Good for the staff at the Alamo Cinema in Austin.
They took a stand for common manners recently and the rest of us should appreciate it if more such steps were taken, especially at the cost of entertainment today.
First of all, the cost of a movie is fine. Compare what you get today to what you watched when spaceships had visible wires and you could see the zipper in the back of the monster.
On the other hand, movies are expensive enough that you don’t want to put up with some ill-mannered cretin who insists on talking all through the show.
After all, there IS a lobby out front.
Go sit there and talk.
Or go down the street and buy a cup of coffee and talk.
Just shut up in the theater, please.
Well, the staff in Austin, Texas did something about it, as a recent Associated Press story explained:
“It seems like such a quaint notion: Folks would go to the movie theater, buy their tickets at the box office, then sit down, shut up and pay attention for two hours to what was on the screen.
“Now, the piercing glow of cell phones lights up the darkness like so many pesky fireflies, and people talk to each other in a packed auditorium as if they were sitting in the privacy of their own living rooms.
“The Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas, did something about this trend by kicking out a patron who refused to adhere to the theater’s rule against talking or texting, then turned the ranting, profane voice message she left into a hilarious public service announcement.
“It’s gotten over 1.75 million hits on YouTube in just a couple of weeks.”
If you can’t behave yourself in the theater, you deserve to get kicked out.
The rest of us, amazing as that may seem, paid our admission fee because we actually wanted to enjoy the movie.
So put away the cell phone, close your mouth and enjoy the flick.
After all, a whole army of people who get paid a lot more than we do, put in a chunk of time to create this masterpiece. We might as well enjoy it.
— Chuck Smith