You go to a movie - sold out - wall to wall people - the guy in front of you is 6'11 - what do you do?

I closed my eyes… listened to the film – then watched it at home on DVD.

But it was annoying.

You?

Ask him to swap seats with his date maybe so at least it the shorter person in front of you.

Being 5’ nothing, this is why I only attend movies at theaters infrequently. I would leave the theater and ask for a voucher for a movie in the future.

Then he’d block my date’s view, @gravity – and I’d be a jerk.

I’d ask for a refund or a free ticket to another movie later on. There’s no way I’d want to pay ten bucks to get into a movie and not even be able to see it.

I usually try to find a comfortable position looking in between the people in front of me. How well that works really depends on the theater. I love the theaters that have the seats staggered so that you are actually sitting in between the two people in front of you.

I’m with @Allie. Even if I find a workaround, my experience of the movie is going to be about what a pain it was to see it. And I think it’s rude to ask him to make accommodations. I’m guessing being 6’11” isn’t anything he had a role in deciding.

You and your date swap chairs halfway through the movie.

What one misses, the other one will see.

Discussion after the movie for each to learn….what the h_ll happened?

I wouldn’t be there in the first place. My favorite way to see a movie, my SOP, is by myself, at a matinee, on a beautiful sunny day, when decent people are enjoying the beautiful sunny day outdoors, so I can sit fifth row center in a theatre that I have practically to myself.

@john65pennington Good compromise – and conversation starter. Smooth.

2nd Answer….........

Determine which is the best seat,,,,,,you or your dates and use that one chair to sit in,

Bring you date over and she sits in your lap.

You may not care if you see the movie, then.

@john65pennington Discuss the first thing that comes up?

Climb on his back like a friendly monkey?

Hi Lucy…...you okay?

All variations of this situation are troublesome (and, unfortunately, not all that uncommon).

•  You pay $55 for a reserved seat at the opera, and the woman in front of you has loaded on the perfume so heavy that you have to hold your program in front of your face the whole time.
•  The man behind you has marinated himself in garlic and whiskey at dinner and is now exhaling into your space.
•  The woman in front of you in a full stadium at graduation is holding a bouquet the size of an umbrella directly in your line of vision and the man behind you is blowing an air horn.
•  The kid behind you on the plane won’t quit kicking your seat, and the one next to you has a typhoon of a cold.

All of these things and more have happened to me. The only ones I tried to do anything about were the woman with the bouquet (she cursed me out and raised it higher) and the kicking kids (dozens, over the years, none of whom ever stopped). My friend asked the perfumed woman to wash it off in the restroom because she was allergic, and the woman had her husband tell my friend off.

The main difference here is that all these people had a choice about what they were inflicting on others, but the tall man didn’t choose his height. He should have taken a seat on the aisle and/or at the back, knowing how tall he was. But people cannot force one another to be considerate, can they? I would have asked an usher or a manager to help us find another seat; perhaps instead they would have helped him find another seat.

sit on his lap, naturally

I’d blow in his ear until he freaked out and moved.

@jeruba Allow me to add one to your list… I went to see Avenue Q, wanted to see it forever, couldn’t wait to see it, was so excited, had 3rd row center seats and got stuck behind someone with a double-BUMPIT. I despise bumpits. I chose to ask for an unused seat further away so I could enjoy the show without fuming. My Bad Idea Bears were working overtime!

That’s one reason why I usually won’t see a movie in a theater until it’s no longer in the top five for attendance.

If the movie is still in the top 5, I’ll ask the sales clerk what the attendance percentage is for the theater. If it’s over 40%, I won’t buy a ticket.
Most of the theatrical releases I’ve seen over the last 10 years, have been in theaters that were almost empty.

I’m sorry that happened to you.
How about getting a portable periscope for any such future occurrences? ;-p

@linguaphile I don’t get out much, what is a bumpit?

@chyna

Apparently it’s a volumizing insert for one’s hair. I thought it referred to someone who had armpits that smelled like a bum. ;-p

@Brian1946 Oh! That thing. Um, I didn’t know people really wore them.

I never heard of them either. Is that style back, then?? In the sixties the girls did that with teasing. Most of the girls in my high school yearbook have big puffy heaps of hair like that.

@Jeruba I feel your pain. Recently there was a question about about what our favorite seat was on an airplane, window, aisle, etc. My answer, in part, was that my favorite was whichever one was not directly in front of the unsupervised 10 year old with ADHD who could, it seems, amuse himself for hours by kicking the back of my seat. Been there.

@seazen_, I guess you could have kicked the back of his seat.

@Jeruba Everyone in my yearbook had the Marsha Brady hair, long, stringy and parted in the middle. Including me.

@chyna It’s a 2011 version of this 1992 hairdo and can be found in all suburbs and rural areas.

The link that @Brian1946 provided is accurate, except some bumpit wearers go above and beyond the call of duty, while others make a valiant attempt but end up having a vertical equivalent of a combover.

Go to the box office and ask for a rain check. Most movie houses will offer you a rain check or a ticket to another film showing that evening.

Switch up seats and dates!

@Brian1946 Maybe next time you could add a little warning to turn the volume down on our computers. That Bumpit’s spiel blasting at full volume was almost more than I could handle.

@lillycoyote (laughing) see why I despise those things? They use those things in re-education camps, I promise.

@lillycoyote Sorry, my speakers are turned off, so I didn’t know. However, if ever I do encounter such an auditory annoyance, I’ll do my best to warn others. It’d be great if the purveyors of such cacophonous crap warned us themselves.

