Constantine (11May05)

It's been a crazy week. Poor Paul has been working even more than usual -- and he worked so late on Tuesday that we missed Cheap Night at our favorite Cheap Theater. So we did something different this week -- we visited The Cheap Theater on a non-Tuesday weeknight. And it was -- not surprisingly -- dead. So dead, in fact, that no one was working the ticket booths, forcing the evening's concession stand worker to do double duty. Poor guy.

This week, we decided to see Constantine (which, for those of you who might be wondering, is not, in fact, a movie about that guy who was recently and oh-so-wrongly voted off American Idol well before his time) -- partially because I got called in to work, due to a yarn-store emergency, and the movie didn't start until 7:25. And despite the fact that the theater was far from packed, we were still able to observe the behavior of two different kinds of Perplexing Moviegoers...

First, The Laughers.

There were two girls across the aisle from me who apparently thought that the movie was a comedy. For those of you who don't know, Constantine is a supernatural action movie, filled with scary-looking demons and exorcisms and stuff. And it does not star Bill Murray.

I'm not saying that there wasn't any humor in the movie. There was. But it was the sly kind that makes you grin. If anything, it makes you let out a quiet "huh." These girls, however, found those bits of subtle humor absolutely hysterical in a laugh-out-loud-till-it-hurts kind of way.

Don't get me wrong. I love to laugh. But there's a time and a place for everything -- especially laughter. This wasn't it.

I know it's not just them, either. I've run into The Laughers before. Believe it or not, I sat right in front of one when I went to see The Passion of the Christ. I'm still baffled by that one.

Anyway, I was relieved that I wasn't watching an actual comedy with these two ladies. I'm afraid, if faced with something that really was funny, they could possibly laugh themselves right into heart failure, and that would put a serious damper on my movie-going experience.

But it wasn't just The Laughers who joined us in our movie-going experience. We were also joined by...

The Personal Space Guys.

I've always been intrigued by these guys -- the ones who think that it's just not right for two men to sit next to each other. Apparently, if two men go to a movie together (just totally as friends, got that? cuz their totally hot, totally female girlfriends just didn't want to see this movie, okay?) and they sit next to each other -- in a way that could possibly lead to their arms accidentally touching at some point in the movie -- then people will see them and think that those two men, sitting right next to each other in a dark movie theater, watching a totally manly movie, aren't just friends, if you know what I mean. Or maybe they're afraid that if they do end up sitting next to a guy in the dark theater, and their arms do accidentally touch, they could possibly become gay.

Either way, as a precautionary measure, these two men will thus sit with one seat between them, so as not to tempt fate and/or encourage gossip. They will then have to lean way over to yell their manly comments at one another (or to share their popcorn) -- and they could possibly end up in a packed theater, where a lonely old lady will end up sitting between them.

But at least no one -- especially none of their fellow beer-gut-toting, mullet-sporting rednecks -- will ever suspect them of being gay (just as long as they aren't seeing something like, say Legally Blonde 2).