Clearly being annoyed by people talking in a movie theater is somewhat of a theme for me.

Apologies for the lack of comic on Friday. I just got slammed by holiday responsibilities. Cami and I hosted Thanksgiving on Thursday and that was a chore and a half. Always good to have family over, but good when the leave, too. I’m sure you empathize.

Our problems were somewhat compounded by the fact that Henry has been cutting teeth recently. He’s had about five teeth for the last few months. But I guess they all must be pushing further through the gums all at the same time because he was practically inconsolable this week. Constant screaming. Like, screaming yourself hoarse levels of screaming. You do everything you can to easy the pain, but teething rings don’t help and neither do cold rags. We give him children’s Tylenol and pretty much wait for him to crash from exhaustion.

So, yeah. Anyway – full week.

I know today’s comic isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s based on a true event, so I had to put it into comic form to purge it from my system.

After we got Henry down to sleep on Friday night, I went to the late show of No Country For Old Men. Cami wasn’t interested because she thought it looked scary. Javier Bardem’s reputation preceeds him! That said, I’m bummed she didn’t get to see this with me because it’s easily one of the year’s best. Believe the hype. The Coen Brothers are in rare form here and all the performances are note-perfect. The ending is still haunting me days later. It’s stuck with me in a good way and I feel like I’m still peeling back the layers of it’s complexity.

The only thing that subtracted from my experience was a 50-ish faux-intillectual couple sitting a few rows behind me. They would NOT. SHUT. UP. throughout the entire movie!

I knew they were going to be trouble from the first moments I laid eyes on them. I ran into the theater to buy my ticket because I was running a little bit late and they there were in front of me. They wanted to see a movie that had left already left the theater and now they were wringing their hands trying to figure out what to watch instead.

They lazily interrigated the box office girl. “What would you recommend? Which of your movies is selling the best? Do you have any written matierials about this one?”

Points to the box office girl for being so patient. Meanwhile, I’m standing behind this couple in tweed jackets and wooden jewelry bouncing up and down like I have to go to the bathroom.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“One for No Country For Old Men,” I say, hurriedly. I grab my ticket and I’m out of there.

I make it into the theater before the trailers start and I see not far behind me is the annoying couple. They’re looking for a place to sit. I’m kind of down in the front in the middle of one of the rows positively radiating “Don’t sit next to me” vibes. They take a seat a few rows back. The movie starts and I put them out of my mind.

That is until about five minutes in when apparently the woman returns to her seat from a bathroom break. Then, the man proceeds to whisper the first five minutes of the movie to this woman to get her up to speed. This was one in a series of SEVERAL transactions during the showing.

I don’t know if you’ve seen No Country For Old Men yet. But if you have, you know that silence is a motif. There are hardly any cues from the soundtrack to ratchet up the tension and the movie is very much about the wide open spaces of West Texas and the scary solitude it provides. Javier Bardem’s character Anton Chigurh is utterly terrifying not because some daring musical cue causes you to jump. It is because he is so still, so methodical. Even the sound of his boots stepping down and empty hallway is enough to send shivers down your spine. You never know when this guy is going to strike. But when he does, it’s sure to be violent.

Meanwhile, these two yabbering idiots will NOT. SHUT. UP. They’re narrating the film to each other. “Ooo! Don’t go do that. He’s in the other room! Oh, no! He’s turning out the lights!”

And I want to murder them.

At several points during the film I turn around and give them the hairy eyeball. At first they look at me like they can’t figure out why I’m not watching the movie. They stop for a while, and then go right back at it. After several over the shoulder glances, I look at them again and ask “Are you going to talk the whole movie?” and turn around incredulously. Again, they stop for a short while before picking up right where they left off. I sit through the rest of the movie with their nagging voices over my shoulder. When they aren’t talking, I start to anticipate when they’ll start flapping their gums again.

The movie ends. I walk out and the two of them look up at me as I exit. “Thanks for talking the entire time.” I say and I stride out.

This sounds petty and passive aggressive, I know. But I probably would have felt more lame to have gotten up and asked the theater manager to politely tell these people to shut the hell up. They were in their 50’s easy. They should have known better.

Besides, there’s this part of me that believes I shouldn’t have to be inconvenienced with the chore of getting out of my chair to force someone to learn common courtesy. That’s why it’s common. You should enter these social situations already knowing what to do.

But it’s water under the bridge and the movie was great. I can’t suggest it highly enough. Just… be careful who you sit around, okay?

I saw another movie this weekend – Enchanted with Amy Adams. Odds are good we’ll be talking about that movie tonight on The Triple Feature talkcast tonight at 9:00 PM CST over a TalkShoe. I hope you can join us. I know we’ll be talking about more than that. Probably The Mist and Hitman, too. Lots of good stuff in theaters over the holiday weekend and I’m sure there will be lots of opinions floating around.

See you then!