What a Ripoff

The movies have become. Now I know why I never go.

Last night bf wanted to see Wall E - a cute, but also serious, Disney/Pixar animation. He ordered tickets online for the Fenway theater and all we had to do was pick them up. We get to the theater - the place is a complete madhouse. I don't know what was going on last night or why so many people decided to go out to the theater, but it was the busiest I remember it in a long, long time.

We waited in a huge line to print out our stubs. Which is annoying there should be a kiosk for buy tickets, and a kiosk for print tickets. They had 3 working kiosks, but they all did both tasks. There were huge lines at each and we got stuck behind a couple that decided to look at EACH movie and then see what time it was playing before deciding on a movie. I mean WTF just go up to the counter if you want to do that!!! The counter with actual people was almost empty because everyone was in line trying to use the damn kiosks!

Luckily we had picked the fastest moving line so we only waited ~15 minutes.

We decided to get seats since the theater seemed to be unusually busy. Good thing we did, or we wouldn't have had a seat. The theater was packed. We had to sit in those front rows - way in the front. We luckily got the last row of that row, but it was insane. After we sat down the theater filled up even more. There wasn't an empty seat in the whole place. It was totally insane.

BF then got up to get us some popcorn and a drink. I wanted diet coke - he likes regular so usually we get 2 drinks and everyone is happy. He goes to the counter and they have a 'special' 2 medium sodas and a medium popcorn. Ok he thinks - that seems reasonable. They don't list a price, but he thinks how much can that be? It's a medium right? Well holy shit!!! the 'medium' sodas were 44 oz each!!!! MEDIUM WTF and they wonder why Americans are obese? Who needs 44 oz of soda at 10pm???? Are you kidding me? But wait, there's more!! The fucking popcorn was a GIANT tub. And I mean GIANT - it looked like it could hold 2 gallons of ice cream and that's not an exaggeration. We ate a ton of that stuff and still only ate 1/4 of the bucket. He was so pissed how huge it was. He was expecting a real medium. And the damn thing cost $17!!!!! He was even more pissed. He's like that is not a special value! It's a monstrosity! It was way too much, they should clearly show the sizes and the prices of that stuff. Now perhaps they did and he just didn't notice - I don't know as I was holding the seats.

And then to the parking situation. We have our movie stubs. It's clear we've attended a movie, but they won't give us the movie theater price for parking unless we get our ticket validated - even though we showed him our tickets. I mean really they KNOW everyone is either going to A: not know about the validation or B: forget. so it cost us an additional $15 to park!! And the garage is the most poorly designed garage I've had the displeasure to be stuck in for 45 minutes. There's only one way out, it's really tight in there, hard to park, hard to make turns etc. Then they had one guy taking the money and EVERYONE was arguing about the validation they didn't know about and/or forgot. He refused of course to accept the movie stubs and everyone was arguing. The line was insane to get out of the garage. We didn't move for a good half hour at all. we put the car in park and sat. It was the most insane thing I've ever seen at a movie theater. It was like I was trying to leave Gillette after a Patriots game.

The good part was of course the movie. Very cute. It had fantastic animation and took a hard look at people- who are depicted at fat people on couches watching tv that forgot how to walk or do anything expect watch tv and eat - living on a giant space station because earth is only full of garbage. the only things left on earth are a robot named Wall E who is trying to clean up the garbage and a cockroach that hangs out with him. Eva is a robot probe sent from the space station to find evidence of regrowth of plant life on earth - and Wall E falls in love with her and follows her back to her space station.