There really aren’t a ton of rules to watching movies, and unfortunately most people can’t follow them. These are rules such as:
- Turn off your cell phones
- Don’t kick the seat in front of you
- Bathe before going to a film
- Don’t rustle your bag of candy
- Be quiet
It is this last one I have a problem with tonight. While I could write an article about each and every one of those others every single time I come home from a movie it just wouldn’t be worth it. The only reason I am writing about it this time around is because it was quite unique, at least unique to my movie-going experiences.
Tonight was a screening of Juan Antonio Bayona’s The Orphanage and as many of you may already know this is a mystery/horror film and it is 100-percent in Spanish, which means we have subtitles. Now, to my knowledge there are only two requirements for watching movies that have subtitles, they include:
- Seeing
- Reading
My nightmare begins thanks to that pesky second requirement. For the entire 100 minute duration that is The Orphanage I was lucky to sit only two rows away from a couple in which the man could not read and the woman next to him had to recite every-single-word back to him as they appeared on screen. Granted, The Orphanage is not a talky debate film, but just imagine watching a film while just inside of earshot is a never-ending whispering. This isn’t the asshole patrons that begin talking for about 20 seconds during a film, this is a constant disturbance, and it is maddening.
I found an article from 2002 over on Newsweek.com saying that 23 percent of adult Americans (44 million) are functionally illiterate. This is explained saying that these people are unable to “use reading, writing and computational skills in everyday life: filling out a job application, reading traffic signs, figuring out an election ballot, reading a newspaper, understanding a bus schedule or a product label–or an address on a sheet of paper.”
You can go ahead and add watching subtitled movies to that list. Honestly, once you find out a film is subtitled and you can’t read wouldn’t the decision be to just leave?
For those of you that think this person may have actually been blind and reading the subtitles to him was necessary and therefore okay I can tell you that, 1) He definitely wasn’t blind, I saw him come in; and 2) No, that doesn’t make it okay. I can’t imagine a scenario where it would ever be considered okay to talk through an entire film, and the only reason it managed to work this time around is because the theater was not full and they had no one right next to them.
I am not sure how trivial this all sounds to you, but when you see as many movies as I do and you have to experience rude and inconsiderate people just about every single time it is truly shocking to experience this level of ignorance and inconsideration.
As for The Orphanage, I can tell you I liked it… I actually liked it quite a bit. It starts off a little slow, picks up a bit, slows down again and then has a rather powerful ending. It has been compared to The Others, which is a film I actually really like and as far as ghost stories go I would say it is either right on par with The Others or quite possibly a little better. For those of you that appreciate creepy just as much as the jump scares should certainly be satisfied thanks to a couple of truly skin-crawling moments. Then again, if jump scares are your thing you won’t be left disappointed either. All this inside a damn good story. I will have a full review in the next couple of days, but definitely keep an eye out for it. Hopefully in a quiet theater.
Oh, and if you can, skip watching that new trailer… it gives away far too much.
