This is a Thing: Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

I write this with heavy heart.

Let's rip off the bandage...

The Alamo movie chain loves movies, clearly. They do one-off screenings of classic, quirky films. Their walls are lined with posters for classic, quirky films. Their seats are amazingly comfortable, and some even recline. They present their films in very nice theaters and they have strict rules against talking or texting. To the point they will kick you out of the theater if you're caught texting or talking.

All well and good.

PROBLEM: THEY SERVE FOOD ALL THROUGH THE FILM.

This is as distracting and disruptive, if not more so, than talkers and texters.

And you know the annoyance of seeing the guy next to you holding his glowing screen up while he checks his phone?

Well...at the Alamo, the guy next to you has a table in front of him, with a LIGHT shining under his table that he uses to read the menu during the movie and decide what food he wants to order.

This well-lit menu in the guy's lap looks like a GIANT GLOWING MENU-SIZED PHONE SCREEN. He might as well be checking TWO IPADS.

Much worse than a nearby knucklehead fiddling with their phone.

Also people talk at about half the screenings I've attended there. The anti-talking rule isn't actively enforced, you have to report the talkers. I've seen people fiddle with their phones during screenings, too. No reprisals.

Also there's TALKING during the food delivery. When handing off plates full of cheese fries or other nutritious necessities, the staff has to ask who ordered what, in addition to walking in front of an entire row of people to deliver that food.

I repeat: theater staff are walking back and forth in front of you for the ENTIRE RUNNING TIME.

And they deliver the check to tables 30 minutes before the movie's over.

I attended a (FANTASTIC!) revival screening of the 1978 Dawn of the Dead there and the tone-deaf staff delivered the check to my friend at the exact point that a main character gets killed. It's a huge emotional moment in the movie, but it happened to be 30 minutes before the ending. So boom, there's a staff member walking in front of you to drop a check. Completely breaking your engagement with the film.

Thanks, Alamo!

(Bonus bit of awkwardness: a staff member comes up to you and introduces his or herself right when you sit down at the theater, like you're at a restaurant. And if you don't want anything, you can tell they're let down, because that means they get no tip from your attendance there. And if you look to the side of the theater, they're monitoring the theater the ENTIRE TIME because of the primitive ordering system: you write your food order on a card and stick that card up on your table and they walk over--IN FRONT OF PEOPLE--to take your order. So as a former movie theater employee, I feel for these poor folks stuck standing there on constant surveillance duty, checking for upraised cards for the film's entire running time. Are they forced to watch the same movie all day, every shift? There's got to be a better way for Alamo to do that.)

Now I get it, Alamo's business model is as a restaurant, not a theater. And concessions have always been where a theater makes their bucks. And SOMETIMES staff members are discreet with food delivery, maybe leaning over a bit to avoid just blatantly walking in front of people.

But c'mon, Alamo...do the food service beforehand. Serve drinks beforehand. (That's what they do at Violet Crown, another local movie chain that's looking pretty good now in comparison. If they can do it, you can do it!) Preserve the sanctity of the moviegoing experience, don't just create a different annoyingly distracting version of it.

There, I just solved all the world's problems.

-Phony McFakename

* * *

I exist on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. And my books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble and Kobo and probably some other places, too.