...of charm and strange: the blog

Yet another strange moviegoing story. This one doesn't make me want to gouge my eyes out, so I felt it was something to write about.

So when I walked into the auditorium to see Intolerable Cruelty this afternoon, I started to sit in one seat, and then realized that I would be blocking the view of an extremely short woman sitting directly behind me, so I moved several seats over. And then I did a double-take, exactly like in the gum commercials, and saw that it was not an extremely short woman at all, but a little girl. She must have been 11 years old. And she was accompanied by six or seven of her little friends. There was a woman (a grown-up one) seated at the end of the line.

Um, what?

This is a Coen Brothers movie. It's a comedy about lawyers. Parents are stupid and take their kids to movies that are inappropriate for them all the time, but it's usually to movies like Bad Boys II. But this isn't stupid, it's just absurd. I'm not sure what kind of parent thinks their kid is chomping at the bit to see George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones in a feature-length round of verbal sparring. Although I have to say, if they were, they'd have awfully good taste.

So when the dreaded Coke race came onscreen and the kids started hollering about which beverage they believed would "win" the "race," I actually concluded that there in fact must be a God because there's no way this much crap could happen to me if there wasn't one to hate me.

I started to question if I was in the wrong auditorium. I started to hope that they were in the wrong auditorium. I started to hope that the first five minutes of the film would contain an avalanche of gratuitous full-frontal nudity so that the kids' chaperone would haul them out of the theater immediately. (And also because the movie stars George Clooney.)

Fortunately, the kids hushed up as soon as the movie started -- because they were so damn confused. They had no idea what was going on. They tried weakly to laugh along when everyone else in the audience was laughing, but they totally didn't get it. It wasn't their fault. What did this woman think these kids were going to get out Intolerable Cruelty?

I wasn't mad at all. I was insanely curious.

After about 20 minutes, the woman ushered the kids out of the theater. She returned 10 minutes later to enjoy the rest of the film, sans kids.

She must have dropped them off at Runaway Jury.