Please Turn ON Your Cell Phones For LAST CALL
There have been lots of attempts to make the movies more involving for audiences lured away from theaters by other mediums. In the fifties, audiences entranced by television were lured into theaters by vibrating seats called Percepto vision, as well as cardboard 3D glasses. Today we still have the vibrating seats - now called D-Box Seats - and we still have crappy 3D to distract us from the pleasures of video games and streaming torrents. But a German company has decided to make such interactive gimmicks look like the least noticeable annoyance in the auditorium with its new invention. Called 13th Street, the idea is similar to those interactive books we all explored as children in which the reader chooses what the hero does throughout the story. In the movie version, audience members give out their cell phone number when they buy a ticket. During the film, a random audience member receives a call from one of the onscreen characters, asking that audience member what to do next. Their response is fed back to a computer, which recognizes the command and then orders the theater to play the next scene that corresponds to the answer. This sounds like a nightmare of monumental proportions. Can you imagine the dumbshit teenagers answering their phone and telling the computer all kinds of stupid commands? For sure they'd say, "Go fuck yourself!" to the endangered hero and their idiotic friends would snicker ridiculously. Even worse, this encourages people to talk constantly during a movie. People talking on cell phones and with each other is one of the motivating factors causing many people to stay home and watch their home theaters. Why on Earth would any theatrical distribution company encourage the continuation of this mass exodus from theaters?? Clearly this is a gimmick aimed at a small fraction of films and audiences. I cannot imagine sitting through Transformersand dealing with some moron telling Shia LeBeouf (pot calling the kettle, indeed) where to run and hide from Megatron. Here is the marketing video promoting this awful product: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qe9CiKnrS1w