As the t-shirt says:
At least with fantasy violence, I can go along with this up to a point. That point is somewhere before Kill Bill Vol. I, I guess, since that film left me asking fruitlessly for a refund (that film was where I learned that just like in a restaurant: once you eat the meal it's too late to get out of paying the check. If you're really offended, leave early). But maybe it's not much before, because I saw the senseless slaughter of maybe a hundred people portrayed on the screen tonight and still found myself entertained.
When I think about hired assassins and secret societies, certain questions arise: who hires them? If I wanted to hire a killer, what part of the yellow pages would I look in? Or should I google it? Here's what I got as the top hit when I tried that.
Anyway, this movie brings a lot of the reductio ad absurdums of the genre into high relief. I won't elaborate as it would amount to spoiler material. The only spoiler I'll engage in is this: (waits a minute for people who don't want to read the spoiler to skip to the next paragraph) Angelina Jolie does not display her marvelous breasts. Her butt and a fairly suggestive scene with the protagonist's girlfriend were apparently enough to get that 'some sexuality' detail in the R rating box. If you want to see Brad Pitt's girlfriend show off her boobies, get Taking Lives on DVD. She's probably shown them off elsewhere, but that's the only movie that comes to mind.
I know, they're just mammary glands, 52% of the population has them. But you gotta admit, like her lips (which almost 100% of people have), hers are a cut above.
Those lips and eyes are an example of what I mean when I say sometimes a woman can be so beautiful it borders on ugly.
But, to paraphrase Arlo Guthrie, that's not what I came to talk about. I came to talk about kid sneaking into R rated movies.
When I was fifteen, I had the most perfect girlfriend. By perfect, I mean she was a year older than me, had pretty nearly a woman's body, and liked for me to eat the lipstick off her in the back row of a movie theater. Okay, she was annoyingly vacuous and said things like 'You should use eyebrow pencil on your stubble, you'd look so like George Michael.'
And one time we went to the dollar theater to make out and there were two movies showing: a G rated dinosaur movie and an R rated movie (I don't recall what it was about, it was sort of immaterial).
Looking old for my age, I'd bought tickets to quite a few R rated movies without getting questioned by the (equally young) box office personnel. But this time, it was a chick who knew me. From church.
And she flat out wouldn't sell us tickets to the R feature. So naturally, we bought tickets for the dinosaur feature and promptly went into the other theater.
And I didn't even have my hand up the perfect girlfriend's shirt when an usher told us we had to actually go into the theater our tickets were for or leave.
Crap. Do you have any idea how hard it is to behave in an utterly inappropriate way in the middle of a bunch of families trying to watch a G rated family film? It was even worse than when Dad confiscated my AC/DC albums.
But then again, that's not really what I was starting to tell you. Ahem. Rene, if you're reading this, that was some tasty lipstick you wore. I'm sure you went on to make some fine young man extremely unhappy.
No, we're back to the movie I saw this evening, Wanted. There was a row of kiddos causing a ruckus during the previews. Some of my fellow movie goers had tried hissing or hollering at them to shut up during the previews, but nothing doing. I was thinking, Why isn't the adult who brought those honyocks settling their pubescent hashes?
When the feature I'd paid five bucks to see started to roll and they continued as if still in their middle school's cafeteria, I got up, climbed over the railing, walked over to their row and said, 'Now that the movie has started, you think you kids could shut the hell up?'
I'd love to say there was no anger in this move, that I was cool, calm and collected. There was not, as I anticipated, a negligent adult in this group of eight or so barely teenaged kids. There were at least five cell phones being texted upon, but no adults. Forgetting my own past, I was stumped at how these squirts got in to an R rated feature.
I wasn't cool or calm, I realized as I returned to my seat. I was fairly vibrating with confrontation. Almost as much so as the time I got charged with disorderly conduct, but that's another story entirely.
Not to worry, soon people were getting murdered in spectacular ways, and apparently the fat bald guy getting out of his seat was enough to put a sock in the honyocks.
After the movie was over, a guy in the row behind me thanked me for being the movie vigilante. 'There was no way they were going to shut up,' he said.
On the one hand, I wanted to bask in the approbation of this stranger, but something wasn't quite right.
'I can't figure how they got in,' I said.
'They had tickets for another show and came here instead,' he said. Which was incredibly obvious after I heard the words.
So I asked the theater management, which is to say someone not much older than the kids in question, what should a Lobster do?
Because if I got up and, instead of rousting the offending kids myself, I'd gone and gotten the management, I'd have missed part of the movie. Would I have gotten a pass to another showing?
'Absolutely,' the management kid said. 'I'd probably give you a couple of passes because it's a real problem. If you're coming to me about it, I figure everyone in the theater has had their experience compromised.'
I might be misquoting her slightly, but you could tell at least some of the vocabulary was from a training video. Still, I wished I hadn't been so focused on my $5 ticket that I wouldn't go ask an usher to check this kids' stubs. Let them go talk over the movie their tickets were for. I mean, the movie I was there to see had show times every fifteen minutes or so, I don't know why I wouldn't have just known the management would gladly let me see the next screening of Wanted.
So what I want is a rewind button. I had a decent response to the motormouth honyocks, but not the best response. A response that would have sentenced these kids to the worst fate possible: watching the film they actually bought tickets for.
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