Oh, the irony!

I went to see this on Monday because I wanted to de-stress after a weekend of visitors and I thought this would be just the thing. There were only about 9 people in the cinema. I sat on the second row middle and there was an elderly gentleman behind me. Then two young women walked in and sat two seats up from me. One had a huge box of popcorn so I could already feel my shoulders going up. But the other woman had a tiny baby!

Now, no one loves babies more than me, but here at my local cinema they have something called The Big Scream where only adults accompanied by babies may attend and the bar is closed off to other members of the public. Fair enough, I'm not complaining. I wish such a thing had existed when I'd been a breast-feeding mum.

My point is WHY did they allow this woman and her offspring in to see the film when it wasn't a Big Scream day? While she was feeding it it was quiet, but then it started crying and she started shushing it, which was louder than the crying and made no effort to take it outside.

On top of that, the man behind me fell asleep five minutes in and only woke up WHEN HIS PHONE STARTED RINGING! Believe it or not he then went to answer it! Had a chat and everything - not a 'I can't talk to you now I'm in the cinema' kind of conversation but a proper one. And when I turned round to ask him to turn his phone off he leaned forward and banged the back of my seat with his fist as if to say How Very Dare You Interrupt Me When I'm Chatting To My Friend.

Well, in the end - this was after the baby did a huge fart and filled its nappy, I decided to move. I complained at the end of the film and got a free ticket for another performance - of a different film natch.

I really identified with the driving school teacher in this film because my stress levels were on a par with his. This film was ruined for me by thoughtless people in a cinema I usually regard as my special retreat. I'm still really furious when I think back about it!

That apart I enjoyed the film more than I thought I would. Brilliant acting and Poppy wasn't as irritating as all the clips suggested she might be. Can anyone tell me what other films/TV I know her flatmate from?

The bit I didn't like was when she was chatting to the down and out. It seemed an exercise in method acting but added nothing to the story for me. And I really liked the way all three sisters looked so similar. Similar enough to be real sisters, I thought.

Oh, poor you, Jem (and LOL, too, the baby filling its nappy made me laugh). I can so empathise, having just spent a five hour journey in the so called Quiet Zone of the train, where I had to move seats three times and put in earplugs twice! (A man through whose earphones you could hear bloody bagpipes from halfway up the carriage, a persistent cougher - don't blame them - and a pissed woman who kept shouting, then crying, at a stranger she'd decided to talk to, and whose conversation I could hear even through the earplugs). AAARGH, it's soooo irritating.
Anyway, I digress.
I'm amazed at the Big Scream thing. Would any mother WANT to take her child into a film, knowing it's likely she wouldn't hear a thing due to, if not her own, other people's babies crying? That's weird.
I haven't been to the flicks for about a year. Will go to see Sex and the City, though! And might see Happy Go Lucky too - an upbeat film sounds like just what's needed.
Oh dear, this doesn't sound very Cultural for an inaugural thread, but hey...
Susiex

Haven't seen the film, Jem, but such a funny story! I am an absolute despot when it comes to noise in cinemas...I'd have people banned for life for talking, even during the previews. The baby owner phone chatting man are making me go quite hot with fury and I wasn't even there! My children are already programmed that you don;t talk in the cinema, even though most kids screenings are like feeding time in the chimp cage.

I took my little girl to the Big Scream at our local cinema every session for a whole year. I was a huge film buff before kids - BFI and NFT membership, the works! - and I missed it desperately afterwards. DVDs just aren't the same.

My daughter went from when she was three weeks old until the week before her first birthday, and it was brilliant! Most babies fall asleep the second the lights dim (cue lots of sucking noises!) When my girl was older, she'd play at the front of the cinema with the other nearly one-year-olds while us mums watched the film. It's much better than kids' club because the films target the mums rather than the kids (er, obviously). I honestly didn't even notice if a baby cried, unless it was mine. At that stage of mothering, you can blot out someone else's baby's cries very easily.

Now I'm back to never going to the cinema, and I'm still fairly stubborn about not watching stupid glitchy DVDs. Sigh.

Anyway, it's great to read what you thought of the film, and maybe one day I'll get to see it!

I'm doing the Artist's Way at the moment and I have to instigate a conversation about synchronisity (well, I would if I could spell it!) The fact that this film is about a girl whose attitude to life is as far away from mine as is possible to get, is, thinking about it, a great example. If she'd been there watching a film, she would have laughed off the man on the phone and said something nice about the baby and she wouldn't even have noticed the popcorn or tutted at two other people who had their feet up on the backs of the seats in front of them, like I (mentally) did.

Maybe what I experienced was meant to be a lesson in how to relax. One of the lines Poppy in the film comes out with to her uptight driving instructor is 'Ooh, it's hard being you isn't it?' with a smile on her face. Actually he is truly weird and gets more sinister as the film progresses, but she can't know this at the beginning and thinks he's just a bit grumpy. I would love to be someone who doesn't judge but I'm afraid I do, all the time.

I go to that cinema every week and never has anything remotely irritating happened to me there, by the way, so it's weird that so much did all in one go!

Luisa, I'd have loved The Big Scream when I was a nursing mother but when you've been there and done that, as I have 4 times, other people's babies just lose their charm I'm afraid. Now I'm like - why on earth are they bringing their kids out to eat so late, or, in a train, why don't they shut that child up? Oh, and I agree - DVD's aren't the same at all.

And Caroline, my kids have inherited my reverence for the cinema too and won't go to Vue - the big multiplex here because they keep the l lights on low throughout and only show blockbuster movies.

I thought for Poppy read potty. Definitely no woman in her right mind would hang about a deserted stretch of waste ground talking to a big man who was obiously mentally disturbed. I agreed with the mad instructor she shouldn't learn to dive in high-heeled boots. What about the cardboard cut out she was supposed to have a romance with? I think it was really a lesbian film that lost its nerve.

Cynically, I think Mike Leigh has brought out a pot-boiler to pay for his next project, or he's suffering from indulgent-director syndrome ala Woody Allen.

Sheila