Your Worst Movie Experience

I want to hear about your worst time at the movies (and the best).

Hi,

A few weeks ago I was going through some DMs over on the app, and was truly delighted to read this from a Worm who loves movies — and had just had one of the worst movie going experiences of their lives.

Sort of.

Let me share what they said (I’ve just removed a few personal details):

I could not think of a worse place to watch a film than in an MRI machine, and I cannot think of a worse film to watch in an MRI machine than Mister Organ.

It’s like the most intense 4D viewing experience of your life: Being trapped on screen with a droning, horrific conman while you are also physically trapped in a loudly humming claustrophobia machine.

It’s nightmare fuel: “Being told to hold my breath for extended periods of time but then also taking in all that is Mr Organ.”

I was laughing, but I was also repulsed. And it got me thinking about the best and worst experiences I have had watching movies.

And because I think a lot of us here on Webworm love movies, I wanted to swap some stories with you. Because as good or bad as a movie is, the experience of watching it changes so much depending on what’s going on around you.

I’ll go quickly.

Worst experience: I was watching Whiplash and felt something prod the back of my left elbow. I automatically jerked my elbow away (elbows are private! You might as well have touched my inner thigh!), twisting my body back and around to see that the person behind me had decided to remove their shoes, and were poking their little tootsie through the gap in the seat to rest it on my armrest. Pretty soon, their other foot took up residence on the other armrest. I made a disgusted sound but they didn’t budge. I am too polite and non confrontational in day-to-day life to pick a fight, so that’s just how Whiplash went for me: I kept my elbows firmly pressed into my sides, as if in the middle seat on a plane.

Best experience: I’ve had more good experiences than bad ones — but a recent good experience springs to mind. It was when I was in New Zealand last month. I was with a buddy, visiting some remote places in the South Island. Both horror obsessed, we were desperate to see Longlegs (a horror that crazily just beat Furiosa’s entire run at the box office) — only to find it wasn’t listed as playing anywhere in the South Island.

Still, we dropped in at a tiny cute indie cinema called Dorothy Browns just to check — and it turns out they had Longlegs… and were doing one single showing that week. Trouble was — we were going to be long gone by then.

What happened next was amazing: Seeing our enthusiasm (I later found out they’d played Mister Organ last year, and had an Organ poster up in the projection booth!), they let us watch it in an entirely empty cinema before we left town.

It was a truly great way to watch something truly unhinged and moody like Longlegs.

What a theatre! That roof! The lights! The seats! The cinema even had its own live-in cat (not pictured here).

Thanks, Dorothy Browns.

I want to hear your best and worst experiences. Please. Let’s all bond in the comments over the various unique ways we’ve experienced movies.

But just quickly, a few things that have captured my attention this week:

On AI:

Fancy that — could it be that AI is massively overhyped, tech gurus screaming at us to get onboard while companies jam it into their products desperate to be ahead of the game?

“The AI bubble warning was sounded before the worst market plunge since Black Monday” said various reports:

“Despite its expensive price tag, the technology is nowhere near where it needs to be in order to be useful,” Jim Covello, Goldman Sachs’s most senior stock analyst and a 30-year veteran of covering tech companies, said. “Overbuilding things the world doesn’t have use for, or is not ready for, typically ends badly.”

Ed Zitron writes a great tech newsletter and said this:

“The AI bubble is close to bursting, with Big Tech losing $2 trillion in market cap as everybody wakes up to the mediocrity of generative AI. Here’s a comprehensive guide to how everything might fall apart - and how little time OpenAI has left.”

Let’s not get started about how horrific all this number crunching is for the environment.

PS: I am not anti-AI, I am just anti AI-bullshit hype.

On RFK Jnr:

If things couldn’t get any more weird in America, it turns out RFK Jr was the guy responsible for dumping a dead bear cub in New York’s Central Park in 2014.

In his words, the cub was roadkill. “I was going to skin the bear... and I was going to put the meat in my refrigerator. And you can do that in New York state: Get a bear tag for a roadkill bear.”

But in his telling, his dinner ran late, and he had a plane to catch. There had been a string of reports of people being killed thanks to new cycle lanes in New York — and so he decided, as a joke, to dump the bear in the park on the way to the airport… and leave an old bicycle on top of it.

Normal stuff. The news covered it at the time. People got freaked out.

I honestly don’t know where to start with this, so I’ll just share this tweet:

On Creed:

In case you are unaware, 90s semi-Christian band Creed is making a comeback, and so a journalist went on the Creed cruise and wrote this truly amazing report:

“I hated Creed. I thought they were terrible,” says Mike Hobey, who, at 28, is the oldest of the posse and therefore the one who possesses the clearest recollection of Creed’s long, strange journey toward absolution. “But then I started listening to them ironically. And I was like: ‘Oh, shit, I like them now.’”

On Elon Musk’s wonderful kid:

Finally, Elon Musk’s daughter Vivian Wilson has been posting a lot of illuminating stuff about her father.

She’s doing this because recently her father gave an interview to fellow knucklehead Jordan Peterson, in which he went on a long rant belittling trans people. Specifically, his daughter Vivian, who is trans.

With that context in mind — Vivian has been posting a lot about her dad:

“You are not a family man, you are a serial adulterer who won’t stop fucking lying about your own children. You are not a christian, as far as I’m aware you’ve never stepped foot in a church. You are not some “bastion for equality/progress”. You called arabic the “language of the enemy” when I was 6, have been sued for discrimation multiple times, and are from Apartheid South Africa.

You are not “saving the planet”, you do not give a fuck about climate change and you’re lying about multi-planetary civilization as both an excuse, and because you want to seem like the CEO from Ready Player One.

I would mention the birth rate stuff, but I am not touching that weird 14-words breeder shit with a ten foot pole. You single-handedly disillusioned me with how gullible we are as a species because somehow people keep believing you for reasons that continue to evade me.”

As one user responded, she should really be the one to write Musk’s biography one day.

I really hope she does.

Anyway — movies. Best and worst experiences. See you in the comments.

David.