TriumphAnt

How’s that again?

(Overheard on CBC television recently) “Coming up after the news: the growing gender gap between boys and girls.”

I’m still thinking about what this means. I’ve always felt that you were either one or the other. But more importantly, I always felt that whichever one you are, your distance from the other remains the same.

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OK, I hereby declare this to be National Curmudgeon Day. (Which will recur however often I damned well feel like it!)

Memo to self: Even if it’s not “Harry Potter 3” you want to see on the very night it opens in Ottawa, stay away from the entire cineplex movie experience on such a night. In this case, it was “Shrek 2” we wanted to see but it was, as just noted, on the same night that the HP3 blockbuster opened.

Most people by now surely are familiar with the cineplex concept. A movie is no longer just a trip to a theatre where you, well… watch a movie. Nope, it’s an EXPERIENCE!!! (Having a molar ripped from your skull is also “an experience”, by the way. My point is that not all experience is good experience.)

Our nearest cineplex is called Silver City and it is home to 14 or 16 (or maybe it’s 1,042. I lose track) separate screens of various sizes. When you enter a building that would comfortably park a Boeing 747, the first thing you notice, unless you are hearing impaired, is the sheer volume of noise.

I’m sure if cineplexes (cineplices?) had been around when Phil Spector began experimenting with bringing his “wall of sound” to rock and roll music, he would have recoiled in horror when he first stepped through a cineplex door. He may even have started producing music with a “wall of silence”, and “rock” music might have come to mean “that which rocks you to sleep”. On such fortuitousness of timing do the wheels of history turn. But I digress.

The central core of Silver City is divided into Hose-You Zones (although that’s probably not their official designation). First is the front desk where you actually pay to attend a movie. There are three cash stations now at Silver City, usually only two of which are actually staffed. Bracketing it like the walls of a funnel are lines of “fast-pass” machines which will yank your credit card in and spit you back however many tickets you want faster than you can say “debt counselling”. I still refuse to use the machines, but given that hiring for the Silver City front desk apparently has now been redefined on the basis that “congenital idiot” is the number one job requirement, I’m thinking that maybe a stone-cold impersonal bit of steel with a CRT face might not be such a bad choice of ticket vendor after all.

Once past the front desk, there is an enormous donut-shaped ring of service stations dispensing the mandatory movie snack choices – popcorn and soft drinks. And for a quick lesson on just how much abuse a Canadian is willing to suffer, there is no better classroom. Start with the obscene prices, the utterly indifferent service, and a laughable standard of cleanliness that makes Max Yazgur’s field at Woodstock – after Hendrix said good-bye – look pristine. These people were literally ankle-deep in popcorn as they fought to placate the hungry fans decked out in their Slytherin capes and Hogwarts scarves! Combine all of these with the fact that we are still willing to line up and part with an average of $10.00 per person in exchange for about 14 cents worth of ingredients (15 cents if you make the suicidal choice to accept the inevitable cheery offer to “Supersize it” for “only 75 cents more!”) and you get what is surely a benchmark image of Canadian-as-masochist.

But wait; there’s more! Hose-You Zone 2 almost completely surrounds the centre foyer and the core snack bar. In it are multiple food services that now offer movie goers the opportunity to haul in trays of nachos and melted cheese, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Timothy’s mocha latte coffee, hot dogs and what is arguably Canada’s single most embarrassing contribution to the world of fast food – poutine. In a movie theatre, for God’s sake! Who knew that people lined up for the next viewing would ever have to be put in the position of waiting while staff cleaned the theatre of chicken bones and gravy stains?

Finally, and most egregiously in my card-carrying curmudgeon’s opinion, Hose-You Zone 3 is a large arcade games room area with the very latest in loonie / twonie wallet vacuuming services. (Which is not to overlook bills. This space is also home to a change machine that will take up to a $20 bill and return you the appropriate amount in coins.) For those movie goers for whom a pre-movie wait cannot reasonably be filled with time passing activities like, oh maybe conversation, you can now smash your formula one racing car into concrete walls at the cyber equivalent of 240 miles per hour.

