The Road and an Apocalyptic Audience.

Went to see The Road last night. It painted a vivid and very real vision of a post-apocalyptic world, and had some haunting and some down right disturbing images within in. And it was a very faithful adaptation of the novel, even down to the cop-out ending that turns it into a cosy catastrophe story. All in all, though, worth seeing.

Of course, I probably would have enjoyed it more had I not been sat in a multiplex cinema in Nottingham, surrounded by a baying mob of feral fucking youths. Seriously, it was like the cinema was filled with those aspiring to be Beavis and Butthead. Not only did they snigger at every bit of nudity, but they also sniggered at every single emotional moment and also at a hefty proportion of the traumatic moments as well. "Hurr, hurr, look that man's naked. And he's got a leg off anything. Those people upstairs are, like, totally gonna eat him. Hurr hurr." Yes, that's exactly how you should respond to the imagery of charnel house filled with naked, mutilated humans awaiting cannibalistic harvest by their captors. Particularly if you are a budding young sociopath.

But it wasn't just the sniggering. They also talked throughout the whole film. They also used their mobiles, and at one point, one of the terrible little shitheads even started playing music on their mobile. Don't they fucking get that other people have paid money to watch this film? Actually, they probably don't and even if they did, they wouldn't care. Sociopathic, see? And the cinema staff were about as much use as a marzipan dildo - occasionally coming in and whispering a chastisement at some rat-boy or rat-girl. There must have been no fewer than 40 people disrupting that screening. The number removed? 3; kicked out at the start of the film. It is no wonder the teenagers thought they could get away with their crass behaviour because, well, the ineptitude of the cinema staff clearly showed they could.

The Road itself made me dread any sort of post-apocalyptic world. The behaviour of large swathes of the audience made me almost wish for some sort of apocalypse; if only to thin out the number of oiks who seem to be rapidly becoming the majority in this country.