Image credits: Frank Whitney/The Image Bank/Getty Images

The rising costs of movie tickets (and the “essentials” for enjoying a movie) have driven people like me to stay at home rather than going to theaters.

The average movie ticket costs about Rs 220. Popcorn costs about Rs 80, and a drink, about Rs 50. Thus, the average expense at a theater is about Rs 350. For a family of four, that’s approximately Rs 1,400 for two-and-a-half hours of entertainment. Include the Parking fees of Rs 100 for a car (or, 2 x two-wheelers, in my case) to make it Rs 1,500.

The way in which movie studios are reimbursed by local theaters has a big role in deciding prices. The studio may can ask for as much as 90% of the revenue from sales of movie tickets, in the first week of the release. This means that the high prices of the “First week” or “First-day-show” tickets aren’t actually benefiting the theaters tremendously. The theater gets more share of ticket sales in next weeks . So, when we go to watch a movie for second time (or first time, but in second week), theaters are getting more share, and giving lesser to the studio.

So, why are the studios charging so much? Some of the best films are made on fairly low budgets. But, we have examples where a fairly high budget film has been an epic fail. So, we may inference that the studio “makes-up” for it’s losses on high-budget films, by keeping prices at-par with the low-budget ones.

While actors (including “actresses” too) make a great deal of money, they aren’t the sole reasons for overpriced movie tickets. If you can spare some time to read the end credits of a film, one will see that many people are people employed by large productions: spot-boys, film assistants, animators, casting assistants, art or set designers. Most of these have their own unions responsible for setting up their wages.

I really want to see movies, and choose them as an entertainment option, but Hollywood (and Bollywood too) are getting greedier now. So many movies have different trailers now days. When you go see the movie it could be totally different from what the trailer shows, and the theater says “it’s not our fault you didn’t like it” — Thanks for telling that, morons. From now on, I’ll spend my hard-earned money on other entrainment options.

Some of their business ideas look so stupid. The price for shows before 5 p.m. during Mon-Thu are some what in affordable range. But, do they ever stopped to think that maybe the people who would need to take advantage of this would be “working” during that time? Further, they keep “buying” the very-few-left single screen, affordable theaters, and they triple the ticket prices there, again leaving us with no choice. The “refreshment stall” at these multiplexes lists the items at 3-to-4-times their original market price — nice exploitation of  “captive audience”. I can buy a full lunch for myself for what a small popcorn and a drink would cost me at these plexes.

Even after paying such hefty amount for the ticket, be ready to sit through 20 minutes of ads, and get your movie watching interrupted by ringing cell phones, people talking loudly, and goons hooting and whistling in between.

If that wasn’t enough, we are now pushed on to these 3-D movies, and charged extra for them. The theater only shows the 3-D version of the movies. If you want to see it, pay for the 3-D. I have a better option here, I choose to give up on going to the movies. Overpaid movie stars, overpriced popcorn and soda-pop, overpriced tickets. I simply wait for the reviews of the movies (I mean, “real” reviews from my close friends, not “paid reviews” on various media). Then, I can get the movie on a DVD from my local library, just for those “really-worth-watching” films. And I can pop my own popcorn at home, buy a drink priced at Rs 20 (instead of Rs 50). I will not pay in to greed any more than I have to.

I’m proud to say that I either download the movies, or get them from the DVD library. I have saved some of my hard-earned money doing this. I hate doing it myself (unethical, and whatever). But, if you want me to come to the hall, lower the damn admission price.

Picture credit - blogohblog.com

People who spend maximum of their internet time on social networking sites are the ones who are destroying it the most. A person who creates his first profile at orkut (or any other Social Networking site) keeps it very clean, and types his profile info and scraps very clearly. Then he spends some time there, sees the profile of their friends, and destroys his language, and the simplicity of the profile.

The first thing – I’m yet to understand the reason behind people constantly changing their Profile names to crappy quotes or annoying self-proclaimed titles such as “lost ma mobile phone” “life looks better now” “i puked yesterday” () or “beauty lies in your attitude” (and those are the First name + Last name). I mean, how the hell someone is going to find them by search utility? For one more reason, how am I supposed to know that the one listed as ‘just special, and is not weird‘ in my friend list is actually “Sophia” when I need to scrap her. People should use the status display to write all this. Changing their name like this actually defeats the purpose of social networking.

Second – the language – The next thing that annoys me most about these Social networks is that people write in a language like

hiiiiiiiii ………………
hieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee….
vveeerrrryyyyy sssssswwweeeeettt
buh-bayee!!
U mst do tis by urself

This looks insane to me. The morons who are obsessed with typing too many i’s and e’s must lower the repeat rate off their Keyboard strokes (Go to Control Panel > Keyboard > Repeat Delay and set it to short). For those who  ignore the red underlines thrown by your spell-checker,  while SMS’ing, you have limited characters, so this may sound OK. But, using this on internet? Don’t you people own a QWERTY keyboard or what? It looks like one of them writes like this because he doesn’t know to write proper English. And then everyone thinks that cool and adopt it.  According to me, that sucks. What is the whole point in writing like that? I feel like an ass deciphering the encrypted scraps and tweets I receive.

Thirdly, the mentality of managing two or more accounts – This is also an issue which beats the whole concept of social networking. How many males I have seen, who have at least one duplicate account, which they run with a fake Female name, use a display pic of a nice looking girl (leached from the WWW, obviously), and have a status which more or less signifies “Boys not allowed” Then they send out requests to girls and chat with them. These losers must get a life. How can they ever believe that they can search for a “love” online? In a country like India, forget about a date with a sweet girl, even a hooker won’t contact you through a social networking site.

With these and some more points (on which, I’ll rant about in later posts), the social networking sites have become a pain for me. My orkut and Facebook accounts, which I used to visit regularly in old days (literally speaking, I had them permanently open in tabs with auto-refresh enabled on the tabs), have now become the least significant place to update me about the issues. I hardly visit them once in a day. How badly I wish that the creators of these sites can come up with some !deas to clean up the mess, and we could relish them in the way we did in the days of their golden glory..

So Pravesh and I were watching “Dostana“. The movie was at the crucial (?) point where Abhishek Bacchan was trying to explain to their landlady that he and John were gay.

So he started off (the following dialogue is just an approximation of what’s actually said. I am not so good at memorizing things word-to-word)

Abhishek: Yeh mera khaas dost hai.
Landlady: To? Dost hai to kya hua?
Abhishek: Nahin, ye mera ‘khaas’ dost hai.
…
…
…
And the conversation went on with Abhishek trying various permutations and combinations. When none of them seemed to be working, John got irritated and said…

J: Hum Gay Hain!!
…

Of course, I was laughing along, coz it was a bit unexpected, at least for me, and yeah, funny. But I was never ready for what was coming next.

A small girl (I guess her age to be about 4-7 years) sitting behind me asked her mom,

“Mummy gay kya hota hai?”

Her mom just shushed her, but she didn’t stop… I must say that she wanted to know real bad.

I could see her mom trying desperately to get the kid to shut up. But she didn’t. She started screaming at the top of her voice,

“MUMMY BATAO NA! GAY KYA HOTA HAI?”

and for a moment the entire crowd was looking towards her. Oh God! I laughed so hard, and that was probably the most funny moment in the whole film. I can’t imagine how embarrassing her mother must’ve found it.

Anyways, it got me to think on various issues,  but they’re too serious to put down here (at least with the genre of this post), so I’ll save a bit of space.

P.S. –> Recounting it all on this blog is not doing full justice with it.
You had to be there. It was so hillarious!