You can blow an entire four-engined Hercules aircraft full of paratroopers out of the sky even before the chutes deploy, resulting in an onscreen explosion and crash that eliminates the need to gun them down one by one as they hang overhead in their harnesses drifting slowly down to the patch of ground you are defending at the rate of about two dollars a minute. Or you can be an ethically challenged drug enforcer who chooses to clean up the neighbourhood by the simple and direct route of using your hand-held simulated pistol to kill anyone who moves into your field of fire. Blamblamblam! Let God sort ‘em out! Or you can exercise your ankles on a large “Dance Dance Revolution” footpad that requires you to fling your feet about to match onscreen choreographic directions at a pace that makes a Brigade of Gurkas march speed of 120 paces to the minute look like slow motion, all the while accompanied by a loud soundtrack devised by someone who is obviously the owner of a closet full of paisley shirts and is bitterly resentful and completely unwilling to accept that disco actually died and was buried a couple decades ago. Yep, George McRae is back and more sub-bass woofer thudding than ever. Do the hustle!

And it is all this stuff – stuff for which the word cacaphony was surely invented – that builds into a cumulative aural assault of eardrum hammering that begins the moment you step in the door from the comparative outside calm of hundreds of angry drivers all struggling to park their cars no more than eight spaces from the front door. You honest to God have to shout to be heard above the din. And guess what? All those people shouting don’t help reduce the electronic noise volume one little bit.

I hate cineplexes. Even the centrepiece – the actual showing of the movie – now begins only after you’ve been forced to endure an excessively cheery escapee from the Department of Cineplex Gnomes, who wheels in a cartload of snacks and drinks (in case you missed those few discreetly placed food vending stations in the foyer). Picking up a microphone, this frustrated loser of last week’s “You too can be Jerry Seinfeld” night in St Peristaltis’s Church basement congratulates you on making the “awesome choice” of your movie tonight, triggering throaty grumbling from all those fans who fell into these seats only because the Harry Potter 3 movie they wanted to see tonight was sold out long ago at roughly the same time Canadians were securing their Juno Beach supply lines to enable them to push on to Berlin. (Every movie is “awesome” to these people, incidentally. “The Passion of Christ” – “Awesome!” “Sponge Bob Squarepants?” – “Awesome!!” Even if Siskel and Roper have just the night before on national TV suggested that your movie choice will be available for home video rental by 10 tomorrow morning – it’s “Awesome!”)

The movie’s actual start, meanwhile, is still temporally located somewhere in what the weather channel would call a “long-range forecast”, because you still have to sit through a half dozen movie screen-sized replays of television commercials that were crap when they were shot for their intended viewing at home on TV, and are now no less crappy for the oversized pore-counting imagery that they become on the theatre screen. But you’re not done yet! You still have to face a half dozen “Coming attractions” that distill all of the plot surprises of movies “coming in the Fall of 2017” into a two-minute sonic blast for each. (“Sonic blast” is deliberate and accurate. Coming attractions are usually blown through the speakers so loudly that my teeth vibrate.)

So take all that rant, and multiply its irritation factor by at least 10 on this night, because the cineplex was awash in Harry Potter fans – kids with lightning bolts inked on their foreheads, people in full dress Hogwarts House regalia (Huffle-Puff! Gryffindor!), and just plain mobs of people waiting to be passed, as though through a colon, along the various steps required to get them into a theatre – buying a ticket, buying a snack. Not even just having your ticket torn in half is exempt from a stultifying wait on this evening. Usually an easygoing process with no wait, tonight there is a line-up of at least 50 people with whom we had to wait to get beyond all those Harry Potter lathered-up zombies into “Shrek 2”.

Snarl.

Footnote: A Canadian gentleman named Nat Taylor passed away on March 3, 2004. He is credited with coining the name “cineplex” and the concept “multiplex”. And its inauguration was, in fact, in Ottawa in 1948 when he subdivided the huge Elgin Street theatre into the Elgin and Little Elgin. It had a common lobby and snack bar to serve both theatres. But it was still a movie house first, last and always. I doubt even the “sucker born every minute” exhibitor roots in Mr Taylor ever foresaw the travesty that his little bit of convenience would become in the bastardizing hands of marketing juggernauts like AMC, Cineplex Odeon and Famous Players.