Why I now refuse to see another movie in a theater (until that much-delayed Alamo Drafthouse finally opens in San Francisco, that is)

Spy wasn't just the last entry in the AFOS blog's ongoing and year-long Throwback Thursday series before I took a three-week-long break from blogging for most of July. The Paul Feig flick is also the final movie I'll be watching inside a theater. I'm disappointed that I'll have to wait to see Ant-Man, Trainwreck, Mission: Impossible--Rogue Nation, Spectre, Ryan Coogler's Creed and possibly The Force Awakens until they hit Blu-ray. After being subjected to yet another theater audience member switching on his or her glowing smartphone screen light in the theater--this happened in the middle of a screening of Spy--I've simply had it. I said to myself, "That's it. I'm not watching another movie in a theater until Alamo Drafthouse actually opens that San Francisco Drafthouse theater they've been talking about opening since the Bush (Sr.) Administration."

It's not like I'm an absolute fascist about it. Unlike that psycho in Florida who shot and killed someone in a theater for texting during a bunch of movie trailers, I'm not distracted by moviegoers who check their texts during the trailers. They're commercials. I don't care. Neither am I distracted by those who use their phones as flashlights to help them see their way out while the closing credits are rolling and I'm waiting for some lame and pointless post-credits scene to arrive.

But when some moron in one of the front rows (and I can see them from afar because ever since college, I always sit in the farthest back row, due to my hatred of having my seat get kicked from behind me by strangers when I was younger) is flicking on his or her phone light during the feature presentation, in the middle of an action sequence, that's when I really get distracted and angry. I never want to be that guy who either tells people to turn off their phones or shushes a noisy talker, which is why I've never done either of those things. But I've always felt like doing so. Rude people in theaters can't be reasoned with, so why bother?

I also never want to be that guy who complains to the theater staff to get them to reprimand some unruly moron, simply because multiplex employees don't do shit. But when that smartphone zombie in one of the front rows flicked on his screen in the middle of one of Melissa McCarthy's Spy action sequences, that was the last straw for me. My tolerance for this nonsense has ended. He switched it on only once during Spy, which actually isn't as awful as the imbecile who brought his tablet to Kingsman: The Secret Service and kept switching it on during the feature presentation (that tablet zombie at the Kingsman screening is reason number 4,081 for why I despise the Silicon Valley tech world, a world I regret having worked for during the '00s). But despite the Spy screening being less aggravating than the Kingsman screening, my tolerance for smartphone or tablet zombies inside theaters is kaput. Why the fuck does this always happen during spy movies?

During the last 1/2 hr of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: GHOST PROTOCOL, the woman next to me was constantly texting. Still trying to fathom this. 1/2

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) January 3, 2012

I can almost understand a dimwitted or impatient person needing distraction during a very long expository scene, but this? Bizarre. 2/2

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) January 3, 2012

It's not pricey tickets & pre-show ads killing the movie theater experience. It's arrogantly rude viewers and indifferent theater owners.

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) March 23, 2012

I'll say it and I'll say it again: movie theaters don't need timid or indifferent ushers to handle texters. That squeaky-voiced teen from The Simpsons wouldn't have the ability or the guts to handle them anyway. Movie theaters need bouncers, and not just a regular bouncer: a Samoan bouncer. Samoan bouncers rule.

I'm not as violent as a bouncer. But smartphone zombies who check their texts in the movie theater (so that fucking phone light emerges out of nowhere and distracts everyone who's paying attention to the movie) drive me so bonkers--much more so than even people who talk out loud in the theater--that I wish Alamo Drafthouse, the theater chain that has broken the mold and won praise for actually doing something about texters and kicking them out of its theaters, would go the extra mile and not just kick them out. I would like Drafthouse to also take them to a back room and show them the respect and kindness they deserve. Here's an example of that kindness.



It's simple etiquette, man. I know there are moviegoers of color out there who, unlike this moviegoer of color, think it's okay to switch their goddamn flashlight on in the middle of the feature presentation. To them, I would like to say the following: don't you fucking frame this as "Man, enforcing etiquette like that is #peak" (as in Caucasity, for people who don't speak Desus Nice-ese). No, it's not.

