{"id":15533,"date":"2017-06-03T09:34:30","date_gmt":"2017-06-03T16:34:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2017\/06\/03\/15533.html"},"modified":"2017-06-03T09:34:30","modified_gmt":"2017-06-03T16:34:30","slug":"before-wonder-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2017\/06\/03\/before-wonder-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"Pre-movie experience: before _Wonder Woman_"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is a report of my pre-movie experience at Wonder Woman<\/cite> last night. This post is not about the movie, and doesn't contain any spoilers.<\/p>\n

I parked in the nearby lot under the freeway. It was mostly full; unsurprising for 7:00 on a Friday night. Probably the reason that the space I parked in was empty was that the car in the next space had a wheel mostly in my space. I wish people were more careful about how they park.<\/p>\n

Not sure I've ever been inside the Grand Lake Theatre before. It's lovely! And there was a live organist!<\/p>\n

We ended up sitting in the second-to-last row, because that was the only place we could find four seats together. But it turned out to be fine; a perfectly good view of the screen, and there were only a couple of lines in the movie that I couldn't hear, probably more due to my gradually deteriorating hearing than to any sound problems.<\/p>\n

Speaking of sound: The audience was very noisy during the previews. The house lights stayed on, and the audience didn't seem interested in watching the previews; they just kept talking. There was a preview for Valerian<\/cite>, and one for Atomic Blonde<\/cite>, and maybe that was it? I forget.<\/p>\n

I don't think I've ever before been in a theatre where I couldn't hear the “please silence your cell phones” announcement due to the audience still talking loudly. I was concerned that that would continue through the movie, but I needn't have worried; even the two guys next to me stopped talking as soon as the lights went down.<\/p>\n

So the lights went down, and there were scenes of male soldiers on a beach, and it fairly quickly became clear to me that the setting was Dunkirk, in WWII, and I was really confused, because I had thought Wonder Woman<\/cite> was set during WWI. And I was kind of annoyed that the opening featured a whole lot of men and no women. (Okay, one woman, possibly a nurse, in a medium shot of the deck of a ship.) And the Dunkirk scenes went on and on, and I was guessing that sooner or later we would see Steve Trevor shot down in a plane, but I couldn't figure out who all these other guys were or why we were getting so much focus on them.<\/p>\n

And then, after what I learned this morning was seven minutes of all that, the word “DUNKIRK” appeared on the screen in big letters, and I still thought it was a place-setting title card, and then it became clear that what we had just watched was a seven-minute trailer<\/em> for a completely unrelated war movie, all about men.<\/p>\n

Someone nearby muttered, “Psych!”<\/p>\n

And then Wonder Woman<\/cite> began.<\/p>\n

And I gotta say:<\/p>\n

Dear Grand Lake Theatre: you have a lovely theatre, but that was not really the best possible way to start your movie.<\/p>\n

Also: Dear Christopher Nolan: a seven-minute trailer is kind of excessive, and giving no indication at the start that it is<\/em> a trailer is pretty annoying.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a report of my pre-movie experience at Wonder Woman last night. This post is not about the movie,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movies"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}