Since we left Oregon on Dec. 30 in the morning, arrived in LA Dec. 31 in the morning, and only got a few hours sleep during the day, Ben and I decided on a low key New Year’s. I happened to have some free AMC tickets, so we headed there instead of our usual theater, the Arclight. The first time I ever went to the Arclight I thought it was ludicrous to pay almost $20 for a damn movie. Then I actually moved from the suburbs to the city and I had to stop watching movies because there was no way I’d pay to deal with the bullshit city theaters churn out. Every movie comes with a free Mexican baby running back and forth in front the of the screen, usually screaming. Sometimes there’s a Mexican mom running back and forth after it, not in an attempt to catch it, but more as a form of exercise.
Sidebar: Do you have to pay for baby tickets in movie theaters? I contend that every year under 5 a child is, a parent should have to pay an order of magnitude more for the ticket. So a ticket for a 2 year old would be something like $1700 and no babies would ever come to movies again.
Anyway, I’ll gladly pay $5 more than average so I can watch a film in peace without God damned babies or jerks showing up 20 minutes late or whatever. But I had these free tickets, so I figured we’d use them to go watch Django on New Year’s.
As soon as I walked into the theater, I noticed a stroller and it’s 4ish year old occupant in the section of seats that go at the very front of the theater below the stadium seats on the flat ground. True to form, she was running back and forth in the wide aisle completely unattended. Thankfully, her parents had a containment plan for the film. Unfortunately that plan involved her watching a brightly colored Disney movie on a portable DVD player. And since they were sitting in front, everyone could clearly see Princess Whatsherbucket Fairypants Adventures like screen-in-screen while Jamie Foxx set white people on fire and dudes got eaten by dogs and shit.
At a certain point I either became too consumed by the film, somebody finally bopped them all on their child abusing heads, or they came to their senses and left (least likely scenario), but I stopped noticing the Princess Party after about the second scene.
For whatever reason, we both thought the DVD player incident would be the last major piece of drama, and we bought tickets to Jack Reacher, since it came on directly after Django. We also bought dinner, which made it an pretty expensive night even after accounting for the free tickets.
It started off well enough. Jack Reacher is the kind of ridiculous hot mess that a person expects some talking in, so I was cool with that. What I was not cool with, however, was the family of fuckholes seated in front of us whose star player was an incredibly drunk and sloppy little dad. First of all, every one of the 4 members of the family stood completely up at least 10 times during the film. One time both the son and the mom stood up at the same time so the mom could give the son a kiss. So Jack Reacher kicking some poor bumpkin’s stupid bumpkin ass becomes Oedipal Shadow Masterpiece all of a sudden. The dad kept up a steady stream of inebriated babbling that started to become a sort of soundtrack backup, and honestly wasn’t bothering me until his phone rang AND HE ANSWERED IT AND HE TALKED ON IT! This is the point at which I will kick a man in his tiny, drunken head in front of his woman and their children. However, in deference to Ben, who’s not used to violence, I refrained from braining this little bitchface and instead I shouted “hey, shut the fuck up!”
Drunk Dad threw his arms in the air, waived them like he didn’t care, said something I didn’t understand, laughed like a girl, told everyone in the theater that he was going to go take a piss, walked about 10 feet away, swayed around to my general direction, did the weird little “come at me bro” upper body lunge, almost fell over, caught himself on the seats, ran into the wall and finally actually went to piss.
Meanwhile, someone else saw this exchange and told the theater attendant that there was a fight starting, so he came in and watched drunk dad mumble to himself, but that was mostly the end of the drama until after the movie when I went to the theater attendant, complained about drunk dad and got 4 free movie passes for my trouble.