Pop Quiz, Hot Shot:

You’re in a theater with 300 other people. It’s dark. It’s quiet. If you talk or answer your phone, people with shush you and you’ll be a total dick. What do you do? What do you do?

Unfortunately, for 96.4% of the nation’s population, they’d choose to be a dick. I don’t know what happened to this country, really I don’t. It used to be different. It used to be that people went to the movies to actually SEE a movie. Nowadays, people seem to only go to the movies so that they can talk to their friends in the dark, or practice annoying people by texting on their Blackberry with the ultra-bright screens, or continue the systematic destruction of respect and decency and etiquette from this universe. Can’t people just give each other muffled hand jobs in the back row, like the good old days?

I don’t even need to give you an example of a bad movie-going experience, because everyone has one (or a thousand). Heck, I’d be hard pressed to find one person that enjoys going to the movies at all. Long lines, overpriced tickets, rude people, dirty theaters, incompetent workers, fatty concessions, ringing cell phones, crying babies, even more rude people and BAD movies.

This has got to change!

In response to the rapid decent of awesomeness that is going to the movies, I have constructed a list of things that might be able to save the experience from the depths of Frustration City (population THIS GUY!). Maybe it won’t change the movies for the better, but it’s the only thing I can think to do to make my favorite place in the world not be a place I want to commit triple homicide in. I hope it helps…

1. There should be ushers in each theater whose sole job is to stand in the front of the theater, watch the audience, and tell talkers to SHUT UP! They should have intimidating all-black outfits and vaguely threatening flash light wands. I don’t even care that having them there would resemble a totalitarian war zone. If it gets the idiots to zip it I say send in the Regulators. There’s not a valid reason you should be going on and on in a movie theater. Unless you are old and can’t hear well (though why you would be at a showing of 300 on opening night is beyond me, Mr. Grey Little Dick that sat behind me), going to get snacks and quietly asking your company if they want something, or devising a plan to get the a-holes behind you to shut up, you should NOT be talking. A movie theater is not your living room. Do you see your ugly coffee table anywhere? Is your crummy art on the walls? Does it smell like man ass in there? Wait, don’t answer that one. Ushers watching the audience would significantly reduce the amount of talking. Like teachers walking the room to prevent cheating on a test or pit bosses roaming the casino floor, when you are being watched you stick to the rules. And rule number one of going to the movies is STFU!

2. How is it that we’ve become a nation of carb watchers and calorie killers yet we have no problem walking into a movie theater and buying a 356oz Coke, n Oprah-sized tub of buttered popcorn and a Junior Mints box so big it could choke the racism out of Cosmo Kramer? Most of the eats found at a theater have exactly zero relation to the movie-going experience, so why are we settling for those artery blockers and cavitity creators? Hot dogs and nachos are for sporting events. Churros are for the zoo. Soft pretzels are for Disneyland. Icee’s are for 7-11 trips at three in the morning. Twizzlers… well, I’m OK with the twizzlers. All I’m saying is that if I’m going to make a night of the movies I might as well get to eat something good (and maybe even healthy). How about some sweet potato fries? Or a good bruschetta? Or Kobe beef sliders? A fountain dispenser of Snapple, maybe? Even an amuse bouche for the foodies of the world? I don’t need something from the cover of Gourmet, but anything that won’t make my sugar levels rocket blast to diabetes would be super, thanks!

3. Snack trays that pop up and over our laps, which hide in the armrests like on airplanes. I still remember the jerk that was climbing over me and knocked my pink lemonade out of its cupholder (all over my nice new pants I might add), at a showing of Remember the Titans at the Loews Universal City Walk. At the time, the cupholders in that theater were not at your arm, they were connected to the back of the seat in front of you. A nice move if you care about the extra three inches of arm rest space, but hell if you forget to grab it when people try to pass by. Let’s go tray table-style, so we can avoid embarrassing hot dog ketchup spurts, melted chocolate bombs, errant nacho cheese dips any other situation that derives from dealing with food in a dark place. We’re crammed into a theater seat just like a plane (hell most of the crappy parts about being on a plane are replicated in a theater: talking, bad airs and smells, no leg room, bad in-flight entertainment), so why not equip us the same way?

4. Can I get a more difficult set of pre-film trivia questions up in this bitch? Everyone knows the answer is always either “Ben Affleck” or “Jerry Maguire”. And kids in Ethiopia can spot George Clooney’s high school yearbook picture faster than they can a chicken leg with no flies on it. Step it up Screenvision, before I launch a canon full of five-dollar Milk Duds right at your bullshit low-fi trivia.

5. “Real” start times. If theaters want to put commercials before the previews, that’s fine, but then they shouldn’t claim a movie is going to start at 7:30pm when in reality the credits don’t roll until 7:53pm. I’ve missed countless movies because I thought I was gonna be late (I refuse to miss the trailers), when in reality I would have been AT LEAST ten minutes early. Print the actual times the movies (and/or trailers) start, so that people can properly schedule their movie-going experience. The only problem this causes is that people will be walking in and looking for seats as the trailers are going on. This can be solved in two ways. Keep the lights on but dim until the actual movie starts, so that late-comers can still see the layout of the theater. The other way is the next item on our list.

