Minutes I’ll Never See Again

by wjw on July 26, 2013

I finally went to see one of the summer blockbusters (World War Z), only to find that it was preceded by forty minutes of previews and ads. Forty minutes from the time when the movie was supposed to start.

Forty minutes I’ll never see again. Some of the ads were shown more than once!

What the hell did I spend my twelve bucks for? So that I can be pummeled by ads for products I’ll never buy and movies I’ll never see? If I’d watched two hours of commercial TV, I wouldn’t have seen that many ads, and I’d still have my twelve dollars.

I’m seriously considering never going to a big movie ever again.

And as for World War Z, it was a zombie picture with a big star and a budget of ten or fifteen times that of any other zombie picture. It looked really good, but there wasn’t anything new in it. Same scenes as in every zombie picture, only bigger and in 3D.

I’m glad I didn’t buy their damn expensive popcorn.

TJC July 26, 2013 at 11:11 am: I saw WWZ three days ago myself.

Thought the book was good (even if the writing style was a bit embarrassing at points). Thought the movie trailer was FANTASTIC.

Movie?

Meh.

It hit all the Hero with a Thousand Faces / Save the Cat! beats, right on schedule.

Problem statement. Collects a mentor. Loses the mentor. etc.

I loved (sarcasm) how Israel had a huge wall…and yet no internal walls, so that even one single problem anywhere in the entire country = Armageddon. :-/

Meh.

Visual popcorn, and not nearly as good as I was hoping for.
Dave Bishop July 26, 2013 at 6:44 pm: If it’s any consolation, Walter, I wasted 30 minutes of my life today. I went to the Royal Horticultural Society’s Flower Show at Tatton Park in Cheshire. Tickets cost £28.50 (about $30?) – which was outrageous enough – but I had to queue for 30 minutes in the blazing sun to buy one!
Once inside it was a very English occasion with ladies in posh frocks and gents in Panama hats – but, nevertheless, far too crowded.
On the other hand I got to see, talk about and buy lots of lovely plants. We English love our plants and, on balance, I think that I prefer them to zombies!
Ralf The Dog. July 28, 2013 at 12:42 am: The theater I visit has a no adds policy. They do have previews. The seats are all recliners (Heated). Each seat has a button you can press to call a waiter for food or something from the bar. All seats are reserved, so you can show up at the last minute and get the best seat in the house to a sold out movie.

The place has been slipping a bit. Half the time, the doormen don’t have their white gloves. I don’t use the valet parking. parking. Those that do say, the detail service is excellent.

(Joking about the valet parking.)
Patrick Mahoney July 28, 2013 at 5:32 am: For what it’s worth, I wholeheartedly agree. Theaters nowadays have way too many advertisements. I also think they are too loud. I want to watch a movie and be entertained, not be pummeled by advertisements, trailers and really loud sound-effects. I will admit that I have less unhappiness with trailers though – going to a movie and seeing previews of upcoming movies seems reasonable as long as they aren’t too excessive.

But my wife and I stopped going to the cinema about 6 months ago – when we went to see “The Hobbit”, which was also too loud and had 30 minutes of ads and trailers – and I doubt we will go to another movie for a long time, if ever.

I’ve heard that the film industry says that the reason that people don’t go to the cinema is that people have virtual home-cinemas nowadays in their TV sets, and that may be true, but certainly the annoyance of the modern movie-watching experience must play into their lack of revenues as well.
andrewsi August 5, 2013 at 3:55 am: I do agree that there are way too many adverts shown at the cinema, especially considering I’ve paid to watch them (I took my fiancee and her daughter to see a movie last week – with tickets and snacks, it wasn’t much short of $60… What are the odds that we’re going to be doing that regularly?)

But it is comparable with how many you’ll see on commercial TV. If you get a show on DVD, you’ll see how long it actually is; a show in a half hour slot will currently run to around 20 minutes of show, and a show in a one hour slot will run to around 40 minutes. That’s 20 minutes of commercials per hour.

Now compare the cost and (lack of) commercials from a Netflix account….