Sunday, September 30, 2007

Veni, Vidi, Venting

[Note: new caegory of blog posts -- "feh." This is just me airing random rancor. So feel free to skip this post unless you enjoy that sort of thing.] 

Two new things annoy the crap out of me. And since I can't call you up and vent, you'll have to settle for a bitchy little blog post.

First, I'm watching the OK HBO series, "Rome" on DVD. It's OK. I like historical, period pieces with great costumes and gratuitous nudity. No big set-piece battle scenes, even though it's about Caesar kicking Pompeii Magnus' bootox. No battles... just aides wandering in and telling the folks back in Rome, "Caeasar has won!" It's about as exciting a way to depict some of the greatest battles of history as is getting an email about... well... battles.

But that's now what I'm complaining about. Despite the lack of large-scale gore, for some reason on every disc in this series, the subtitles pop on for no reason in the middle of a scene. Right in the middle. Like, mid dialogue. Boop! All of a sudden, Mark Anthony has got letters up his toga. Which I then have to turn off using a four-button push sequence on my remote. We are annoyed.

Next in my list of Newest Trivial Gripes is lighted devices in movie theaters. Now that everybody's cell phone, Blackberry, iPhone, Smart Phone, etc. has a backlit screen, people checking their electronic proddings during the feature becomes... distracting. I've econountered a few folk who spent several minutes texting (I assume) during a movie, the liquid glow of their tiny screens taking me out of my special, distracted movie watching place. Same goes for whipping out the cell phone to check the call you just missed.

Last night, however, while seeing "The Transformers" with my son, I experienced the ultimate (so far) in glowing, egotistically annoying behavior: the blinking BlueTooth headset.

Some ding-dong in the front row wore his cell phone's little ear-piece thing-a-ma-bob throughout the entire movie... and every three seconds, it blinked. A lovely, bright blue mechanical lightning bug effect that made it just about impossible to watch the film. I eventually slouched down so far that the head of the nice man in front of me eclipsed the pulsing evil.

I haven't heard a cell phone ring in a movie theater in about five years, I think. People know to put them on vibrate, and the theater often reminds us to do so before the feature. That's great. Now we need to remind people to silence and veil their frippin' devices. "Please eclipse your various light emitting diodes and liquid crystal displays."

Feh. 

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