Comments about ‘Chris Hicks: Turn off the cellphone and quit kicking my chair, please’

I whole-heartedly agree with this! It's more than just about being disruptive during a movie, it really comes down to having mutual respect and consideration for others. I don't care how quiet or discreet you THINK you are being by keeping your phone on vibrate, or by covering it with your hands or keeping it in your purse while checking or typing messages, but all that constant movement is disturbing. I really do wish theaters would do more to crack down on this problem. I think if they actually took a hard stance and did throw some people out, the problem would go away.

I agree. It's even worse in my area, and the problems are wider. I've had to ask people to stop swearing in front of my small children. During a movie.

I was at a school concert last night, and I almost couldn't hear the concert with all the other noise in the auditorium. Two girls behind me kept up a constant stream of mindless, inane chatter through the entire performance. Kids were running up and down the bleachers, and people kept dropping things. A family came in late (during part of the performance), and were highly disruptive. All had phones/ipads/mp3 players, which they wouldn't turn off/down, and they all talked through the rest of the performance.

The problem is so bad that our school system has a student stand up before the performance, and read instructions to the audience on how to behave during a live performance - sit quietly; listen to the performance; hold applause until the end of a scene or number; no cat-calls or wolf-whistles; please turn off electronic devices. The instructions are rarely heard because the audience is doing all of the above while the instructions are read!

Chris, you and I come from the old school of film patrons, when movies had story lines and actual plots. They were not a interminable, non-stop assault on our senses of loud music, explosions, car crashes, and endless, pointless action. Movies at one time were much more cerebral, and required some actual concentration and mental commitment in behalf of the audience. I prefer the "Sundance" indi and doc type of movies over the hugely financed studio messes that are splayed on the screens today. Movies today are designed to make money quick, and the average shelflife of a film is about 3 weeks before it goes to video and leaves the theaters, and theaters make most their money on box office receipts and concessions, so the studios must continue to mass produce films to keep the audiences coming, so quantity supercedes quality, and that is why so many films today are bad. Movies are just glorified TV shows, without the commercials. The demographics of movies is targeted to ages 15 to about 35. Us older patrons are not the targeted audiences they want to appeal to. Movies today appeal to the lowest common denominator, and they are getting worse.