It's Saturday night, and all I want to do is go see a good movie at a quality theater, but that's nearly impossible in this town.
Let me paint a picture for you.
I pull into the Kerasotes Showplace 8 parking lot. You may be familiar with this theater. It's one of three in Hamilton. It's crowded, and I'm going to see The Unborn with my boyfriend. At the time, the movie had been out for a few weeks, so I thought it would be a pretty relaxed viewing. Lo and behold the employees of Kerasotes proved me wrong.
Of the 30 people in the movie that night, I can confidently say I was the only person that didn't need to get up once, let alone two and three times. It is very distracting when the door is flung open, let's say 30 times during a movie, letting light flood into the dark theater.
Now I know that Showplace 8 is not to blame for the annoyances of its patrons, but when alerted they failed to exert any authority. There was a group of four teenagers who were obscenely loud throughout the entire movie. They didn't take the hint the first time we told them it was time to be quiet. After my boyfriend mentioned it to management, they admitted, "Yeah, they've been running from movie-to-movie all night." Well, hello! You'd think they would do something about that. After that, a police officer stood in the back of the room, for all of about five minutes, and then the loud mouths resumed their natural habit.
Oh, but the cherry on top was not implemented until returning to Oxford two and a half hours later. As I was leaving my boyfriend's truck, I spotted something on the seat and leaned in for a closer look. It was then that I realized that I had been sitting in gum the entire movie and transferred part of it to the seat of the truck.
That illustrated the lack of attentiveness the employees have toward their own workplace and its consumers. I suppose I should have expected that, given the completely unfriendly welcome when entering the theater.
After this was all said and done, my boyfriend and I called to voice our complaints to the management and they failed to return our calls. I have since boycotted Showplace 8 and will continue to do so for the rest of my time at Miami University.
This is a problem that occurs all over the country-poor quality movie theaters ruining decent movies. Theaters should not settle for mediocrity, because that is how patrons are lost. More importantly, customers should not settle for poor service, nor should we have to.
Another example of this mistreatment of customers, happened right here in Oxford at the Great Escape Princess Theater. I think I was seeing the late show of Bottle Shock. After purchasing my ticket and choosing my seat, about 20 minutes into the movie I started to get hungry. I headed out to the concessions and was refused food and drink. If you can believe it, they said that it was too late at night and they didn't want to run the register again.
If you are a business, why would you close the register before customers were gone? If that's not the best way to lose easy sales, I don't know what is. I thought theaters usually tried to increase concession sales by appealing to customers the value of up-sizing, yet the Princess Theater does the opposite. That just solidified my feelings toward bringing my own food and drink to theaters, but that's not allowed either.
I have since been forced to drive an hour out of my way to reach a quality theater. The Esquire Theater in Cincinnati is one of two quality theaters within a 30-mile radius of Oxford. It is well-worth the time and the 100 percent chance that I will get lost every time. I would rather drive up and down the confusing, unlabeled streets of Cincinnati than have to suffer another minute at theaters where employees and customers don't appreciate the beauty that is a good film.
It is so nice to go to a theater where the rest of the audience is silently watching the film and just enjoying it. It reassures some of my faith in people and that all appreciation to movies hasn't been lost to movies like Superbad and The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
The Esquire is the best option to see films of Oscar-caliber like Milk and The Reader, which the theaters in our area rarely screen, instead bringing films like Pink Panther to a town where the majority population is college students.
The remaining theater left in the vicinity that is of some quality is the Holiday Auto Theater, a 60-year-old drive-in theater located on Old Oxford Road. Surprisingly they screen very current films, and the prices are low, and I mean really low. $8 for three movies in a row, that's 5.2 hours of film for only $8. Watching the beginning credits, which are still like they would have been 60 years ago, is like enjoying your own little slice of Americana and nostalgia from the 1950s. The only complaint I have about the drive-in is the unclean bathrooms, which are far better than picking someone else's gum from the butt of my pants.
Movie theaters in the Oxford and Hamilton area need to be held at a higher standard by their customers or their poor service will only thrive and never improve. The pasttime of going to a theater and enjoying the experience of viewing a new, exciting film with a room full of people sharing the same anticipation is rapidly declining and needs to be restored.