I like making fun of moments of Caucasity as much as the next brown man, but someone telling you to shut off your phone in the theater isn't white privilege exerting itself. It's not white man etiquette. It's human etiquette.

#TheConjuring wasn't scary.The #millenials in the audience who couldn't stop texting, talking and taking pics during it were.

— Kristina Wong (@mskristinawong) August 7, 2013

You're not just rudely distracting everyone who paid to watch a movie, whether the movie is good or Michael Bay; they didn't pay to watch you play with your phone. You're also making everything about yourself and diverting everyone's attentions in the theater to you, attention whore. Now that--the petulant "I have the right to keep my phone on whenever I want to!" defense--is acting exactly like the privileged white morons you so despise.

One of those privileged white morons is Madonna. You want to behave just like Madonna? I'm glad to see Lin-Manuel Miranda setting an example for how to handle lousy phone etiquette by banning Madonna from attending his Broadway musical Hamilton after she texted during one of Hamilton's Off-Broadway performances. "That bitch was on her phone. You couldn't miss it from the stage. It was a black void of the audience in front of us and her face there perfectly lit by the light of her iPhone through three-quarters of the show," grumbled Jonathan Groff, Miranda's Hamilton co-star. I'm even more glad to see Patti LuPone verbally and physically getting tough on these tech addicts who come to Broadway performances and show no respect for the actors. LuPone once paused in the middle of one of her Gypsy musical numbers to chew out an audience member who was snapping photos. Then a couple of weeks ago, she stepped out of character again during a performance of Shows for Days to confiscate a phone from a texter who's another one of what LuPone perfectly describes as "self-absorbed and inconsiderate audience members who are controlled by their phones."

You don't fuck with the Cut-Wife. https://t.co/b894RNc1jW

— Alyssa (@apowerfulbeat) July 9, 2015

Now if only those indifferent movie theater owners whom Matt Zoller Seitz complains about in his frequent tweets about lousy theater behavior would be as tough on morons in their theaters as LuPone has been on morons in hers. I like the writing of Anil Dash, but his idiotic defense of texting in theaters is both a lowlight of his writing and reason number 4,082 for why I hate the tech world. I'll always admire Seitz for his impassioned response to Dash's piece.

My response to people who think they have a right to use iPhones during movies. http://t.co/sS0BF6iSKw pic.twitter.com/PoWefI7rKU

— Matt Zoller Seitz (@mattzollerseitz) August 8, 2013

After I threw in the towel after seeing Spy and said, "I give up dealing with this shit," I happened to stumble into a comment about lousy theater behavior that was written a long time ago by one of my AFOS radio station listeners, graphic artist and Drafthouse theater fan Vincent Bernard, over in the comments section of the Drafthouse-owned Birth.Movies.Death., back when it was known as Badass Digest. Vincent's opinion is exactly the same as mine. He said, "When I want to watch a movie, I want to watch a movie. I don't give a flying fuck what anyone else thinks or feels about it. I'm trying to immerse myself in art, not sing Kumbaya around a campfire. I treat film the way I treat all serious art. I certainly don't want to read great literature or view great paintings surrounded by ill-mannered buffoons, so why should film be any different?"

That's precisely how I feel about moviegoing: it gives you the opportunity to immerse yourself in visual art, and you should be able to do that without any distractions or interruptions. I'll still enjoy the ability to be free from any distractions and immerse myself in a movie, which is what the Drafthouse folks--and now over on the stage acting side of showbiz, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Patti "The Cut-Wife" LuPone--are fighting so hard to preserve. I just won't be doing so in a theater anymore, until the day Drafthouse finally opens its Mission District theater. If you can't even manage to immerse yourself for two hours, you have no business being inside a theater. Just leave and take your shitty little screen with you. I hope a car hits you on your way out because you were too stupid to look where you're going, and I hope that car was driven by someone who wasn't paying attention to the wheel because that person was too busy texting.

