just plain loud chewing? The projectionist was sitting out in the theatre watching the film and moved into the booth for the same reason.

I don't like situations like this, noise and distractions are one of the reasons people cite for not going to theatres to watch films but it does seem a little petty to ask someone to chew softer?

If I had been in the theatre I probably would have said something, I wish my projectionist had.

I know what the guy looks like so I'll know him the next time he comes. I'll probably either say something to him when he buys his ticket or check on him inside and see if he makes as much noise again.

Maybe if I'm lucky he's one of the people that read this blog and he'll let me know he won't do it again.

I hate it when...

Some girl showed up about 20 mins late for a film tonight and called her friends inside to find out where they were sitting. That's a trifle rude to the other customers. The theatre was quite full so she probably had to crawl over a bunch of people to get to her friends.

Cell phones have their place but not in a movie theatre. One of the most common answers given as to why some people prefer to see movies at home is distractions from other patrons in theatres, especially cell phones.

That's my 2 cents for tonight.

Gross things people leave behind in the theatre.

I think I did a post on this a while ago. The projectionists clean up all the popcorn bags etc. at the end of the night. We find some interesting stuff left behind by people either in the movies or by the classes earlier in the day. Just in the last couple days I've found under the seats.

- a sushi roll
-an apple core
- a used tea bag.
- we find lots of used napkins-some not just used to clean hands.
- lots of leaking coffee, pop and Ice cap containers.


The first four I left for the custodians to clean up. It's their job and they wear gloves, I'm not about to touch old sushi or used napkins.

Some times we find good things, I found a loonie tonight.

Annoying customer #413 / Hot Building.

Theatre is a bit hot today which reminded me of an incident from a couple years ago. It might have been a Tuesday but in any case it was a very busy night around the beginning of summer. This building is heated with radiant heating using liquid not by heating the air like most houses do. So when the outside temperature changes the insides of the buildings take a bit to catch up. The physical structure (concrete) of the building has to either warm up or cool down before the temperature inside stabilizes.

On this particular night the room was about half full and very hot by the end of the movie. As we learned in The Matrix human bodies produce a lot of heat. One older guy comes out after the movie and starts yelling at me about how hot the theatre is and he's had two heart attacks. I tried to be as nice as possible to him and explain the situation and how the temperature of the room is beyond our control.

I couldn't help but think though, why didn't he just leave before the movie was over if it was that big a deal for him?