mobile phones | the m0vie blog

Trick or Tweet: Phoning or Tweeting During a Movie…

Posted on December 6, 2011 by Darren

I don’t know, I guess I kind of assumed that “don’t use your phone during a movie” was such a basic part of movie decorum that it really wasn’t worth mentioning. However, it seems that I might have been just a little bit naive in my supposition, at least concerning the iPhone app that came with Despicable Me. Now the Tateuchi Center in Bellevue in Washington is building a theatre designed to accommodate those who want to text and twitter during a film, stating:

“This is the wave of the future for the people we worry about attracting,” said John Haynes, the theater’s executive director. “Simply forbidding it and embarrassing people is not the way to go. So we are wiring the building in anticipation of finding ways to make it work over time.”

I don’t know, I thought embarrassing users was actually a pretty good idea. I just don’t like the idea of encouraging people to use their mobiles during any sort of performance – and, you can bet, this theatrical example will have implications for usage in cinemas.

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Filed under: Movies | Tagged: cell phones, cellular phones, cinema, films, mobile phones, Movies, phones at the cinema, texting, tweeting, txting | 10 Comments »

Going Mobile…

Posted on April 23, 2010 by Darren

Ah, mobile phones. Or cellular telephones to our overseas readers. How did we ever get by without them. Can you imagine a time when you were actually able to have a legitimate excuse for ignoring people trying to get into contact with you? When you were unreachable, save at home or at work? I reached my teenage years just as mobile phones became truly moble – I came of age as they became standard accessories for everyone. So I’ve never really lived in a world without them. So I’ve never really had a chance to stop and think about how they’ve influenced movie-making and the like. While they’ve undoubedly made it easier to write genres like dramas or romances where you no longer have to worry about characters sharing a geographic location to have a conversation, I think their biggest area of influence has been on horrors or thrillers, movies which took great pride in isolating individuals and having them face threats or challenges on their own. How has this changed?