OK.. the Ya Jagoff trip to Hawaii is on.
I am presenting at the Hawaii Social Media Summit this week.
So we have some awesome guest blogs this week!
Today’s by Laurie Koozer works at University of Pittsburgh and blogs over at www.YinzrReadin.com.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you may have noticed that our beloved city has become something of a big deal when it comes to movies. When I went to see the awesome movie Gravity a few weeks ago, I felt all kinds of civic pride when a preview for an upcoming Stallone and DeNiro flick featured several shots of the city skyline and the McKees Rocks Bridge.
I was considerably less proud of my city, and humanity in general, about 45 minutes later when it sounded like the whole theater had broken out in conversation.
If you’ve seen Gravity then you know that this is the kind of movie that swings between deafeningly loud and devastatingly quiet with not much in-between. Every time the volume got lower, I could hear the conversation between a mom and her elementary school age son sitting just behind us. I, too, am the parent of an intensely curious child who questions everything. I also know that there is a time and place to give detailed answers at full decibel and that a movie theater is not that place. I paid $13 a pop to see Clooney and Bullock in space not listen to your theories on space debris or life inside a satellite!!
And it wasn’t just them, a few rows behind there was a couple chatting and a few rows below that some teenage girls were whispering louder than the crowd at the Pirates’ wild card win.
By the time the movie got to the quiet point where I was supposed to reflect on Bullock’s emotional plight, I was too busy being angry to concentrate. Instead, I was seriously reflecting that hurdling through space seemed like a cakewalk compared to sitting in this theater and enduring one more minute of all this non-stop yakking!
Okay, so in the grand scheme of things, I know that talking in the movie theaters doesn’t really compare to space catastrophe but can anybody tell me what is so important and interesting that people can’t wait 90 minutes to tell somebody? Unless you get a text that Sidney Crosby is eating dinner at the PF Changs next door or there is an asteroid coming to destroy the theater, it can wait!
There are already 17 million reminders at the beginning of the movie to turn off your cell phones, do we also need a few dozen reminders to shut the hell up?
Even if societal manners have degraded to the point where all the jagoffs are talking during the movie, I want to believe that Pittsburghers are better than that.
So prove me right and next time you go out to see a movie, just sit down, shut up and enjoy the show, YA JAGOFFS!!
Still clueless about proper theater etiquette? Check out Laurie’s blog Yinz R Readin for some pro tips on how to watch a movie.
About Today’s Guest Blogger:
Laurie is the author of the Pittsburgh-centric novel What Happens on Sunday.
The ebook is available now on Amazon. Click The Pic
