Out there's our home. And it's in trouble.

I visited the cinema with my good chum Reginald this weekend. We decided to see the two films that were released on the 27th, Wall-E and Wanted. Nothing is at all odd about my frequent trips to the theater with Reginald, but when we went to the theater this weekend I noticed something strange: the difference of audiences for both films.


You're thinking to yourself that the differences are obvious. One film is about a cute robot who falls in love and saves the world. The other is the adaptation of a graphic novel about a league of assassins and the facile doormat who liberates them. So one movie is about robots while the other's plot is simply robotic.

The crazy thing is that while we were watching both films, Reginald and I felt as though the average IQ was much greater in the Wall-E crowd. Granted, this was the group that also chuckled it up during the Beverly Hills Chihuahua trailer (watch at your own risk; it makes me wonder whether I'm connected to myself) so I could be totally wrong.

The plot (and pacing) of Wall-E is much more sophisticated. The titular robot does not speak for the first fifth of the movie and it isn't until much later that there is any explicit, forward-moving plot. The kids, though, shocked me with their patience. The theater was packed, but only a few children were wandering around out of boredom. The kids oohed and ahhed when they were supposed to and generally seemed to get the big picture. Wanted, on the other hand, is all plot from the very get go. Explosions, gun fights, assassinations...all within the first half-hour! The viewers sat staring, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, at slow-motion bullets, exploding heads, and Angelina Jolie's sacrosanct beauty. And I must admit that we were hypnotized by her righteous posterior and her inviolate curvature.

In one theater we have a bunch of kids and their parents transfixed with a Chaplin-meets-Metropolis world of science (non)fiction. In the other theater we have a mix of young and old adults (including the old codger who sat next to Reginald and ate popcorn nonstop, like one of those little plastic birds that dunks their beak in water meticulously), all clearly jaded by real life, laughing and clapping when someone gets their head blown off.

If being like the kids from the Wall-E theater is considered infantile and idiotic, then that is a label I am willing to wear with honor. The people in the Wanted theater seemed so...lonely, like they were looking for something the one-up the last thrill: something that would shock them. I sat in that theater, next to my old friend Reginald, thinking how sad it is to not find joy in a small scale (in comparison to Wanted) movie like Wall-E.