Movie Etiquette

Over the weekend, B, his best friend, and I went to the movies to see the latest Transformers movie. I would say that the movie itself was ok, nowhere near as kid-friendly as the first one (unnecessary language and such) and a little on the long side, but ok otherwise.

The theater we went to is slowly remodeling. Some of the auditoriums are brand new with nice seats while others, like the one we were in, has more broken seats than usable ones and the air didn't work very well. But even that wasn't the most frustrating part...

In the row in front of were four adults with two children... one was probably 7ish and the other was maybe 3. The 3 year old had full reign of the auditorium... running up and down the aisles squealing and after about 10 minutes of this one of the adults would chase him down and bring him back to his seat. This must have happened at least 5 times during the movie. Finally the adults took turns taking the kid out to other movie theaters to let him run around in them...distrurbing other movie-goers, and when they returned to our movie would proceed to talk not so quietly to each other about what the 3 year old did in the other movies and how good/bad/funny the other movies were that were showing at that time.

About 30 minutes before the movie was over, the 3 year old quieted down and we were able to fully pay attention to the movie, but by that point we were kind of ill. Movies cost too much money these days to have to deal with uncontrollable children (in a movie not designed for children in the first place). I wish more parents would consistently teach their children how to behave and be courteous to others in public settings.

Do you have any stories about going to the movies?