Penny not from heaven: The welcome return of Penny Dreadful

Penny dreadfuls, a.k.a. penny bloods, were lurid supernatural or crime stories that were published in weekly installments in 19th-century England. In a Showtime featurette about the first season of Penny Dreadful, the supernatural drama that takes its title from that Victorian-era form of fiction, creator/showrunner John Logan noted that penny dreadfuls, which cost only a penny per installment, marked the first time the mass media brought horror into people's living rooms. "So I thought, 'That's exactly what I'm doing with television.' What I'm writing is a penny dreadful, and it just stuck," said Logan in the featurette.

But the penny dreadful Logan is writing costs way more than a penny to enjoy and consisted of only eight weekly installments in its first season. That season was imperfect, but it told a riveting Victorian story about what Abel Korzeniowski, the talented composer whose score music from Penny Dreadful is currently in rotation on AFOS, once described as "trying to find oneself in the world." The show's horror side wasn't even the most interesting part of the season; if Logan got rid of all the supernatural moments from the first-season episode "Possession," it could easily have been an episode from a modern-day non-horror drama about family members agonizing over helping a junkie relative through withdrawal. The character interactions in episodes like "Possession" were mainly what got us hooked on Penny Dreadful.

This week, Penny Dreadful returns to Showtime for its second season, and "Fresh Hell," the season premiere Showtime unveiled online two weeks ago in a censored, "yeah, throat-slashings are okay to show, but boobs and bush are terrifying, mister!" version before it premiered on Showtime last night in unedited form, indicates that the new season will be as riveting as the first. It might even turn out to be better than season 1, which lacked an antagonist who was as compelling a character as Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton) or Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), the demonically possessed psychic who's still rattled by the question a priest presented her with at the end of last season and she's been unable to answer: "Do you really want to be normal?" Evelyn Poole (Helen McCrory), a mysterious spiritualist who was introduced in last season's "Séance" episode, takes over as the new season's primary antagonist, and if things go right, Evelyn and the Nightcomers, the coven of shape-shifting witches she leads, could turn out to be the kind of charismatic and formidable menace this show's always needed. Last season's rather run-of-the-mill and too-easily-defeated vampiric adversaries didn't quite cut it. "Fresh Hell" establishes that the ruthless Evelyn and her followers have ominous and currently vague plans for Vanessa's powers.

Penny Dreadful is basically an Avengers for the Victorian horror lit crowd--but if Black Widow were the leader everyone else would take a bullet for and she were a demonically possessed psychic instead of a guilt-stricken spy. They have a Hulk, and he's a gunfighter and a werewolf instead of a scientist who often transforms into a green-skinned beast. The gathering of Victorian-era characters created by different authors also brings to mind Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics, but while Mina Murray led the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Penny Dreadful relegated Mina to being a largely absent figure whose disappearance brought together her father and the other members of Penny Dreadful's Victorian Scooby gang.

Kept out of the inner circle of the Victorian Scooby gang are Dwight the Troubled Teen Caliban (Rory Kinnear), Dr. Frankenstein's unwanted son and a lab creation he's kept secret from his colleagues; Brona Croft (Billie Piper), the dying prostitute Frankenstein murdered late last season and then successfully re-animates in "Fresh Hell" to give the angry Caliban the bride he demanded from Dad; and promiscuous socialite Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney). The show has yet to come up with a compelling reason for why we should care about Dorian. He doesn't even appear in "Fresh Hell." If the new season can come up with a better way to integrate Dorian into the team's adventures than "obligatory premium-cable drama character who bangs the entire younger half of the cast," then that finally takes care of an even bigger problem than "Do you really want to be normal?"

Selections from Penny Dreadful's first-season score album can currently be heard during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS.

