Marshall and the Movies

I’m a little behind on participating in memes that I wasn’t tagged in, but here’s my late entry into the series that I have found quite entertaining.

Cinema Scream put together a list of bloggers’ “cinema code of conduct” after the Ebert/Roeper of Britain put forth a manifesto of crimes against humanity that can be committed at the theater.  You know, like talking on your cell phone, smacking, and putting your feet on the seat in front of you.  Here’s their colorful, exciting graphic:

The meme asks for bloggers to add any other rules that should be added.  To this, I reply “read my random factoids column” because I have written about enough annoying moviegoing experiences that I could have a season of “Seinfeld” concepts.  But to add a new one, I’ll talk about my experience yesterday at “Black Swan.”

People need to respect saved seats. My friend and I got into the theater early so we could save two more seats for people coming later and still have good seats.  Up at the second-highest row, you get into some coveted premium seating.  Sure enough, the two people meeting us didn’t walk in until about the trailers, which made for about 20 minutes of us fending off the two seats.  A large group of twenty-something women were also on our row, and they clearly wanted our two seats.  So much so that one of them decided to aggressively use one of them as her footrest.

Later, a couple came up and just sat in them about 5 minutes before the previews started.  The entire auditorium was almost entirely full, so I wonder how they had the nerve to just sit in the seats.  Clearly if you are that late, those kind of seats aren’t going to be wide open like that.  If you want good seats, you have to get to a crowded movie early: it’s Social Darwinism of the multiplex, and it has been governing moviegoing for a long time.  Don’t act like it doesn’t exist.

So, dear moviegoers, sometimes groups don’t all get to the theater at once.  No one is going to be saving good seats as a buffer between you and them.  If they happen to be the kind of person that does want to do that, you’d be much better off finding a different seat.