Bad Behavior at the Movies

Tonight I can say I've seen it all.  I thought I had seen it all before, but I was wrong. Now, I've seen everything.

Nearly sold-out crowd for a midnight documentary.  People are jazzed up. Some are dressed up like the subject, as a kind of tribute. Everyone's cheering for the intro, folks are into the movie.

So everyone will behave, right? Surely they've come to actually, I don't know, watch the movie?

Not so fast. Two people seemed to have other agendas. Mr. Texto on the left, several rows in front of me, lost focus with the film not even 15 minutes in, and instead of having the decency to just graciously nod off, the emboldened sonofabitch thought he might see if anything on his mobile phone could entertain him further. Answer, unfortunately, was yes, as he proceeded to distract himself (and ~100 of his fellow movie-goers) every ten minutes for the next hour.

But our little attention-deficit poster child only gets takes the 2nd place trophy in the Most Annoying Person at the Midnight Movie contest I was holding in my own mind tonight.

No no - the big prize goes to Sally McSnapperson who, I presume, loved the movie so much that she felt the need to further document it by taking photographs with the camera of her smartphone.  She held the damned thing up to the light a few times, and an eager audience of filmgoers watched that shutter close more than once.  Sad news, though - the pics didn't turn out to her liking.  Don't worry though, guys, she wasn't going to give up that easily.  She could do better. The flash! She switched that feature on and went to town.  I'd say ten flash pictures from a two-minute period of the film are now sitting idly in her phone, ready for her to swipe through fondly as she rides the subway back to New Jersey or wherever the hell she crawled out of.

I'd now like to address the people sitting to her immediate left and right, as well as the full row directly behind her.  Were you just a bunch of raging pussies, or had someone actually bound your fingers for some reason, rendering you completely incapable of tapping the budding shutterbug?  I won't hear any excuses of just being too drawn into the film to have noticed it, because even if such captivation was possible, this was not the film to inspire such a comment.

Yours truly was of course the brave soul who wandered from the back row of the theater down to the middle of the third row to tap the crazy person on the shoulder and hiss "EXCUSE ME BUT THE LIGHT FROM YOUR CAMERA IS EXTREMELY DISTRACTING." She gave me a look of immediate compliance mixed with pure mortification that indicated it hadn't crossed her mind that there were other actual humans sharing the same space as she.

Because I'm a good person I will choose to forgive, but I will never forget.