6. Nationwide reserved seating AND a seating chart posted at the ticket counter and again in front of the actual theater. I know some theaters have already instituted reserved seating (the Arclight in LA is the frontrunner on this), but I feel it should be nationalized. For all who have never experienced this let me tell you, it’s a feeling like no other. The way TiVo let you start controlling how you watch TV and the iPod helps you to individualize your music, reserved seating is a game changer for going to the movies. Say you like sitting in a certain seat and spot and never enjoy a movie if you don’t sit in those seats. You can remove the worry that they’ll be taken by simply going online and reserving your seats ahead of time. This way you can stroll in two minutes before the show time, casual as can be and with no anxiety, your empty seats waiting patiently for your ass (literally).

7. People should be forced to take a test on the movie they are seeing, so as to prove they DESERVE to see it. This would eliminate the people that are there solely to annoy everyone else around them by talking about how bad the movie is. I saw Black Snake Moan last spring and the jackhole girls in front of me said this out loud at one point “This is bullshit. Where are all the snakes? I thought this was a sequel to that plane movie”. I swear to you this happened. And we wonder why a show called “Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader” is the number one new show of the year. If you can’t name three pertinent facts about the movie you are paying $11 to see, you shouldn’t be able to ruin it for the people who are paying good money to see Sam Jackson drag a chained, half-naked Christina Ricci around a dirty shack. Seriously!

8. Noiseless wrappers. Remember that scene in Garden State where Zach Braff asks his rich friend how he made all his money and the guy says he invented silent Velcro? And then he whipped out a piece of it, demonstrated the effect and snapped his fingers at the awesomeness of the silence? Well, can we get a team of mensa scientists on the invention of a noiseless candy wrapper, right mfing quick? It’s not a matter of national security or anything. It won’t improve discovery, or stop suffering around the world. It won’t feed the hungry. But it will prevent me from punching out the guy behind me every time he crinkles his fucking Red Vines wrapper during a crucial dialogue scene. Nobody is polite anymore about it. You open up your candy or (snuck in) food BEFORE the movie starts. And if you gotta crinkle it, do it fast. Stop digging around in there looking for gold. I defer to the great Brian Cox in The Long Kiss Goodnight on the subject of ceaseless, stupid actions like wrapper crinkling: “He’s been licking his asshole for the last three straight hours. I submit to you that there is nothing there worth more than an hour’s attention. I should think that whatever he is attempting to dislodge is either gone for good, or there to stay. Wouldn’t you agree?”

9. Ass-gaskets for the seats. I know I’m the resident Adrian Monk around my area of the Interwebs, but would it be too much to ask for a seat wrapper so I don’t have to sit on or against some dude’s leftover sneeze particles, some kid’s booger balls, some ladies’ nacho cheese leavings, or any food item with any level of goo? Its bad enough I have to step on a three-month old Mountain Dew-covered floor, I sure as hell don’t deserve to rub against filth flarn filth flarn flith! Not at today’s ticket prices.

10. Seriously, I can’t express this enough, BE QUIET! You know what we need? A noise meter like the one from Mission: Impossible, rigged to measure the volume of the person sitting in a respective seat. If the level hits the red you get shocked. If noise level persists in the yellow without halt, you get shocked. If your phone rings because you were too much of a dick to turn it off before the movie, you get shocked. Maybe a couple hundred volts would put an end to your needless jabbering. And it would save me the time (and court fees) from having to put my size 10 s-kicker boot up your ass.

BONUS CHANGE: No babies allowed after 5pm. Why do you have a seven month-old baby in a 9pm screening of Transformers? The THX is hurting my ears, imagine what it’s doing to your infant. And even though everyone in the world finds Shia LaBeouf “oh so precious”, it’s not like your child can appreciate his brand of peach-fuzzed snark, anyway. So take your kid home, Mother of the Year, before I steal it and make it watch a Lindsay Lohan movie, thereby breaking down it’s self-esteem so much you’re virtually certain to be raising a future stripper or pederast. Or at the very least, keep it on the PG and under tip.

Here’s my ultimate solution: Raise the prices. Make it so exorbitantly expensive that the only people that can afford to go are rich people who have enough etiquette to not talk and suckers who are just glad to be there. I pay $40 to see a Broadway show and nobody talks (and there aren’t even CGI explosions or hot boobs). The extra money is worth my peace of mind. I’m happy to pay $20 to see the new mediocre Will Smith flick if it means I can just sit there and watch the movie in silence, instead of trying to punch the guy sitting behind me in the thorax (or sock the chick in her babymaker, whichever sex happens to be talking at any given moment).

With the advent of large HD televisions and video on-demand, the movie-going experience is quickly becoming a thing of the past; we might as well shift gears now and start treating it as a luxury, so that the people who still prefer getting their entertainment this way can appreciate it. And the dicks that want to talk and text and try my patience can do it someplace else. Silence is golden, people! So shut your lips and learn!

Bangarang!