guerilla tactics at the movies

sunday was one of those sticky-humid days best spent in an air-conditioned room, so some friends and i went to see harry potter and the half-blood prince. wanton spendthrift that i am, i indulged in a $5 medium fountain drink to celebrate my first 2009 summer blockbuster movie experience. livin' large, baby!

the movie was way more badass than i expected and i was really enjoying it. i'm a very casual HP fan, so i didn't care about it diverting from the book's plot. frankly, i don't even remember the book very well.

apparently, people also complained there wasn't any explanation of what happened earlier in the series, which seems slightly ridiculous to me. harry potter is one of western civilization's most phenomenally successful and ubiquitous book/movie/video game/unintentional sex-toy series. if the hogwarts crew has been quidditching under your radar for the past decade and you finally decide to see what all the hubbub's about by going in cold to the sixth movie... well, you probably deserve to be lost.

unfortunately, my aforementioned diet coke splurge meant i had to get up in the middle of the movie. nothing kills the mood like using crowded theater bathroom. during my whole trip, i kept thinking about how bad real life sucks compared to movies and how i'd rather be blasting shit with magic.

real life continued to suck once i returned to my seat. some churl kept throwing chewed-up candy. it seemed like he was targeting the girls directly behind me but i was catching collateral damage. after the third time i was struck, i decided to pull some rambo shit and go on the offensive.

i grabbed a bag of discarded popcorn from a garbage can in the lobby, then reentered my theater through a different door and found a seat way in back where i could see everyone. as soon as that little fucker threw something, i'd be on him like an hawk. i was planning to whip the whole bag at his head once i found him. or, if he was someone who could possibly beat me up, i would just throw stuff at the back of his head from the cover of darkness in a bit of poetic justice.

unfortunately, i was robbed of sweet vengeance because i never actually caught anyone in the act of throwing anything. i'm pretty sure it was this one douchey suburbanite teenager. he definitely would have been the "whole bag at the back of the head" scenario.

quis custodiet ipsos nerds?

i went to see "watchmen" the other day. i thought it was pretty good overall. here's a great piece of bathroom graffiti i found at a borders in san diego:

(it's tough to read, but one person wrote "who watches the watchmen?" and some wiseacre drew an arrow pointing to the quote and wrote "nerds")

i loved the novel and the movie is a pretty faithful interpretation, but it definitely has its low points. i hate ham-handed symbolism (i.e. "argh! the comedian was right! life IS just a joke!") and the movie had more than its share of that. plus, malin akerman and matthew goode certainly aren't going to win any oscars for their roles, but i don't think they're as bad as some people say.

despite my generally positive impressions, i left the theater with the feeling that i would have been confused had i not read the book. but mostly because people in the theater kept talking/laughing/making noise and i couldn't hear. we went to a matinee at a mildly crappy theater and the crowd wasn't exactly respectful.

the movie's high ratio of male-to-female nudity provoked quite a bit of snickering amongst the audience. i can understand a brief chuckle at seeing dr. manhattan in all his luminous blue glory for the first time, or at nite owl's relative flabbiness for a superhero... but it's pathetic when adults are still giggling at a completely nonsexual image of a naked person after seeing it for the sixth or seventh time.

i think my worst "inappropriate laughing at a theater" experience was "the fellowship of the ring." i'm a big LoTR fan (shocking, right?) and i had been following the production of that movie for like three years.

i saw it on opening night in a packed theater and i was spellbound, up until the scene where boromir gets shot by a bunch of arrows. a group of people somewhere in the back of the theater started laughing uproariously and i have no idea why... looking at it objectively, there isn't anything funny about the scene; no goofy facial expressions or weird groans or anything.

i was livid at them ruining that scene for me. to this day, i still have nagging memories of those boorish assholes whenever i watch it.