By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Stomping crickets: Peter Rainers down on hot and spicy entrees
Peter Rainer‘s only recently become film cricket of the august Christian Science Monitor but he’s got an embarassingly exaggerated, WTF?!-level fume about how moviegoing manners among his colleagues disappoint him, as a professional, that is. [In breaking news, the “anguished sigh” remark may refer to Pauline Kael, who retired in 1991 and has been dead for almost five years.] “I happen to be one of those people who don’t like a whole lot of hubhub, least of all inside a movie theater. Because I’m a professional film critic and attend hundreds of screenings a year, this presents a distinct problem for me. Many of my screenings are for critics only, so you would think I have a comparatively easy time of it. The press, as we all know, is so well behaved. Think again… For example, there is one group (whose identity I won’t divulge except to say that it dispenses Golden Globes every year) that’s notorious for smuggling hot and spicy entrees into screening rooms (often poorly ventilated) while pursuing a line of nonstop chatter in heavily accented English. Then there are all those critics who pull out their lighted pens at the drop of an insight… New school is bringing your laptop into the theater and typing your insights as you go along. If enough of these typists are in the theater, the collective sound is like a squadron of rats clacking across a linoleum floor. Critics also enjoy impressing other critics by venting aloud for all to hear. One famous critic used to belt out an anguished sigh whenever she found a film too drippy; another regularly rocks the room with a laugh pitched somewhere between a croak and a whinny. At film festivals like Toronto and Cannes, the one-upmanship often takes the form of instant mini-dissertations, as in “That tracking shot is so Tarkovskian!” That example is so… apocryphal. A chart of Movie “dont’s” is appended for those who’ve made it through the clumpy gruel, including don’t “[kick] the seat in front of you.”