A dying father was deep in conversation with his young son. The father, a billionaire, was on his death-bed stricken with a disease that was finally taking his life away. The son felt like an alien, his face hardened, eyes averted. The father reaches out to the son. His words struggling to offer explanation for his absence for all the years he missed when his son was growing up. Suddenly, a child’s piercing scream is heard.
Even the father would have jumped out of his death-bed and crouched in fear. But he was protected. This was a scene in the movie – Amazing Spiderman -2. Though the actors were spared the terror, we were not. A toddler was out to wreak her revenge on her family and mankind.
“You get up dad! You get up! YOU GET UP!” she yelled in her scratchy voice till all of us sitting many seats away were willing to get up and give our seats as long as she would shut up. Her embarrassed dad got up and stood in the aisle. The mom must have tried to quieten her but it had the opposite effect. The girl started babbling even more loudly if possible. She found this the right time to carry out a loud monologue in Hindi while we squirmed. The scene was lost in the pandemonium. The parents still stuck on. She continued chattering loudly drowning out the already very loud Dolby sound in the auditorium, but her parents just pressed on!
My husband and I had not bargained for a raging headache when we decided to watch this latest craze of a movie with our kids. The place was teeming with kids of all age groups and their parents/guardians. Some of the older kids would spontaneously launch into conversations forgetting that it was not their living room that they were seated in. The younger ones are a goddamned menace. They don’t listen to anyone least of all their own parents. They talk, yell, and sing, just about anything to drown their boredom in watching a movie they don’t understand a word of. Why are they taken to such movies in the first place? I had seen parents bringing little kids to Life of Pi. Life of Pi? What did they think — it was a cartoon film?
Yes, I am a parent. I have my deepest sympathies for the poor parents who get no opportunity to catch a movie in the theatre. Well, I have been there too! But seriously this cannot be their idea of fun. If I was in the place of that little girl’s parents, I would have walked out a long time ago. But they continued to put us all through misery sticking around till the end of the movie while she did not allow her dad to sit next to her mom. And we tolerated it out of decency.
That brings me to the question of why parents take toddlers to theatres? Have the others not paid ticket money to watch a movie in silence? And don’t they have any sense to get up and leave when the child creates a ruckus? Somehow, in public places, we are expected to put up with loud, absolutely boorish children, just because they are well… children. And I hold such parents in really low esteem whose kids run around in aisles, monkey around, yell and talk and basically make a real nuisance of themselves. Do they think that we ought to babysit their kids or turn a blind eye or rather deaf ear to such misbehavior?
What does the theatre do? They just ramp up the volume till you are in danger of losing your hearing completely. Yet, these kids manage to scream louder.
I think all theatres must have rules that if children make too much noise, the parents must be asked to leave! Please leave your kids home when you go for movies.
What have your movie going experiences been? Have you felt disturbed by little kids?
Rachna says 
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