Audience participation

Nothing beats the Muscat heat better than a double bill in City Cinema (formerly Shatti Cinema). First on the list today was Coraline, a quirky animated tale written by Neil Gaiman (who also wrote Stardust, a favourite of mine) which I found adequate, but not worthy of the glowing reviews (although I appreciated the animation (it looked like stop-motion to me) and direction). The second film was The Proposal which was decent enough for a romantic comedy and quite funny in parts too. It is my experiences during this film that will be recorded for today's blip (alongside an image of Qur'um beach, just up the road from the cinema).

There is an unwritten rule of cinema etiquette that dictates 'One is permitted one free seat next to one if one is at a performance that has not sold out'. To reinforce this rule, I will carefully (when appropriate) place my Crumpler bag, sunglasses, ticket stubs and keys on the seat to the left of me, and my wife on the seat to the right.

Upon arrival in the theatre, seeing me sitting three seats in from the edge (following the above set-up), and in a half empty cinema with plenty of free seat clusters both behind and in front of me, it would take a person of extraordinary witlessness to attempt to occupy the seat that I had reserved under the rule of etiquette stipulated in paragraph one.

Enter Shakypopcornman and his wife.

"Is there anyone sitting here?" I was politely asked. Under my ongoing instructions to try and behave like (and be more tolerant of) other people, I resisted the urge to point out the hundred or so other seats that nobody was occupying in addition to the one next to me and dutifully fumbled my belongings into my pockets and onto dry bits of underseat flooring so as to not cause a scene seeing as he had arrived fifteen minutes into the film (which in another rule of cinema etiquette, strips him of any right to any seat not in row A).

The normal technique of eating popcorn requires the use of the thumb, fore and middle fingers to scoop a small bite sized cluster of perhaps six or seven pieces which can be placed easily into an open mouth. There is an acceptable drop rate of around 1 or 2% using this technique, a drop rate not acceptable to Shakypopcornman who carefully ate one piece of popcorn approximately every thirty seconds for the best part of an hour. After the hour mark had passed, he started to give the thing-that-popcorn-is-eaten-out-of a quick shake (again, approximately every thirty seconds) in what I can only assume was an attempt to sift the larger remaining pieces to the top of the disappointingly large amount still left. This lasted for another twenty minutes until his wife confiscated his popcorn in an obvious attempt to stop him annoying the tits off of her too.

In addition to Shakypopcornman, Excesssnotman was having a field day filling his ear-pipes up with stuff that should clearly have been deposited in a hanky, mobile phones were constantly ringing (and being answered) and an entire family took it in turns to use the emergency exit door for their toilet trips, the resulting blinding outdoor light creating temporary blindness each time.

Transformers 2 is out next Thursday, and if any of the above happens during it, I don't want to think about what I might do.