I went to the movies Saturday afternoon. I don’t go to the movies very often, for good reason. But I had a free ticket, so I chose There Will Be Blood.

Anyway, great movie. Worth watching just to see the last 10 minutes actually. But this isn’t a review.

The movie is very very long. About an hour in to it, the people 2 seats away from me start to get bored – low attention span I suspect. So they begin to chat. Quietly, but just enough whispering and giggling to get on my nerves and make me remember exactly why I hate going to the movies.

This goes on for a good half hour, and I’m starting to get really pissed. I keep hoping they’ll stop and get back in to the movie, but it doesn’t look like it. I’m really angry. So I turn and I say “Mate! If you don’t shut up – there will be blood!”.

Ok – I didn’t. I wanted to say that. But instead I said “Guys, can you please stop talking?”. And to their credit they did for the rest of the movie.

Anyway, the whole movie experience just sucks. Every time I go it sucks. Mobile phones go off. People chat. There is always some dude with bad B.O. that keeps wafting in my direction. People come in late and ruin the start. People open their chips and rustle the wrappers. Phone lights flash as someone sends an SMS. People sneeze and cough around you. How is this enjoyable?

“But you have to see it on the big screen”. Yeah, that’s just great. So you sit amongst the human filth and look up at a big screen. A screen that more often than not has some flaw in it that your eye keeps being drawn to. The one I was in Saturday is a brand new Hoyts cinema (Melbourne Central), and either the screen had a vertical seam half way across, or there was a fault in the entire copy of the movie they were showing.

Like everything today, people are all too willing to accept “near enough” and will put up with stuff like this. Get the movie on Blu-ray or DVD and watch it at home. You’ll thank me later.