Penny Dreadful season 1, whose score cues can now be heard on AFOS, makes Universal's plan to Avengers-ize its classic monsters seem plenty dreadful

Universal's recently announced strategy to launch a Marvel Cinematic Universe-style reboot of its classic monster movie franchises--with the new Dracula Untold as the first blockbuster in the studio's potential monster movie universe--seems pointless, especially when you look back on the sophisticated and mostly inventive approach Skyfall screenwriter John Logan took to intertwining the paths of famous literary horror characters during the first season of his Showtime supernatural drama Penny Dreadful. There's no way Universal's proposed mad monster party will compare to what Logan, directors like The Orphanage's J.A. Bayona and an exemplary, nearly all-British cast (with Timothy Dalton, Harry Treadaway and in smaller comic-relief parts, Simon Russell Beale and Alun Armstrong, as acting standouts from the British side) accomplished on cable, in eight episodes that were all written by Logan and are all making their debut on Blu-ray tomorrow.

Penny Dreadful, which Showtime has renewed for a second season, revolves around Victorian London psychic Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), her estranged father figure (and perhaps biological father), African explorer Sir Malcolm Murray (Dalton), and the ragtag, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-esque team they form to track down Mina Harker (Olivia Llewellyn), Sir Malcolm's missing daughter and a familiar figure from the various permutations of Dracula. Joining Vanessa and Sir Malcolm on their dangerous quest are introverted forensic specialist Dr. Victor Frankenstein (Treadaway) and American expatriate and gunfighter Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett). Each of the principals--except for Sir Malcolm's laconic valet and bodyguard Sembene (Danny Sapani), whose claim that "I have no story" better receive some sort of payoff next season or I'll be one frustrated viewer of color--is wrestling with demons, both figurative and literal.

Traumatized by his mother's death when he was a boy, Dr. Frankenstein has figured out how to resurrect the dead, but the price he has to pay for playing God is living in constant fear from the vengeful creature he created and rejected (Rory Kinnear, whose take on the Frankenstein creature is closer to the Mary Shelley novel's original conception of him as articulate than Boris Karloff's version of the creature as a childlike giant of few words). Ethan is hiding from both his powerful and unseen father (ooh, ooh, is Powers Boothe or Sam Elliott not busy?), who's sent Pinkerton detectives on his trail, and a mysterious dark side he's trying to suppress. Sir Malcolm is plagued by guilt over his past misdeeds as an explorer, a husband and a parent and feels responsible for the terrible fates of his two grown-up children. Finally, there's Vanessa, whose psychic abilities are both a gift and a curse. They're a symptom of satanic possession, which is responsible for many of the show's most crazy and GIF-worthy visuals, whether it's swarms of spiders crawling out from under Vanessa's tarot cards or a naked Eva Green doing her best impression of the graveyard ghost sex scene from MacGruber.

The show interestingly shapes Vanessa's ordeals with possession as both a metaphor for the struggles of living with mental illness and an addiction narrative. Remove all the supernatural moments from "Possession," the standout episode where Satan's hold over Vanessa is at its worst (Green gives a tour de force performance) and her exhausted colleagues take turns watching over her, and it could easily be a non-horror drama episode about family members or work friends struggling to help a junkie relative or friend through withdrawal. But there's little of the heavy-handedness that marred Buffy's "Willow gets strung out on magic" storyline. Logan complicates the wicked stew of Vanessa's ordeals with both moral ambiguity and the possibility that a normal existence is more repressive to Vanessa than the pain she endures while possessed ("It's such a repressed time, the Victorian times. And so she's very hungry for life," said Green about her character). "Possession" and an even better earlier episode, the Bayona-directed "Séance," best exemplify why Penny Dreadful's first season is so compelling despite occasional storytelling missteps (I wish there was a better way for Reeve Carney's Dorian Gray to be integrated into the first season's central mystery, other than "obligatory cable drama character who bangs everybody"): the first season is a story about, as series composer Abel Korzeniowski puts it, "identity, trying to find oneself in the world," intriguingly dressed up as a Gothic horror drama.

