Movies vs. Air Travel
In the last few years my wife and I have shunned movie-going in favor of the convenience, low-cost, solitude and vast selection of Netflix. Just the other day we broke that practice in order to see Juno, which is funny and different, at the Carmike Cinema 16 on Cinema Drive. Sharing the theatre with 8 others, we quickly realized the room was freezing, so I ventured out during previews and politely complained to the youthful staff. Throughout the feature presentation the theatre remained cold despite my attire of T-shirt, long sleeve T, and sweatshirt. My wife’s fingers were chilled as if we were watching the movie in an ice skating rink. The total disregard for the consumer reminded me of air travel and how both industries have declined in the last 10-15 years. Here’s a list of grievances for each:
Movie-Going
- Too expensive
- Too many commercials/previews
- Deafening soundtracks, especially during previews, which must be directed at the elderly and hard-of-hearing
- Food and drink awful and way too expensive
- Most movies suck
- Too cold/Too hot
Air Travel
- Cramped and crowded
- Too many delays
- Security overload
- No food/Bad food/Pay for bad food
- Discourteous service
- Lost luggage/No room for carry-ons
- Too cold/Too hot
These two targets are almost too easy, but if anyone has additional comments pro or con, please post them for all to read. Thanks.
I’m not a big fan of the modern movie, either in theaters or at home – I tend to prefer shorter-form stuff, both fictional (from Miss Marple to Grey’s Anatomy) and non (from Nature and Nova to Nightline). For movies, I like mostly old and sometimes offbeat – just about anything in black and white with Katharine Hepburn, Fred Astaire – Flying Down to Rio, etc. – and my all-time favorite: Metropolis, both with the original score and the Giorgio Moroder 1984 colorized update.
I went to a very tragic movie theater in a small town in northeastern NC in late December to see National Treasure, which I foolishly did not realize would have a 10-minute car chase in it, as I am somewhat culturally retarded and didn’t know this was an action film in romance-historical disguise. Even with only 16 other people in the theater, which is slightly more than my antisocial agoraphobia would prefer, four latecomers plopped down right behind us and yakked even louder than the loud commercials and previews. My recollection is that the temperature was OK, but the projection and sound quality both left something to be desired – but that’s understandable given that this was the new theater when we moved there, when I was in high school many years ago. Neither the movie nor the theater made me miserable, but neither did either make me particularly happy, and even though the price of the movie was $8 for two, I can still find cheaper ways to kill a couple of hours, and I no longer need an excuse to get away from my mother!
While I am a ferociously demanding consumer in general, I am fairly easy to please with air travel because it is very important to me. I don’t like waiting in lines, but as long as they are fairly administered (no cutting, no new line opened that later line-joiners somehow get into first, etc.), I accept them as part of the price for what is incredibly cheap transportation, all things considered. Likewise the food, the cramped and crowded conditions, and carry-on limitations. I do object strenuously to bad service and will fight that fight for weeks or months until I either get satisfaction or get bored. I’ve been pretty lucky with luggage – never lost a bag and had only three go wandering without me – one for more than a week from Frankfurt to Bangkok and finally back to me in Sicily, the others showing up later in the day – and I’ve never had anything stolen. The security stuff is another story entirely, but again if it’s managed fairly I don’t mind – although I have run into a few attitudes there, I have resisted giving much back as their power to really ruin the trip is too great to flout.
I would love nothing better than to travel in the style of the golden era of airliners – and I could come close, if I were willing to plunk down the price of first-class or even use miles for an upgrade. Back in that golden era, in the mid-century, people in my economic stratum didn’t get to fly, any more than people like me in the decades before commercial air travel crossed oceans in first class en-suite cabins, dressing for dinner. We might have been on the ship, but we didn’t bring trunks of evening wear and dine on caviar and porterhouse steaks; we were in the second- and third-class, with stacked bunks, bathrooms down the hall, eating in one of multiple seatings in a dining room that had more in common with a school cafeteria than haute cuisine.
Back to the present: the couple of times I have ended up in first class, it was pretty comfortable and the food was OK and very enthusiastically presented. Maybe not the same as dressing for dinner on a transatlantic crossing, but the same price range, which is not mine. So I suck it up, game the system as much as I can with strategic flight and seat selection for likeliest uncrowded conditions, always have plenty of cash in my pocket to get something to eat in whatever airport I hit anywhere near a mealtime, and am grateful my legs aren’t any longer or my bladder any smaller than they are. And I am still in awe and really, really grateful that I can get in my car in Wilmington in the morning, drive to RDU, and have supper at the In-N-Out on Sepulveda at Lincoln – pretty much any weekend I want to, if I watch the fares and am prepared to act quickly – and quite frankly, if I didn’t eat at all in between that would be OK, and I’d finally try a double double and maybe get fries and a milkshake on the same visit ….
http://www.yelp.com/biz/in-n-out-burger-los-angeles-2
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Mr. Cranky! A two-fer about how bad airlines and movie theaters are
Movie theaters do seem both desperate and disregarded. The soundtracks are surreally loud in such empty caverns. But this is the mega-theater in idle mode: I read something about how much the business of show business these days is staked on that first blockbuster weekend or two, when the lines form for Hillary Duff or whoever. Go at some other time, or see something else, and you’re cold and alone. 29 days a month the theater is just a big rent-payin’, money-losin’ air hanger.
I have few expectations of movie theaters. We go so infrequently now that I tend to overappreciate the shows we see there. I get all excited about the big moving images and big sounds, the spectacle. Spike Lee’s Summer of Sam is a case in point. Was it good? Was it a dog? We saw it at the sexy, then-new Metreon theater in SF, and I was completely taken in by the Baba O’Riley.
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