planning ahead

Seriously. Would it kill the Sunset Drive In to let us know what movie they’re gonna be showing in 3 days? I’m just in the dark about it. I would love to know what movie it is, cause I’m inviting the business unplugged to go on Friday night.  I have no stinkin’ idea how its gonna go down.  Here’s hoping the business majors show up anyway!

Movie Theater

Last night I went to the Edward’s Cinema in Bako, to the late showing of “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” with my friends Megan and Brandon. It’s an interesting movie, and I would recommend it if you have 10 dollars and 3 hours to burn.

Anyway. We sat down in the mid-sized theater around 9:30 so that we would be sure to get some good seats. We were about 5 rows from the top, just to the left of the center of the stadium…these were prime seats. Just to the right of me was a middle aged woman saving the seat on either side of her. I found this acceptable because the theater was filling up quickly. I even heard a couple a few rows down asking some people to scoot towards the center so they could have two seats together. I was glad we had arrived with plenty of time to spare…ahead of the crowd.

The movie began, and I was pretty enthralled. 10 minutes in, my cell phone vibrated in my lap. I looked down to see that Alyssa had sent me a reply to an earlier text message. About 2 minutes later, she sent another quick text and I, not really thinking through the situation, started typing out a quick reply to her. As soon as I had begun the message, the woman to my right tapped my shoulder and said in a near regular volume voice, “Do you mind? Its really dark in here and your phone is really bright!”

I felt awful. I felt like all of those Sprint commercials about “silencing your cell” at the beginning of the previews were suddenly aimed directly at me and my beaming phone in the theater. I was a movie wrecker! I turned my phone over in my lap so the screen was facing my thighs and starting scheming on how I could properly apologize at the end of the movie.

As the movie wore on, I still felt horrible about the cell phone incident. Then, I noticed something interesting. The woman who had asked me to stop texting was stretching out into the two seats adjacent to hers. She was reclining in three prime theater seats, right smack dab in the middle of the packed theater!  She proceeded to rearrange herself for maximum comfort at least 5 times over the course of the lengthy movie, and bumped my arm off the rest a few times.

My first instinct was a furious judgement. I thought to myself, “Who the heck does she think she is…telling me to stop texting and then bogarting 3 whole seats! Lame.” Then after a few minutes my fury melted into pity. She was sitting all alone. Bummer. No one to sit next to. When you go to the movies alone, there’s no one to digest all of the epic moments with afterward. The movie ended around 12:45 and I did apologize at the end of the film.

By the way, the girl seated directly in front of me was texting on her iPhone frequently…and her LCD phone screen is about 4 times the size of mine. She didn’t get a reprimand from the theater Nazi.