Korzeniowski plays a huge role in making Penny Dreadful's Gothic setting such an attractive place to be--the show's Game of Thrones-caliber production values would have made the Hammer horror studio, a huge influence on the show, gangrene green with envy. The effectiveness and richness of the Polish composer's string-heavy score cues are why several of those cues are now in rotation on "AFOS Prime" on AFOS and will be added to "Buckets of Score," the AFOS horror/thriller score block that takes place only on Halloween night. Korzeniowski's main title theme, "Demimonde," is reminiscent of the Gothic sweep of Danny Elfman's score from the 1999 Sleepy Hollow. "Street. Horse. Smell. Candle.," another Penny Dreadful score cue that's in rotation on "AFOS Prime," is integral to why a sequence where Dr. Frankenstein introduces his creature Proteus (Alex Price) to the sights and sounds of a busy London street is oddly affecting: Korzeniowski effectively relied on simple piano chords to compare Proteus' rediscovery of objects and animals from his previous life as a whaler to the experience of a child's reactions of wonder from first encountering objects and animals from words he's just learned.

Another element that makes Penny Dreadful's first season worth marathoning on Blu-ray is its literary references. Vanessa's first few scenes with Ethan in the Bayona-directed first episode are, like so many other supernatural dramas on TV, loaded with cinematic references, particularly to Strangers on a Train from Hitchcock, one of Bayona's favorite filmmakers, and to one of Green's greatest acting moments before her standout work on Penny Dreadful, her train scene with Daniel Craig in Casino Royale (between her, Dalton, Kinnear and Helen McCrory, who had a bit part in Skyfall, as Madame Kali, this show is a post-Roger Moore 007 movie fan's casting dream). But then the show interestingly takes more of a turn for literary references rather than cinematic ones. You won't find another new show this year where the characters are so frequently seen reading books and are so fond of discussing literature or quoting poetry, in much the same way that the characters in the Scream movies frequently talked about slasher flicks or the Sopranos characters were so worshipful of mob movies. Instead of coming off as distracting and pretentious, the literary references are deployed by Logan to capture how books and even penny-dreadful fiction were as dominant a media in the Victorian era as TV or the Internet is today, whether it's Vanessa and Shakespeare aficionado Dr. Frankenstein bonding over Wordsworth or the Frankenstein creature's Bard-inspired name of Caliban and his fondness for John Milton's Paradise Lost, which is a direct lift from Shelley's novel.

The literacy of the Penny Dreadful characters sheds light on my biggest complaint about the J.J. Abrams/Roberto Orci Star Trek movies: nobody reads like they used to on Star Trek anymore. They can't even make time for the "Famous Jewish Sports Legends" leaflet from Airplane! In Star Trek's previous incarnations, characters used to often demonstrate their literacy by either quoting both fictional authors (the mutated helmsman's dialogue about wooing women with poetry in the 1965 "Where No Man Has Gone Before" pilot) and real ones (Dickens and Melville in Star Trek II, Shakespeare and J.M. Barrie in Star Trek VI and, of course, the Bard again on The Next Generation) or becoming actual authors themselves (Jake Sisko on Deep Space Nine). Pre-2009 Star Trek's depiction of centuries-old literature surviving and enduring despite the transition from print to PADD tablets used to make me feel hopeful for the future. Apparently the changes in the timeline that were triggered by Nero's attack on the Kelvin wiped out Kirk and the other characters' book smarts as well. The elimination of the characters' literary sides from Star Trek makes the possession of Vanessa look pleasant.

Speaking of curses, if Penny Dreadful manages to break the curse of Showtime originals that collapse creatively after the first couple of seasons and is able to continue its hot streak past its enjoyable first season, the show could send Universal fumbling for the Tom Stoppards and Scott Franks of the world to punch up its monster movie reboot screenplays and "Penny Dreadful them up" or better yet, make Universal reconsider its bound-to-underwhelm shared universe plan and pay closer attention to why failed modern-day monster movie franchise starters like I, Frankenstein and Universal's own Van Helsing were unable to captivate audiences and critics. In this era of Hollywood tiresomely trying to Avengers-ize tentpole franchises that don't exactly deserve to be Avengers-ized, what can stop the determined heart and resolved will of Universal? Maybe a little show from Showtime can.

Selections from Penny Dreadful's first-season score album can currently be heard during "AFOS Prime" on AFOS and will be featured during "Buckets of Score" at 5pm Pacific on October 31.