Discuss: Moviegoing Bad Luck

I'd just like it to be known that when I built up The Italian Job out of order it wasn't because I was smoking up. I was just new at reel splicing and was careless.

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My worst experience was when I saw "G.I. Joe" over the summer. I was having a blast watching the movie, but there was this family behind me who did not know the meaning of "No Talking". Not only were their kids loud, the parents themselves were shouting comments at the screen such as "She looked better as a brunette,". and if that wasn't enough I politely asked them to please be quiet - they were louder than the explosions- and the woman, who's bare feet were on the seat next to my head acted like I was the nuisance. And when they left, her meathead husband stared at me and crammed a handful of popcorn in his mouth as she waved at me with a smirk on her face. I would have reported them to the manager, but I didn't want to ruin it for the kids. I will say though there was a parent with a kid younger than the others who knew how to teach her kid manners.

That aside, I was astounded by the silence and respect for fellow patrons when I saw "inglourious Basterds".

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I mentioned this before, but as a projectionist, I accidentally showed a theater full of six year olds expecting to see "Jimmy Neutron" the vibrator scene from "Not Another Teen Movie". Not my brightest moment, but it is by far one of my funniest.

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I have two theaters in Nashville that I can go to. One is full of movie talkers and the other is full of high school kids & wanna be hipsters. Depending on the movie my friends and I will choose one over the over. I went to the high school kids theater (Green Hills) on opening night of Inglourious Basterds and a fight broke out between some high school kids and a couple of rednecks. When the rednecks got escorted out by police, one of them yelled "f**k all of y'all." Totally killed the next 45 minutes for me.

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You know its seems family are the focal point of these disturbances. My isn't as bad as some but equally annoying; when Transformers 2 (worst movie ever) came out, I went to see it and right behind me there was a family. And for the first half of the movie they were alright but when the desert scene came on, their kid just kept on crying! He cried and cried and cried and the parents wouldnt do anything!! So for most of the desert scene all I heard was incescent crying. Really made a horrible movie awful.

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Two bad experiences out of many:

Ironman: After watching it in theatre I though it was a bad film, but rewatching it on DVD I found it was a great flick, but ruined by teenagers in the theatre who texted and facebooked and twittered every 10 seconds, blinding me with their cellphone lights. I almost committed murder.

Star Wars Revenge of the Sith: A bad movie, ruined even more so by a row of middleschoolers in the back row, who talked all the time (esp during quiet scenes), made jokes, threw popcorn, kneed the seats in front of them. Someone in the audience got really pissed off but the little punks didn't give a damn. I felt my hope for mankind's future drop a little.

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So I like Star Wars, and against better judgement, I decided to go see "The Clone Wars." Worst movie I have ever seen. EVER. (Also, the only movie I have ever walked out on... I couldn't handle the gay hutt character. Horrible!)

So, the lights go down, (about ten min late...) and the "previews" start. Well, these previews looked hilarious, and I didnt realize that Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downy Jr. Had so many movies coming out...

Once the choppers started flying above the jungle, several people got up to go see what was going on, not realizing the type of carnage that was about to happen in front of a theatre of little kids...

Once the shooting, gut spilling, blood spurting, and cursing happened, all hell broke loose with parents running down the isles with kids in hand, children crying, and several "star wars nerds" laughing it up.

Tropic Thunder was not appropriate for that audience, but it was one of the funnies things I have seen in a long time.

(Oh, and twenty billion times better than that star wars garbage.)

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The first time I saw Inglourious Basterds, there was a father & son in the row behind me. The father was reading most of the subtitles to the son, and the son kept asking questions like, "Why does he have to kill everybody?"

No wonder I had to see it two more times since then.

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My worst experience I can remember was actually last night when I saw Extract. Instead of the theater being the usual 60 degrees, it was in the low 90s with high humidity. This has never happened before in this theater, but living in Texas I manned up and sat through the movie.

By the end of the film I realized I should've just walked out and asked for a refund, and not because of the temperature.

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Well, I hate to admit, that I was actually one of those responsible for an irrating moment when going to the theatres.

I went & saw Jurassic Park for the first time. At the time it was the scariest thing I had ever saw (I know...sad). So I literally was yelling at the people on the screen "RUN! RUN! FASTER! MUST GO FASTER!" at the top of my lungs. To this day, I am surprised that I was never kicked out. So if anyone reading this had this experience when watching Jurassic Park in the Theatres, I apologize now, 20 years later, but I am trully trully sorry. I think I was actually louoder the the dinosaurs.

