Going to the movies: Take me out to the crowd

My friends hate when people talk during a movie, and they have stopped visiting some local movie theaters because of this behavior. And they have reason to. You don't want to have a serious movie interrupted by someone talking on a cell phone or yelling at the screen. But there are other movies, such as Taken - an action flick starring Liam Neeson as a spy who comes out of retirement to rescue his kidnapped daughter - that can actually be improved with a little crowd participation.

There's a stereotype that black people like to make noise at movie theaters, and whether or not it's actually true, I'd say there were a number of black people where my friends and I saw Taken last Saturday at the Regal Royale 14, the movie theater at University Town Center in Hyattsville. Last semester, I wrote about University Town Center in a column titled "Land of Stores and Danger," which got a chilly response from the management there. I'm sure they won't appreciate me saying their theaters attract loud patrons, either, but I wouldn't say it's a bad thing. In fact, seeing Taken at Royale 14 was the most fun I've had at the movies in a long time.

I was pretty frustrated in the beginning. There were two middle-age women behind us, a 20-something couple to our right and a teenage boy in front of us, all commenting on the movie. "Damn, that's a long-ass hallway," the woman behind us mused at one point. Later on, the guy next to us turns to his girlfriend and noted, "He's shooting all those n-----s up." And at the end of the movie, the kid in front of us yelled, "Man, that was awesome!" and the whole theater breaks into applause, as they had every time Neeson killed someone.

By then, I wasn't annoyed anymore. I realized that you go to a movie for suspension of disbelief, to put yourself with Neeson as he tears through a Paris sex-trafficking operation to find his kidnapped daughter. But you never go it alone. Even if you see a movie by yourself, you're sharing that experience with everyone else in the theater, and after the movie, you talk about the experience to your friends and family. Movies are an integral part of the pop culture we share in this country. And talking during a movie, as heinous as it sounds, contributes to that community created by pop culture.

As we leave the theater, the kid who sat in front of us strikes up a conversation. "Oh, man," he said. "When that one guy got electrocuted, he was crying like a little bitch!"

"Well, you'd be crying, too, if you got electrocuted," I said.

"Yeah, but I wouldn't cry like a little bitch!" the kid replied. "I mean, seriously! Cry like a man!"

This feeling of community seems exactly what University Town Center was designed as - a place for local students and area residents alike to gather and celebrate. Urban planners say that clustering shops, homes and offices together brings people closer, but none of the books I've read said anything about movie theaters doing that. There's nothing wrong with asking for a quiet movie, and the best part about living in the Washington area is that you have your choice of theaters where that is the norm. But sometimes, it's nice to go out and actually interact with other people. After all, if I want to watch a movie alone, I've got a laptop and an Internet connection.

Dan Reed is a senior architecture and English major. He can be reached at reeddbk@gmail.com.