Lil and I went to go see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Thursday night. Aya was four hours away, and Brian was at home because I was still irritated about something stupid he had said in the morning. I wanted to preview the movie for Aya to see if it was something she could watch without getting freaked out.
Who am I kidding – it’s Indiana Jones! I wanted to watch it for me.
The preview for Hellboy II was AWESOME. There was fantastic use of color, light and texture. We had no idea what movie it was at first, but in those first five seconds, Lil and I had both decided that whatever it was, we were going to have to go see it.
The first hour of Indiana Jones was great, despite the presence of an extremely enthusiastic young man who was either mentally challenged or drunk. He kept up a loud, inappropriate commentary about what was happening. He was particularly spastic about spiders. The people he was with were muttering, “Dude, you’re not even afraid of spiders,” to which he protested that yes, he was, if they were big spiders.
He was blithely unaware of the rest of the audience telling him to ssssh.
Then the sound cut out.
FAIL.
It came back on after 5 minutes, but it sounded like only one speaker was working. Very quiet and fuzzy sounding, with a constant buzzing hiss. The inability to hear the dialogue did not stop the mentally challenged guy from drawling “oooooh… I knew it’d be the Russians…”
A couple of angry people stomped out to go find someone to complain at. I was one of them.
The theater staff fumbled around for 15 minutes, adjusting the volume between a blaring buzz and a hissing whisper, before finally announcing “We’re not going to be able to fix the screen, so if you want, you can go to the box office and get a rain check.”
I was thoroughly disgusted by that point, so we bailed and got in line with several other disgusted people and grabbed rain checks. Maybe I’ll see the rest this weekend, or maybe sometime next week when I have time off.
From what I did see, the spider webs might bother Aya. The scorpion encounter might scare her. The nuclear test bothered me, a lot. I don’t know how Aya will react to that scene.
I was sure the title of this was going to be Indiana Jones and the Temple of Fail.
That would be so appropriate. I need to remember to bug you next time I’m stuck for a post title!