If You Talk In The Cinema You Deserve A Painful Death

Posted: 19 March 2012
Tags: cinema, film

So long as there are people constantly texting, loudly munching popcorn or guessing what's going to happen next, the cinema will always be a painfully frustrating experience.

Other people in the cinema are a fucking nightmare.

I go to the cinema a lot and if you asked me in conversation about things I love I would more than likely say amongst unbelievably smelly cheese, jewellery and that new davidoff advert with Paul Walker that I ‘love’ going to the cinema. But I’ve realized lately, hand on heart, that the joy of witnessing celluloid magic collectively, the shared experience of it has seriously lost it’s sheen. It is now far less about the wonder of universal feelings, those ‘we are all different but really we are the same’ reassurances and more about holding back from throwing a shit fit and hurling abuse at my fellow cinema goers for their annoying behavior. NB. I would never do this. Not because I’m all zen or anything but because I don’t believe in talking in the cinema.

YOU ARE NOT SAT ON YOUR COUCH WATCHING A FRIGGIN’ DVD.

Cinema seats used to be hard and distractingly uncomfortable things and now, thanks to the rise in boutique style cinemas, especially in my area of North London they resemble lazy boy chairs, with a table for you to balance your glass of pino noir to quaff till your hearts content. All of this I massively approve of but for the fact that these elements make selfish gits forget they are not home alone. They are not sat, feet up on the sofa with their girlfriend who can zone out the banal commentary they provide to films, and somehow still wants to sleep with them after watching them eat popcorn like a pig at a trough but that they are, in fact, in a public place with 60 odd other people who have also paid a crazy amount for the privilege.

I honestly don’t understand people who talk in films. How brief is their attention span, how self important are they that two hours cannot go by without some else hearing the sound of their voice and all the interesting and valid opinions they have to offer? I blame the blogging generation.. Ahem . But seriously, I’ve noticed that cinema talkers tend to fall into three camps:

Dialogue stops - we start

Dickheads of the world, movies are made up of more than people talking to each other. The bits where dialogue ceases in the film is not like pressing pause where you can get in a few moments gabbing about what happened at the Christmas party between you know who. The scene is still being set, the yarn continues to unfold in the sweeping shots across New York’s city skyline, in the montages of time passing, in the score that someone spent hours composing exactly for this moment to move you and your missing it all - you fools.

Externalizing that which normal folk just think and feel inside or talk about afterwards over a bacardi and coke

I predict the fate of the protagonist, blow by blow account

” He is going come back and find them doing it on the washing machine, I bet you, yeah and then he will realize that everything she said at mount silver was a lie and that will make him feel awful and then he’ll really want to speak to his dad, but he is dead and their is no one else to talk so he will stop writing his novel, start drinking again to numb the pain I think, then go back to the place where they met as high school sweethearts and there he will be reminded of that time from the earlier scene, remember? Where they talked about coming back to this place in ten years whether they made it or not and it will all get too much for him I reckon and he’ll top himself. Probably jump off a bridge or do it with pills - who knows?”

You WILL know, if you shut the fuck up and watch the film. In about two hours all will be revealed, it is in hand and all you have to do is let it happen in front of your eyes. Please note, I have never seen anything at the cinema with a schlocky TV movie plot as shite as the one that I typed a few moments ago!

Having said that, quiet contemplation is not the order of the day in all films. Saturday night slashers and slap stick comedies should be filled with gasps and gaffawing, burst of nervous laughter and clutching the person next to you in shock. This is part of seeing something with a crowd, in the dark on the big screen.

However, fully formed sentences have no place in the cinema for me until after the credits roll. Or unless you think your having a heart attack and need to bring it to someone’s attention.