Behind us was Film Geek guy who spent the entire night dazzling his fawning girlfriend with his amazing ability to discover plot holes. In front of us was some woman who just couldn't get warm no matter how hard she tried. She'd shift around in her chair, lie down and then sit back up, and add layer after layer of clothes. The moment we'd adjust to her adjustment, she'd adjust herself once again. Then there were the gaggle of girls a little bit farther ahead of us. As far as we could tell, they didn't watch any part of the movie and spent the entire two hours having rather animated conversations and gossiping. Besides angering our inner cineaste ("this is the scene where all the faces melt, how could you not watch!?") we just couldn't get over the fact that it didn't occur to them that if all they wanted to do was talk and drink wine, doing so in a huge park full of maybe a thousand people watching a movie might not be the best place for it. It didn't help that one of the girls, the one directly in our line of view, would move back and forth between leaning in to share some particularly juicy insight or lean back to laugh in hysterics at her friend's bon mots every other minute. We had finally adjusted to the lady right in front of us for the umpteenth time only to have the girl move in and out of our line of sight.
And yes, we're cranky, bitter old men. If we were smart, we'd organize some sort of neighborhood group that would complain about all the increased traffic and noise into our neighborhood and how showing movies in Dolores Park just isn't Mission enough and might bring in people who don't live in the Mission. Maybe even people from Walnut Creek!
But we won't. Because it was still pretty darn cool and we still had a great time. In fact, we can't wait for October's showing of Young Frankenstein.