Jonathan Melville: Talkies are for movies not for the audiences

IT is time. Time for those of us who pay our hard earned cash to enjoy a trip to the pictures, to make our voices heard above those morons who ruin the cinema experience by talking all the way through the feature.

At the weekend I attended a screening of Martin Scorsese’s Hugo in 3D, priced at a whopping £10 per person.

For that I’d expect gold-plated tickets, unlimited popcorn and champagne, but settled for a 7.50pm screening of the film.

Sadly a few of my fellow audience members were the type of people who seem to think that a cinema is simply an extension of their living room, a place to point at the screen and chat to their friends about something that just happened in the movie.

The question of whether I should track the offenders down in the dark to tell them to keep it down played on my mind during the film, but they were experts in the art, doing it just enough to be annoying but not enough to justify being thrown out.

And that’s why things need to change.

Unless you’re excusing yourself to go to the loo or reacting with the rest of the audience to something on the screen, there’s no reason to talk during a film. None. Zero. Nada.

We’re used to those ‘No mobile phone’ ads and I’ve not heard one ring in years, so let’s suggest to cinemas that they run ‘No talking’ ads from now on. Or at the very least allow us to throw something at those responsible.

Will any Edinburgh cinema be brave enough to take a zero tolerance stance on noisy patrons in 2012? Or do we sit back in silence and accept that the morons have finally won?

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