@linguaphile Yes, PsyOps material for sure. LOL

and

@Brian1946 I have to accept partial blame. I have an old boom box hooked up to my computer and was listening to some stuff on youtube earlier so the volume was cranked up pretty high, but fluther is generally a rather quite place so I had forgotten. It was kind of like when I first get into my car after having my music cranked up loud. It blasts even me out of my seat practically

@Jeruba I went to see The Monkees at an outdoor festival. There were no seats, so you had to stand and it was completely packed. Most of the fans of the Monkees are middle aged women. But during this particular show, for which I had camped out for hours to get in the front to see my beloved (and short) Davy Jones, some drunk young man of about age 20 shoved his way up to the front and crammed himself in front of me. So I had is butt (complete with boxers and butt crack showing) in my face, and then he decided to to the spend the entire show doing the “rock concert salute” (you know where you raise up your arm and have your thumb and pinky sticking out). He was wearing one of those wife beater under shirts, so I was treated to his smelly, dripping pit hair for the entirety of the concert. That’s all I could see, even though I was only 3 feet from the stage.

Did I mention that he was at least 6 feet tall and was wearing one of those 12 inch high Cat in the Hat hats that were popular in the 90’s?

@seazen_ This is one reason why I only see movies where they have stadium seating. In your case, I probably would have asked the usher to see if he could re-seat me, then if not, I would have just gotten my money back. The poor tall dude probably didn’t sit in the front on purpose, it sounds like the theater was packed and he just ended up there.

@Kardamom I loved that story.

I was blocked in a group picture by a very tall man. I held it against him all day. Then I found out that he’s the prince of a foreign country (which I can’t mention since he’s abroad secretly) where there are a lot of tall people.

@sliceswiththings If he was secretly AWOL, why did he pose for a picture? That just struck me as humorous. :)

@linguaphile Haha good point. He’s not secretly abroad as much as exiled from his home country, and maybe he doesn’t want them to know where he is. I tried to brag about this “celebrity encounter” on facebook but my friend who knows the prince quickly stopped me for security reasons.
And he wasn’t even in the back, blending in!

@cockswain And I didn’t even get the worst of it. Another friend, who was supposed to be meeting me at this show, could not get over to where I was standing because it was so crowded. So she was about 30 feet away from me and we never did get to stand together. But what happened to her was that she brought along an old aquaintance of hers (another woman) who was in town and thought it would be fun. The acquaintance got super drunk and loud and went all “frisky lesbian” all over my friend. She was pawing at her and kept trying to kiss her. My friend tried to rebuff her and she tried to leave, but because the crowd was so thick, she couldn’t even get out of the throng and she had to put up with the frisky girl until the end of the show. When she finally did get to escape, she put the drunk acquaintance back into the car (my friend drove them both to this show) and the girl promptly threw up in her car. My friend dropped (dumped really) the acquaintance back at her hotel and went home. The next morning the frisky girl called to apologize, but she wasn’t exactly clear on what had gone on. My friend read her the riot act and told her that she was a drunk and needed help. A week later the girl called my friend again to say that she had just signed up for Alcoholics Anonymous.

I try to shift to a position I can reasonably see most of the screen. If it is impossible to see within reason, I would ask for a refund or to see a different film if it has multiple theatres. If it is winter, I would sit on my coat. Luckily, there is usually a few theatres with stadium seating in the cities I have lived and this is not likely to happen. Also, most theatres warn you it is the last few seats you are buying, so you know you might wind up in the very front (the front is usually where people running late get stuck) but anyway, at least the theatres seem empathetic to people being able to see and enjoying the flick.

@Kardamom Even better story.

It’s the main reason to wait till after the hubhub has subsided to see a new film. We never go to a new film the first week it’s out. No movie is that good. Anyway if a person is that tall he’s being a dick to sit in front of anyone and probably has no social skills whatsoever.

@Jeruba Next time on the plane a kid keeps bumping your chair and you ask nicely for them to stop, find a big guy to switch with you if possible. Bet the parents will tell the little tyke to stop then. Or you can offer a person behind said person 50 bucks to bump the parents chair for everytime their kid does it. Bet the parent gets upset and asks them to stop. Then you tell them if they make the kid stop you will pay the person cash to stop.
Or if they start before the flight has left you can complain to the flight attendants and they can ask the parents to control their child or they will have to leave the plane.
To answer the question, I’ve been there and have gotten a voucher for a later showing. If its a couple sometimes I will ask them to switch seats with me. Usually not a problem when they see all 5 feet of me.

I would devour his soul.

@Kardamom I ROtFL.

@john65pennington Hi John! :)

Flick his earlobe until he gets up and leaves.

My daughter + a “ticking time bomb” bottle of pepsi + his head + a puss n boots doe eyed stare = a clear view…ta-da!

@Kardamom Damn monkees, they’re everywhere.

@ucme, what does “a puss n boots doe eyed stare” mean? “Puss in Boots” is a folktale about a poor young man who makes good with the help of a pet cat who dresses as a man and is a gifted con artist.

@Jeruba That’ll be this fella. Oh & i’m well aware of the reference you make. I just think the Shrek version suits what I had in mind.

@ucme You mean (shiver) the face that even Shrek can’t say no to? The face no-one can say no to. Gulp. No, not that. It wasn’t me, it was the one armed man I tell you.

@seazen_ That’s the one, more powerful than even the icy gaze of Medusa. One minor difference being, his stare makes your tummy tickle.

This sadly happened to me, i went to see macbeth with my high school english class. by the way i’m deaf and all my friends are deaf. so we sat in our seats and i got the front row i was THRILLED. but then 2 ASL interpreters were in my way. Sadly one of them were very large. so i basiclly saw the whole play signed to me when all this action was happening behind me. :(