The one thing I have recently grown a dislike for is the habit of continuously going on your phone in the middle of a movie.
I just watched a movie with a friend who I’ll call John. John had never watched this movie before and I was excited to get his real reaction to some of the big moments in the movie. However, everytime the pacing of the movie started to slow down, John would go on his phone for a couple minutes. It’s important to note that this was a foreign crime/thriller movie that had subtitles, so important dialogue was essentially flying over his head if he wasn’t watching.
With the first couple phone checks, I was willing to let it slide since he wasn’t actually missing anything major other than a few small jokes and exposition dialogue. However, as we got deeper into the movie, it was starting to become apparent that he was missing a few major pieces of the plot.
One thing that really got to me, and actually drove me to write this post, was the fact that John didn’t realize that a character who had been murdered was close to the main character. This scene is an absolutely brutal moment in the movie because the main character’s goal is to stop the string of murders that’s occuring in the town. Up until this point in the movie, the murder victims bore no relation to the main character, so they were grim moments, but not at this level. The gut punch that this moment delivers as it’s someone close to the main character is only delivered if you actually know their relationship. The whole scene creates a tension that underscores this tragedy that eventually becomes the driving force for the main character’s newfound desire to catch the murderer in the final act.
But John, unaware of this connection because he was on his phone during the one significant interaction between the soon-to-be victim and the main character, wasn’t able to grasp the true levity of the scene. What got to me was when he had to ask, “Does he (the main character) know her (the victim)?” and I had to clarify that yes, they had become close friends during the investigation. This question was what made me realize how much of the film John had missed because he was too busy being on his phone.
I never confronted him about it because I didn’t think the severity of his bad habit warranted confrontation, but I sort of wish I had because I want John to be able to properly digest a movie to its fullest extent. It makes me wonder what other major details in other movies he had missed and never learned because he was distracted and watching alone or never got the details clarified to him.
TLDR: My friend, John, missed a detail of the movie we were watching because he was on his phone when it happened. As a result, the emotion of a climactic scene went over his head because he was unaware of the entire context of the scene and I had to clarify for him for him to truly understand the full picture.
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/15wj522/whats_something_that_bothers_you_when_youre/
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