The Attack of the Wooden Octopus

My neighborhood movie theater has a Tuesday special, where movies are $6 and a free popcorn is included. So naturally it is a big hit. Who doesn't like free popcorn? What you save financially though is sometimes sacrificed to a rowdy crowd. Which depending on the movie can, on occasion, be fun. At the piece of crap Grudge remake, when everyone was shouting things at the screen like- "Damn girl, don't go in there, you stupid!" I even got in on the fun by saying, after one character is killed "Awww, she got Grudged!" Tonight friends and I went and saw Cloverfield. What a picture! Best thing I saw this year. All 23 days of it. But the audience didn't seem to love it as much as I did. The two knuckleheads in the row in back of us kept up a running commentary. I figured out they were a few sandwiches short of a picnic when after the trailer for the new Star Trek movie played, they decided it was for the Fantastic Four's latest sequel. When the Cloverfield monster is first glimpsed, they deduced it must be an octopus. And finally when the main characters meet up with the military, one of them asks what the creature is. The army guy says they don't know what it is " but it's winning." "It's wooden?!?" the film scholars behind me cried out! A wooden octopus is attacking Manhattan? Hmmm. As the film started to wind down and the hopes for a happy ending dwindled, the "this sucks" and "I want my money back" started to erupt from all over the theater. This provoked me in to a round of some serious hand clapping, which I usually don't do- no one who made the movie is present so why bother, right? It was the sound of one man clapping. On the ride home we talked about why people didn't like it. We joked about shouting our own things at the screen, like "You call that Mise en scène?" or "That's a jump cut?! It's almost like the French New Wave never happened?" I guess people like to have things explained to them, to see a movie they have more or less seen already. Where a MOVIESTAR saves the day, makes a few quips, beds the girl, and kills the monster. When something comes along that breaks from the norm, that expects you the viewer to fill in some of the blanks, it causes some angry responses. I suppose for some people a wooden octopus isn't that interesting, even if it does come with a free popcorn.