Ruining the Movie Experience

I don't want to write about superhero movies every day, but until Man of Steel comes out, it's going to be hard for me to think about anything else. 

Today, I thought I'd talk about the rude, thoughtless people that sometimes attend the movies with us.  Do you remember the days when you could go to a movie and there were no cell phones ringing, people texting with those bright screens, or finding other ways to ruin the movie experience?  It's hard to remember those days.  It's the reason why many people avoid the theatres now, especially when they can have their home theatres.

These people drive me crazy.  How do you handle them?  Ignore them? Confront them?  Complain to the theatre?  I used to have a friend who would shout, "Thanks for ruining the movie!" if a phone would ring during the movie.  My problem with this is that you're continuing to ruin the movie for everybody else by making a scene.  Here's how I've tried to handle a couple of the situations I've encountered.

When my wife and I first started dating, we went to go see a terrible movie.  Honestly, I can't even remember which movie it was.  While the movie was terrible, I still paid for it and wanted to watch it.  About 30 minutes into the movie, a phone starts ringing.  It's the lady sitting directly in front of me.  She looks at it and puts it back in her purse.  I figured she forgot to turn off the ringer, did so and put her phone away.  I would have appreciated that.  About 15 minutes later, her phone rings again.  This time I'm a little annoyed.  It rang once and you had an opportunity to turn the ringer off.  This time she lets it ring longer before putting it back in her purse.  I'm still very forgiving at this point, but annoyed.  A third time her phone rings and she answers it.  I have no idea what she was talking with the person on the other end about, but it could have happened outside of the theatre.  I give her about 20 seconds to hang up before I lightly kick the back of her chair.  She turns around and gives me the death stare.  I politely say, "Get off your phone, please."  I'm not sure about the please part, but the general tone was polite (other than the fact I kicked her chair).  She turns around and continues to talk again, so I kick her chair again...HARD.  She turns around again and I tell her, "GET OFF YOUR PHONE!"  She hung up at that point and apparently didn't stick around for the rest of the movie.  The next time I looked down, she was gone.

More recently, a similar situation occurred, but it didn't go so well.  My wife and I went to see Total Recall.  Does being a bad movie tend to cause the rudeness more?  Or is my view of the movie tainted by these bad experiences?  We decide at the last moment to go see the movie at a movie grill for lunch.  I'm a little more forgiving of patrons at these locations since they lend themselves to distractions.  We get to the movie right as the movie is starting.  The theatre is dark and we end up sitting right next to a dude by himself.  Whoops!  We watch most of the movie without incident.  It gets right towards the end of the movie when they're revealing all of the twists, and the dude decides a pivotal plot point is the perfect time to make plans for that night.  As soon as he starts talking, my wife leans over to me to tell me not to say anything.  I don't plan on saying anything, because the dude is a little scary.  He talks for about five minutes straight.  I'm doing my best to ignore him and focus on the movie.  I look over at him though and he looks at me.  He says, "What?" 
I ask him, "Can you please get off your phone?"
"Just a minute, man."  A couple of minutes later, we're both more annoyed at him because he's continued to talk, possibly louder.  He catches us looking at him again and says, "What?!?"
At this point, my wife says, "We paid $10 for the movie.  Can you please get off your phone?"
"You take this $#^& too seriously!" he responds as he gets off of the phone stands up and moves down to the end of the row.  I think he tried complaining to the waitress when she found him to give him his check.  I guess she didn't want to do anything about it, because he starts kicking chairs and having himself a good "grown-up" temper tantrum.  After he pays his bill, he gets up to leave before the movie is finished.  He stares at us as passes our table.  Normally, I'll stay through most of the credits if not all of the credits.  This time, we left with the rest of the theatre because we were scared of leaving by ourselves.

Sometimes I choose to ignore distractions, but there are times when you can't deal with them any longer.  Most of the time, if they're close to me, I'll ask very politely and the person responds well.  These two experiences are two of my more extreme encounters.