Theaters look at barring cell chatter

Houstonist is usually the model of kindness and charity, but there are some people who make us want to kill: the ones who nearly kill us cutting in lines of traffic, for example, or Britney Spears. Right up at the top of that list are people who talk on their cell phones during movies. After we drop a month's salary on a movie ticket, popcorn and a drink, the last thing we want to hear is "Hello? Yeah, I'm at a movie!" That's why we're so, so glad that theater owners are talking about ways to curb phone conversations during movies.

But how to do it? One idea is to bring back ushers in theaters — though we're not exactly sure how that would work. Would they try to shush people talking on the phone, librarian-style? Wouldn't that cause more problems than it would solve? We'd really support ushers if they removed people bodily from the theater or used pepper spray.

A better idea, at least to our mind, is installing cell-phone jammers in movie theaters. That way, we'd be guaranteed a measure of peace and quiet — which, of course, some people don't like:

Joe Farren, director of public affairs for CTIA-The Wireless Association, said any technology that could threaten the ability for someone to make or receive an emergency call, was bad for the public.

"There are more than 220,000 calls made to 911 from wireless phones every day in America," Farren said. "To put irreversible technology in place that prevents those calls from being made in the tens of thousands of movie theaters across America makes no sense at all."

Ah yes — we have but to look back on the years before cell phones, when tens of thousands of movie-theater emergencies went unreported because people would actually have to get up and tell someone what was going on. Things used to be so barbaric! People obviously can't be trusted not to answer their phones during movies, nonsensical as it may be, so we think cell-blocking measures (in whatever form) can't come soon enough.

(In a bizarre case of Houstonist's stars aligning, here's an instance of two things that make us homicidal converging, from The Superficial.)