Just came back from seeing the Dark Knight.  Good film, though certainly not the greatest movie I’ve ever seen in the history of mankind, and it certainly wasn’t better than Batman Begins, which I LOVED.

The movie experience is really starting to sour on me though, beginning with the ticket price of $7.75 that I had to pay… for a MATINEE show.  Just to get a bag of popcorn and a fill of soda set me back another $11, for a total of $18.75 overall before I’m even sitting down here.

Now about $20 poorer, I’m finally settling in and watching no less than 25 commercials because I arrived a few minutes early, which was then followed by previews mixed in with even MORE commercials, and now I’ve seen enough advertising that I should be watching this #$%^&ing movie for free, hell they should be paying ME money now.

But, still, this was a matinee show, and there was barely anybody there, so once the movie begins it should all be smooth sailing from here on out, right?

Nope.  Just before the lights start to dim, in comes in a parade of 3-4 year old little snotlings followed by their parents, who at that point should have been arrested, sterilized and caned for being the dumbest assiest parents alive.  Really, who takes their 3 year old kids to see a dark, disturbing movie like this?  You’re talking about a film that shows a horribly disfigured Harvey Dent like so:

And sure enough, during a scene in the movie where Harvey Dent shows his horribly disfigured face for the first time:

“WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”

Murder.  Death.  KILL.

I proceeded to turn my face abruptly and gave the parents a withering, disfiguredly look of my own, and then made an angry show of getting up and moving to another seat while they tried to calm down their traumatized children, who no doubt will now grow up to be violent criminal imitations of the Joker themselves, all because they had the misfortune of being raised by the stupidest, laziest, asstarded parents in creation. 

Gads.

And even when the little turdlings could manage to shut UP for five minutes, I could still barely hear the dialogue, which was all but completely drowned out by the booming, thunderous bass of 7 foot tall speakers that was designed only to maximize the sounds of ground shaking explosions taking place in the film (and nothing else.)  It’s not a stretch to say I came away from the movie missing 70 percent of the dialogue and wondering what the $%^& half the movie had even been about.

Sigh.  Somewhere along the way, mankind managed to completely destroy the movie going experience for me.  All I can say is, thank God for DVDs.  I can just grab up a digital projector, find a white wall here to use, and I’ll have my very own custom movie theater, with a comfortable easy chair to sit in, no little crapballs with legs running around and screaming at the top of their lungs to ruin it for me, cheap buttered popcorn from the local market, and finally, perhaps the greatest invention ever made in human history: the pause button.