Going to a Movie.....

In 1977, I remember lining up with my family to see Star Wars at Westmount Square. There was nothing like it. The anticipation and electricity in the line-up was palpable. People would gaze at the movie poster as the line slowly moved wondering how a Tie Fighter would look on a big screen. At the concession stand my father complained about the overpriced popcorn and said that charging $3.50 for a small bag of M&Ms was "highway robbery" but, when the lights went down in the theater and the curtains were drawn, all was forgotten.

We saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1984 in Plattsburg New York, Jaws 2 in Times Square, Aliens at The Imperial on Bleury Street and countless other films over the last three decades and the result was always the same: pure escapism for a couple of hours when all the problems and stresses of daily life simply disappeared.

It was not until late 2015 when I went to see Star Wars: The Force Awakens, that I realized that insidiously, out of nowhere, the experience of going to the movies has now become quite irritating.

On December 18, 2015 at precisely 9:30 am, I set out to Colisee Kirkland to see the latest Star Wars installment and found myself almost as excited as I was in 1977. In fact, I do recollect with great joy humming John Williams' infamous score on the way to the theater. The house was packed, filled with movie-goers ripe with expectations and excitement. When the lights finally dimmed at 10 am, hundreds of us were not immediately treated with eye catching trailers for big new films to come. No, instead we were manipulated into doing the one thing that should be considered as blasphemy in a movie theater. We had to pull out our phones and play some ridiculous game on the big screen with the help of an "app" we had downloaded. The entire event felt like sacrilege and lasted at least eight minutes begging the question: don't we go to the movies to get away from the phone?

After then being reminded to then turn off our phones and to not kick the seat in front of us, we were then manipulated into watching a barrage of advertisements and I felt like "Alex" did in the film A Clockwork Orange when he was subjected to the "Ludovico Technique" - a fictional form of aversion therapy where a patient is forced to watch violence until he is sick to prevent him from being violent in the future. We could not leave our seats because we might have missed the opening to a film we had waited years for and the big corporations like Coke, Tylenol and Honda knew it.

When the ads were finally over and the trailers for upcoming films ended, it was 10:30 am and I was exhausted and considered walking out before the film even began. Luckily, the story was simple and easy to follow and I soon forgot all about the trauma it felt like I just experienced: waiting for the movie to start.

I decided to give the experience the benefit of the doubt and just recently went to see Deadpool. The start-time of the film was 1:10 and it did not officially start until 1:28. Why? Cell-phones, apps, games, instructions to the audience, ads, more ads and finally, the movie.

With all these annoyances, one has to wonder: do movie directors and producers really know what happens in a theater before their film plays? Does a comedian want to come on stage and perform in front of an audience that has been angered and annoyed for twenty minutes? That's what going to the movies has become.