Never again, Promenade

Friday The Beefcake and I rolled down to Venice and had lunch, then drove up to Santa Monica to have dinner and Where the Wild Things Are on the Promenade. Big mistake.

The movie was perfectly awesome. There were tears, and The Beefcake and I spent a good deal of our post-movie time discussing the allegorical elements.

No, it was not a mistake to see this brilliant film. It was a mistake to go to the Promenade.

Over the past few years, I have only seen theater releases in two places: The Arclight and The Grove. For those of you who don't know LA, The Arclight is a theater where you have assigned seating and no commercials and generally there are very few kids in the audience. The Grove is part of an upscale outdoor shopping mall where you get the occasional kid in the theater, but usually they're accompanied by an adult, usually an LA resident, and generally the kids are few at night. These are also theaters frequented by Industry people, so there's a lot of respect for the art of film and people generally stay through the credits.

The Promenade is a major tourist attraction in Santa Monica. Lots of shops and restaurants, and it's within walking distance of several beach front hotels and the pier you see in every movie ever about LA. You know, the one with the ferris wheel.

The Promenade is a place where Daddy drops his kids off with a credit card and a pick-up time. We forgot all this before we went to see the movie. The kids movie. With oversize puppets.

There were children everywhere. Loud, unaccompanied children. After the previews started, a group of about 8 or 9 teenagers stomped in waving their bags and giggling and playing musical chairs across two rows for like ten minutes. Then they talked. They talked to each other for the entire first act.

I turned around and Teacher Glared. I shushed. They barely acknowledged my existence. Then about halfway through the film the kids in the back row decided it would be fun to push and tickle the kids in the row in front of them. The tickled and pushed kids giggled and pushed back.

This is what I wanted to say: "Hey, you see this big guy here next to me? In a minute I'm going to rip your trachea out of your neck and beat you to death with it, and he won't lift a finger to stop me."

This is what I said: "Shut the fuck up."

I combined it with Teacher Glare. Not a peep out of those kids after that. I can be very intimidating even without beaten-to-death-with-your-own-trachea fear.

Meanwhile, as I am becoming increasingly aggravated by the giggly children behind me, the cell phones pop out all over the theater.

Hey, people who like to look at their cell phones during the movie, stop it. It's not only annoying to the people directly around and behind you, it's also extremely aggravating to the people all the way at the back of the fucking theater who can see it but aren't close enough to say something to you about it.

So if the person in front of you is annoying you with their cell phone, they're probably annoying everyone behind you. Don't be afraid to say something. You have the support of the entire theater.

At one point a woman had some kind of exciting and funny text, so she passed her giant phone with the huge blue screen to her friend, who also read this hilarious text and then passed the giant blue screen to the person in front of them, who read it and passed it back, at which point the original lady read it some more then responded, then left her phone open while she waited for the next message. Altogether her phone was probably open and glowing for ten minutes. I was easily 15 rows behind her and 8 rows to her left but I saw all of this very clearly.

As she was doing this, some guy on our side of the theater kept opening his phone and texting every few seconds.

THIS IS ANNOYING. If it's that important to you, leave the theater. If you want to text and watch the movie, wait until it comes out on DVD and do it at home.

I will never, ever go to the Promenade for a movie again. Or if I do, I'm leaving with blood on my hands.