I don’t know you are and I don’t know why you’re talking. If you’re looking for conversation, I can tell you I don’t have the patience. But what I do have, is a particularly short temper. A temper that has built up from a long period of movie-going, a temper that makes me a nightmare for people like you. If you shut up now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you…but if you don’t…I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you.
– Ryan Brown
From his upcoming film, Taken: The Talkative Movie Viewer
Do any of you feel like this when you go to the movies? My rant stems from a screening for the movie “Ted” that I attended recently but my hostility towards the subject has been present for as far as I can remember. Knowing “Ted” is a comedy, I expected the crowd to be a bit more lively and to hear their random outbursts of laughter accompanied by the occasional short commentary. A comedy, like all other movie genres, is meant to invoke the audiences’ emotions related to that genre and I would hate to inhibit anyone’s emotional response to a scene, but there are moments for those responses. The person sitting next to me was attending for a reason other than to watch the film. Not only was he consistently talking throughout the film, he was speaking at a normal conversational level that everyone could hear. When someone doesn’t even have the courtesy to whisper, it shows they have no regard for the film and no regard for the people around them. My mind went blank and I harshly used some expletives telling the person to be quiet. At this point I was so angry that I was actually hoping for an altercation so that I could unleash every bit of mindless rage and gain satisfaction from some vigilante justice, but instead he chose to keep quiet and leave the film early.
Now I may be a short tempered individual but I’m not alone. I am pretty sure that there are many more people like me rather than the non-confrontational, calm and collected individuals. Chances are, if you are someone who likes to excessively talk during a movie, you are probably surrounded by a group of people that came to the theater for a couple hours of stress relief and quiet who could snap at any moment. With that being said, talking in the movie theater could be more dangerous than you think. If you do a search for violence and death related to talkative movie-goers, you would be surprised at how many results would turn up. So for your own personal safety and for the safety of others, I suggest you just shut the f*ck up!
Here are a few added tips/suggestions for you talkative movie-goers:
1. If you have to have continuous conversation in a movie theater then you are wasting your own money. I suggest you wait until the film is available to rent so that you can pause the film as needed and save a few bucks.
2. As important as you may think your commentary may be during the film, it’s not. You had nothing to do with the film nor any credentials that would make your commentary of any value. To have any sort of valuable insight you would have to be fully engaged in the film…which you are obviously not.
3. If the film is not interesting enough for you to follow then you should keep quiet and wait for it to get better or leave. You are wasting your own time if you’ve already decided you do not like the film and time is money.
4. If you have to check your cell phone constantly then you are an addict and you need help. I know you feed off the urge to update your Facebook or Twitter status in hopes that someone will care but honestly…they don’t. The only one that does care is you, the person who is checking every minute to see if someone has commented. If you can’t step away to enjoy a movie for a few hours then movies just aren’t for you.
5. Die in a fire…we all hate you.
