The Curmudgeon

I recently saw The Hunger Games with my friend Ashley.  Ashley and I are creepy tweenie movie goers, even though we‘re full grown adults. She has a baby, for God's sake!!  Yet we’ve been going to all of the Twilight Saga and Harry Potter movies (yes, sometimes at midnight; but no, not dressed up) since we met in 2005, while moving into an apartment complex on the same day.

Might I add, this was the first one we’ve watched while drinking. It was quite the enhancement of the movie going experience.

Three thoughts of note regarding our most recent tweenie movie outing:

Don't make Jay Maynard angry...

Thought A: The Hunger Games has been getting a lot of attention lately for it’s likeness to Battle Royale and/or Blade Runner and/or Lord of the Flies. I can certainly see the likenesses. Of course, I can certainly understand that at some point, there are no new storylines. It’s like my Dad once said about music “Eventually, won’t you run out of new songs? You can only arrange chords so many different ways...” Touché, Dad.   But in all seriousness, what I want to know is why no one is pointing out that The Hunger Games is an obviously blatant rip-off of TRON?! Kids (software programs) are transported by tubes (lasers) to an arena (Mainframe) contolled by the Capitol (MCP) where they have to kill (destroy) each other in order to survive.  I know I was only two when TRON came out, but I watched it on VHS a lot growing up, and I suspise* Suzanne Collins (author of The Hunger Games) did too. Look, I’m not picking sides or anything, but I can’t wait for TRON Costume Guy and Jeff Bridges to throw down a lawsuit for intellectual property infringement.

Brilliant

Thought Two: For this particular movie, we decided (mostly because there is a bar inside) to go to the Magnolia Theater in the West Village. (Dallas…not New York. Poor Dallas. Calling parts of our city “uptown“ and a variety of “villages“ does not make us New York. It makes me sad for us.) It was Sunday, late afternoon, the weather was beautiful and the Uptowners (Dallasites, not New Yorkers) were out IN. FULL. FORCE. After having to park on the gazillionth (third) floor of the parking garage, I had to force my way through a crowd of commercial real estate brokers and pharmaceutical salesgirls just to cross the street to the theater. The experience was so traumatizing that I actually said out loud “I’d rather be homeless than live in this apartment complex." I don’t know when I got to be such a curmudgeon, but I find nothing appealing about being surrounded by 1,600 people wandering aimlessly around. I just so rarely achieve the level of public drunkenness that makes situations like the Mark Cuban St. Patrick’s Day Parade or 6th Street Halloween okay. 

Thought D: What has happened to our society, that people can’t sit through a two hour movie without playing a round of Words With Friends or checking their Facebook status? I’m dead serious that this deterioration is NOT OKAY. It’s been annoying for a long time to have cell phones ringing in inappropriate places, but now that phones are tiny computers, every time someone breaks one out, it lights the theater up like the movie is over. What is wrong with people? Just because you’re texting instead of talking doesn’t make it any less distracting. “What? Is this glowing device just below your line of sight bothering you?! Why?” I’m not trying to sound like your Gramps or anything, but people are out of control if they can’t watch a movie without being ‘plugged in’. Not okay.

Upon proof-reading, I realize this post makes me sound grumpy and mostly un-cool. I started to get all defensive about it, compiling a list of reasons I am uber-cool to present to you, dear reader. Then I stopped 1) because the list would just be way too long and 2) because I wouldn’t be fooling anyone. “Back when I was a kid, if we wanted to steal music, we had to get a ride to the mall, go to the Sam Goody, and shoplift it! You kids have it so easy…!”




* I created the word “suspise” It’s like a mutant word coupling “suspect” & “surmise”, and it is amazing. Let’s go viral with this new word.**

** While you’re at it, please start using the word “chalant” all the time, all the time. It’s another awesome Beth-ism referring to something that is the opposite of “nonchalant."  DO IT.