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#41. The Substandard’s List of Movie Theater Grievances
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Dudes Chatting — movie theater grievances ("Harry Send" episode): Billed as a cranky-old-men venting session, the episode covers a range of theater sins with escalating specificity. JVL opens with a contrarian claim that cell phone use has actually improved — Sonny immediately and forcefully disagrees, citing every recent screening he has attended. Sonny's grievances are vivid: a six-year-old doing wind sprints up and down the aisle during Spawn, and a baby crying twenty minutes into a recent Wonder Woman screening. JVL's main complaint is parents bringing young children to hard-R films at late hours — he saw a roughly four-year-old child at a 9 p.m. Deadpool screening. Vic invokes sticky floors, the chaos of seat-blocking for Return of the Jedi with a group of ten friends, and notes that stadium seating has eliminated several classic theater afflictions. JVL's most specialized grievance is masking — the failure of theaters to adjust their curtains to match the aspect ratio of whatever film is playing, leaving black space at the edges of the frame. No reviews or box office segment.
Full transcript
Vic00:00:00Hello, and welcome to another micro-episode of The Substandard, sponsored by Dollar Shave Club. I'm Victor Matus, along with Jonathan V. Last and Sonny Bunch. Just a quick reminder that full episodes of The Substandard are available every Thursday, and Substandard show notes are mostly posted by Jonathan Last every Friday at weeklystandard.com. Mostly. Mostly. This episode is what I call, and JVL knows what I'm talking about, this is the Harry Send episode. What does that mean, JVL?
JVL00:00:36There was, in the late 1990s, an oft-run ad for Microsoft Windows, I think. I'm going to guess it was for Microsoft, yeah. The idea was to humanize Windows. This was right when they were in their big antitrust case, and so Microsoft started spending bazillions of dollars on crisis communications. And they're showing all these people using Microsoft products to express themselves and make their lives. And one of them was this incredibly cranky old man, who, in the voiceover section, was like, you know, I use Microsoft products to be able to tell people what I think. And so you see that on the screen, as his voiceover is typing, you see him typing Harry, and then him saying, Send! Harry Send. And so this is cranky old men telling you what they think about things.
Sonny00:01:25For the younger audience out there, this is the... You know what grinds my gears? Oh, is that what they... It's a Family Guy reference. It's, you know, grinds my... Well, there you go. What grinds our gears?
Vic00:01:36Well, what is grinding our gears on this mini? Tell me. What is it we're talking about?
Sonny00:01:42Garbage people. Well, that's kind of an evergreen now. Garbage people...
Vic00:01:46I'm sorry, you'll have to be more specific.
Sonny00:01:48Garbage people who go to movie theaters with their garbage tendencies and ruin everything for everyone else.
Vic00:01:55Especially now that the summer movie season is upon us.
Sonny00:01:58Summer movie season is out there, so the dregs of society have decided to drag themselves to the theater and really muck everything up for the rest of us.
Vic00:02:05What peeves us and what peeves you? JVL, do you want to start off on what it is that drives you crazy? Can I start off with a happy thought?
JVL00:02:17Please.
Vic00:02:17Or do we want no happy thoughts?
JVL00:02:18No, no, no, no. Please. At least in... I can't speak for the entire universe, but in my corner of the theater-going world, the pestilence... The pestilence of cell phone use has diminished. Really? Five years ago, three years ago, what was it, Sonny? The theater owners looked like they were desperate to surrender to this stuff. They were saying, oh, you know, kids these days, they want to use their phones during movies, and you can't be a fuddy-duddy. You've got to let them do it. Otherwise, they won't ever go to movies. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I believe AMC even tried establishing phone-friendly screenings, so you could come and, you know, text and tweet and do everything you want to do.
Vic00:02:54There's a huge backlash against it.
JVL00:02:56And this is a lesson. That whenever somebody tells you that technology can't be stopped and information wants to be free, they are full of it. Go try to find naked pictures of Aaron Andrews on the internet. You can't. And that's because there was an intense, intense exercise of willpower, legal willpower, to make those things disappear.
Vic00:03:16That's why you had to download them when they were available.
JVL00:03:20Just kidding. And so if you decide, if a society decides that something is important to them, they actually can put the technology on the internet. Technology toothpaste back in the tube. That's what we've done with cell phones and movies, and I love it.
Sonny00:03:32No, you're so, I mean, this is just wrong, because every single theater experience I've had in the last five years, and I've had a lot of them, there's been some asshole in the theater looking at his goddamn phone three inches from his face, usually in like one of the first two or three rows, you know, before it gets to the stadium seating. So literally everyone who has stadium seating can kind of look down on it and see that glowing little object that is. That is just drawing your eye away from the screen. So I don't know what fantasy. You've invalidated my theory. I don't know what fantasy world you live in, but it's gotten worse. It has not gotten better. It's gotten worse.
Vic00:04:08You go to more movies than I do, obviously, but I've been going more, obviously, because of the show, and I haven't had that experience. Also, is it okay to look at your phone during the trailers?
Sonny00:04:19I would say it's frowned upon, but it's not the worst thing in the world. Not yet a faux pas. It's not a horrible. It's like talking during. The trailers, which is okay-ish. Okay-ish. As long as it's quiet.
JVL00:04:33Between the trailers, it's okay to talk. Yes. So you can lean over to your seatmate and say, boy, that new Spider-Man Homecoming movie looks like hot garbage, and that's totally in bounds. Yeah.
