My bawling infant has warbled over all the important dialogue in the establishing scenes of this film, but he should quiet down soon.
Like you, I’ve been waiting all summer to see this movie. The trailer looked so exciting as I sat in bed with my iPad in my third trimester, weary and bloated, and prayed to give birth to my bundle of joy or just die already.
So I sympathize completely with your frustration that the film’s delirious sound mixing can’t wash through your ears in amazing six-channel digital audio, because my baby’s yawps and wet shrieks pierce the theater like snotty cannonfire and obliterate the carefully balanced soundtrack.
He’s being what I call a Pouty Pants, aren’t you, sweetie?
And the CGI special effects in 3D, so rich and luminous you can literally reach out and touch them, and for which you paid an additional fee on top of your already outrageous adult ticket price — on an IMAX screen as wide and glorious as a Tahitian sunset, for which you paid yet another upcharge, bringing your total cost of admission to an amount that Scrooge McDuck could swim Olympic laps in — all these visual sensations would blast eyegasms through your brain stem if you could only concentrate long enough to follow the action. But your attention is understandably distracted by my child’s staccato gurgles and sudden, long-winded howls that jerk you upright and jangle your nerves like harp strings plucked by a spastic spider monkey.
Normally he goes right to sleep, especially at 10:00 on a Saturday.
Some of you have clicked your eyes in our direction, as if to alert me to his intermittent discomfort and roof-rattling shrieks, and thank you, thank you so very much, I appreciate your concern for my family’s health and happiness. We haven’t been out since the Wednesday before last, when we dined at Olive Garden and I used our booth as a changing table because, whoopsie, accidents happen and calamari is best enjoyed hot! I’ve considered stepping out to the theater lobby for a moment, if only to see if I can calm his hellspawn squeals in relative piece and quiet, but the movie’s just getting to the good part.
So let’s settle in and watch this cinema spectacular in 70-second intervals, in between my baby’s screeches and my whispered shhh‘s and the creaking of the seat, the whole row of seats even, as I shift my legs and try to identify a position that might soothe him for as long as 75 seconds. Great films bring different people in one place to be astonished by two hours of movie magic in the dark, together, and to accommodate whatever unholy squawling might spew forth from my adorable widdle snookums.
Except for this kid kicking my seat behind me. What an asshole.
Submitted by: Andrew Bryan Smith