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I have had more bad experiences in Cinemas than I care to mention. I've had it all, kicked seats, people talking, kids asking questions, kids crying, babies crying, phones ringing (on one occasion FOUR times by the one person in one film), food thrown, kids running in and out of seat aisles right in front of us, constant seat swapping right in front of us. On quite a few occasions, I have had to give thinly veiled threats to teenagers more interested in being disruptive than watching the movie their parents money paid for. A few times I have to follow through and talked to management who subsequently booted said teenagers out.

Recently, while seeing the latest Harry Potter, we had someone coughing in the aisle next to us. And I mean COUGHING......and more coughing......for the WHOLE film. It was infuriating - but must have been worse for the three people that were sitting with them.

And the first I went to see Gladiator it was a 40 degree centigrade day and the cinema's air-conditioning had stopped working. The theatre was like a sauna and about ten minutes in, the projector lamp actually melted through the transfer, bringing the movie to a halt. I'd never seen that happen before.......except in the movies!!!

Suffice to say, home theatre has been a massive improvement for us. We still go and see some things that should be watched in a theatre - but these days we prefer the comfort and undisrupted peace of home. Not to mention it is cheaper (for the price of two movie tickets in Australia, I can buy the movie on bluray and watch it whenever we want!)

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When I was in the 6th grade I was so excited to finally see The Fellowship of the Ring on the big screen, words could not explain just how ready I was.

Halfway through the previews the film broke and I was crushed. Thankfully the management fixed it and that night became one of the happiest theater going experiences of my life but it threatened to be a huge disappointment.

As far as people go, I really can't stand it when people talk loudly during movies, but I draw the line when people are not only loud at a movie but also immature and disrespectful of the film.

I'm a film student at University of the North Carolina School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. My school's theater was screening Blade Runner for the entire University to see which is never a good thing. You would think that the other art students who weren't film students would be respectful of the film, but they weren't. They jeered, they snickered, they giggled, and they made degrading comments out loud. They basically made fun of a great film simply because they thought it was boring. It was one of the most frustrating experiences I've had to go through in the cinema.

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I've noticed this isn't so much "bad luck" being discussed as it is a nationwide epidemic of rude jackasses we must all suffer. The worst experience I've ever had in a movie theater was on opening night of Moulin Rouge, and there were about twelve or so kids in thier early teens who all came in together, who had no intention of sitting calmly and watching a movie for two hours. They ran what appeared to be marathon races around the theater laughing and screaming while the movie rolled. They had loud conversations about things not pretaining to the film, in which they got up from thier seats and acted things out for the rest of the folks in the group. They were constantly coming and going all through the film. Not only that but everyone else in the theater let out a big "Shhhhhh!" every thirty seconds or so. It all climaxed when one of the boys apparently blew soda through a straw onto the back of one of the others guy's neck, causing him to erupt from his seat yelling, 'What the fuck!! That ain't cool man!" over and over. Finally, a policeman and a manager came to escort all the kids out of the theater, and the whole crowd erupted in thunderous applause. But by that time, the film was 3/4ths over and had been pretty much ruined.

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I was taking a friend to see There Will Be Blood after gushing about it to him, and three minutes into the film, the projector light went out. The film was still running and the sound was still on, but of course there is no dialogue for about the first 18 minutes, so all we were hearing were splashes and clangs and music to a black screen. I immediately got up and found one of the theater employees who, after about 10 minutes, confirmed that the light in the projector was completely burned out and needed to be replaced, which is a pretty lengthy process.

Thankfully, they gave everyone free passes for later and also let us go to any other movie that was starting at that time so our time wasn't totally wasted (other than the fact that the only movie starting at that time was Semi-Pro). And I took my friend to see There Will Be Blood again at a different theater a couple weeks later.

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My worst experience was a year ago when i went to see a movie called "greetings from the shore." my friend had a small part in the film and i was really excited to see him on the big screen for the first time.

the film was to start at 11am. I got to the theater with ten minutes to spare only to find out the manager hadnt show up yet. the employees had to call a manager from another location to open the theater. movie didnt start until 11:40.

finally we get inside and the movie starts but just as my friends one scene started the audio in the theater cuts out and it doesnt come back on until AFTER his scene is over.

worst of all, there were no refunds for this horrible experience. needless to say i never went back to that theater again.

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I went to see Drag me to hell a few weeks ago, but the teenage boys sat behind me had no intention of watching, just made their social plans (at the top of their voices) in the row behind me. Any tension was melted! Doesnt that just piss you off?

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At my first attempt to see Inglourious Basterds the curtain was not fully pulled back from the screen so on both sides the movie was projecting onto the curtain, which was REALLY distracting, and I was missing what was going on on screen because I kept paying attention to the damn curtain. I went to the lobby three times to ask them to fix it. Nobody came to fix it so I decided to just leave (but not before chewing the manager out and getting my money back) and see it another time (at a different theater).

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