Sonny00:04:43I think that's fine. But the problem is the cell phone is not the real issue here. The real issue is humanity. Humanity has always been garbage. Preach it. Preach it, brother. I would say that this has been something that's annoyed me. When did the Spawn movie come out? Was that like 97? I'll effort that. 98, maybe. But I remember seeing this in theaters, and I was like 14. So I was 15 at the time, probably. 14 or 15. I go to see this movie. Jonathan and I were here at the theater. And I'm sitting there in the theater, and there is, I swear to God, a six-year-old doing wind sprints up and down the aisle. Just like running. Just running up and down the aisle. And I'm like, what is this? Because some faultless parent had brought their child there to watch a movie that was totally inappropriate for them. And instead of actually like- Just run up and down in that spot. Just run up and down the aisles. That's fine. Nobody's going to care. Why would this theater full of people care that you, child, are running up and down in the aisles? Who cares what they think anyway? I'm here to watch the movie, so you do your own thing. And this has continued for 20 years I've been going to movies and having this happen. Recently- Really? Was at the Wonder Woman screening that I went to just days ago, where some faultless individual brought an 18-month, maybe two-year-old baby that, of course, of course started crying 20 minutes into the movie. Baby girl, though, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Of course. Well, I mean, it was empowerment. It was empowerment. But thank God, thank God this father or whoever took the child away. It was definitely a father. Interesting. Yeah. So anyway, this is- People are thoughtless and awful, and cell phones are only, they are only a symptom, they are not a cause. JVL.
JVL00:06:31As a person with a great number of children, I make a point of never judging parents about anything. Except? Except bedtimes. The one thing I am incredibly judgy about is seeing parents taking kids out, what should be small kids, way past an acceptable bedtime. Right. Kids act badly, and it's not the kid's fault, that's on the parent. Yeah. And it is exactly, I remember when I went to see Deadpool, I saw a 9 p.m. screening of the very hard-R Deadpool. Very hard-R.
Vic00:07:09Hey kids, this is a superhero movie.
JVL00:07:10In which a mom had brought, I think he was about four or five. So not even an infant that you could hope to sleep through, just a kid who should never be up to 11 o'clock at night under any circumstances, no matter what. You are asking this kid to fail in life. Yeah. And to a movie. In which he should absolutely not have been. The language. Sitting in there.
Sonny00:07:30Yeah, yeah, yeah. Language, nudity, violence. I mean, like actual pretty intense violence. I mean, it's.
JVL00:07:35No, it was. And so, yes, that is one thing. This is a thing that I judge other parents for. And I think.
Vic00:07:41There were, I mean, there are parents who brought their children to see Logan.
JVL00:07:45You know, which is.
Sonny00:07:46Yeah. I mean, look. Very graphic, obviously. And like, this is, you know, part of the problem is that parents have been conditioned to think like, okay, superhero movie. This is probably something that my, you know, 10 or 11 year old or whatever can go to. And that's not the case with a lot of these kind of new movies that are coming out. Logan and Deadpool and all that.
Vic00:08:05No, they should know better. It's easy to find out ahead of time. Yeah.
Sonny00:08:07But this is just part of being a parent, right? Like, the MPAA has done a very good job of creating a ratings classification system that says, hey, here's a movie that's rated R. And it's rated R for these reasons. And actually, now, sometimes we make fun of these reasons because it's like historical smoking. Like, okay, F off. But like, but, you know, when it's strong. It's strong sexual content or graphic violence and nudity. Like, you people should know.
JVL00:08:32You should know. There is one thing that I find even more distracting than that, though, which is masking.
Vic00:08:38Oh, the screen. Do you guys know what masking is? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The ratio.
JVL00:08:41So masking, for people who don't, movies are typically shot in one of two aspect ratios, one to 185 or one to 213, I think it is. And theaters are equipped with special curtains. And these curtains, they have both horizontal. And vertical curtains, which can expand or contract to shrink the width or the height of the screen. Because what you want is you don't want the theatrical equivalent of black bars. Yeah. The black letterbox. It drives me nuts to be paying $18 for the special Dolby Cinema presentation of a movie and to sit there staring at the immobile curtains. And I have tried tweeting delicately at AMC about this, because I don't want to be the guy who goes to the theater manager and says, hi, hi. I don't mean to be a nerd or anything, but why the fuck don't you mask your screens properly? Yeah. Yeah. But on the other hand, like, it drives me crazy and they're destroying our cinema experience.
Vic00:09:41I will say that, by and large, though, these are little complaints compared to the movie experiences that we had growing up, especially you and me, JVL. The 70s, in the 80s. I mean, I remember I saw Cape Fear in 1991 here. And the guy next to me was drinking out of a brown paper bag. And then there were people walking up on stage and it was a little bit crazy. And I also remember when I was younger, you know, I mean, people threw popcorn at each other all the time. I don't see that anymore. Stadium seating, you don't have to worry about, you know, blocking seats for friends like I had to do for Return of the Jedi, like for 10 people or whatever. That was insane. And you don't have to worry about, you know, you don't see a lot of that anymore because everybody is so separated. And I would say the biggest complaint that I had growing up was. The floors and how sticky they were. You dropped something on the floor. Oh, yeah. Gum, whatever. It's sticky. You could hear it when you're walking.
JVL00:10:32And I assume it's gum, depending on the theater, you know, but. Our Twitter buddy, Gabe Rossman, mentioned last week an experience he had seeing. Do you remember which movie this was, Sonny?
Sonny00:10:44It was Fear and Loathing.
Vic00:10:48Fear and Loathing.
JVL00:10:49How next to him in the back of the theater were a couple of gentlemen who were enjoying one another. In the theater. And I said to Gabe, was that okay with you? And Gabe said, I'm sure it's fine.
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