So, of course, I'm drawing a blank.
Any ideas? Yeah, but nothing I feel like beating into column shape. What did I do for the Fourth? Eh, not much. We stayed close to home, visited the in-laws, and managed to see a movie actually in a theater. Unfortunately, it was MIB 2, which I suggest you avoid; rent, maybe, or just watch the previews for an hour and a half, because that would be more entertaining. Comedy sequels seem prone to redundancy, in that the writers are either lazy enough or merely stupid enough to reuse material from the original film. Why "stupid"? Because if it's not done out of laziness, then it's done because someone thinks that the audience wants to see the same jokes again. Do they think we're nostalgic for the first film? That we'll think "Hey, that's so clever! They used the same joke, again!" Me, I think "Hey, they used the same joke again! Lazy bastards." MIB 2 has a lot of that.
Of course, I'm probably misjudging the majority of the movie-going public. The teenage lads who were sitting near us, for example, probably enjoyed the rehashed jokes immensely. But they were mouthbreathing cretins, so it's difficult for me to "get inside their heads" regarding this issue, despite the certain abundance of space therein. How stupid were they? Well, they were chortling heartily, and one of them said, very loudly, "That was funny!" after a pre-movie commercial for Fandango.
I'm not making that up.
Now, maybe my dislike of commercials before movies is prejudicing my view, but the commercial just isn't funny. It's stupid, and once you've seen one, you know the joke, such as it is. Even that first time, it's not funny. In fact, it's painfully unfunny, and the whole thing makes you realize just how long thirty seconds can be. Especially when you're thinking that you just paid six damn dollars for a matinee, and it's not like the multiplex is showing European art films to a couple of bored hipsters in any of its theaters, so if they really need to show commercials before the films, then something is desperately wrong. Sure, studios are spending many tens of millions of dollars on movies, and the ones that do well finance the ones that don't, in theory.
I only have a very basic understanding of the economics of the situation, and I'm sure there's one or two people in any given theater who might actually use Fandango, but if I have to sit through the damn thing then it just can't cost them that much to hire a decent writer, or at least grab a few people and let the ad agency know that the thing isn't at all funny and just makes the audience, who certainly aren't going to leave their hard-won seats at this point, hate the advertised item with a passion and swear to never use their service, and, perhaps, even vent their hatred in a (semi-) public forum in an incredibly long run-on sentence, just to prove how annoyed they are.
But it's nice to know that I can always fall back on a good, virulent rant in times of crisis.