In my other job as a film critic, I sometimes see up to three, maybe four movies a week in the theater. Many of these are free preview screenings that often seal-off a small section for press and their guests, with the rest of the theater open to radio station contest winners, promotional ticket-holders and various jerks who treat a free movie with the same level of testicular excitement usually reserved for winning a million dollars from Publisher’s Clearing House.
To say these seat-fillers are the bottom of the barrel does a grave injustice to barrel-bottoms. I have seen grown men step on their own children for promotional items like keychains and posters, heard more crying babies than a maternity ward on a Friday night and, subsequently, force-adapted to the general Lord of the Flies-esque disregard for any type of social decorum, free movie or not, with loud talking, cell-phone lights and chair-kicking some of the more innocuous indictments of things that you just have to “let go of.”