Humboldt County Theatres Are Run By Morons For Morons

I took my daughter to see the first showing of Aliens in the Attic today. We saw it at the Broadway Cinema (part of the Coming Attractions mini-Empire) here in Humboldt County. It's a nice theatre, but it seems to employ morons and attract the same thing.

The film, for what it is worth, was far better than I expected. That's not what this is about, though. This is about what happens when someone can't run a projector and other people feel the need to comment about it.

When the trailers started, the image wasn't centered correctly so you had two halves of the film playing at the top and bottom of the screen with a large black space in the middle. It was fairly obvious what had happened, and while the projectionist attempted to get it right he or she (most likely a he) was having a fuck all time doing it.

People were fairly quiet at first. Then they started. "I wonder what's happening?" "Do you think they know it's broke?" "Who keeps fixing it?" "Maybe it needs to warm up." I could live with those remarks, as dumb as they were. However, when the movie started and it still wasn't fixed, I heard something that made me want to stab.

The woman seated next to my daughter, commenting that the beginning of the film was still split on the screen, said to her friend, "They must have put in the widescreen version."

"Why?" the friend asked. I would've asked, "What the fuck kind of drugs are you on you half-wit?"

"Because when I accidentally get widescreen movies I get the same black bar, but because mine is a DVD it is at the bottom of the screen not the middle. Should we tell them they have the widescreen in for a fullscreen movie?"

Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

This woman looked beyond child-bearing age, though I imagine at some point a child vomited forth from her drooling vagina. How anyone could let someone that dumb breed is not the scariest of thoughts, though. What terrified me was that she was still breathing because I doubt this was the first time something so profanely stupid fell from her gaped mouth.

If I had a knife ...

The film never got totally centered correctly. It was fine, but bad enough that I could see the mic in some shots. No biggie, though. As long as the woman two seats to my right didn't open up her trap again, I was fine. If she would, I would have to say something.

Luckily, for both of us, she didn't.

I can't have my daughter exposed to such nonsense. It ruins any kind of confidence she has in adults. It undermines her view of what a grown-up should and should not say. It takes her world and turns it upside down. Even she looked at me like the woman was off her nutter because my daughter, all of five years old, knows about widescreen. (We prefer our movies in widescreen in my home.)

Which all of this begs the question: Why would three women in their sixties and fifties come to a PG film for kids while not bringing any of their own with them? That's just weird, but maybe they wanted to see something they could understand and relate to on some level.