NotSheep

We went to see another movie courtesy of Filmeducation this morning - this time it was Stormbreaker. It was very nearly excellent; unfortunately the “baddies” were played for cheap laughs and Nadia Vole seems to have had a completely different director to the rest of the movie, as she seems to have been thinking she was acting for Loony Tunes. But anyway.

Apart from one primary school group and us, the entire audience was secondary school groups. I wish I’d had a camera, because anyone who watched them would never again assume that school teaches social skills. There wasn’t a single secondary school group that didn’t take at least twenty minutes to get seated, and which didn’t then promptly lose half its members as they went off to “just going to the toilet” only to return with popcorn and drinks. Fair enough - except that all but one of them arrived after the movie was due to start. It was delayed by over half an hour while the staff - the cinema staff, not the teachers - tried to get everyone settled down.

The theatre is one of those with an aisle running from one side to the other, about half-way back from the screen, and we were sitting in the first row after it. Good for stretching your legs, not so good for teenagers ploughing past you and kicking your feet or your knees or - in one case - the one-year-old standing beside your legs. Not one of them apologised either.

But the schoolkids from at least one of the groups could be forgiven, because they certainly weren’t getting set a good example by their teachers. One of the teachers came in and glanced over at us, gave us avery fake, exaggerated, WTF-type look and then said to the cinema staff “Is this Stormbreaker?” When the cinema staff confirmed it was, she gave us the same look again and said “For secondary?” I was tempted to tell her that most of the kids with me had read the book, and ask how many of those with her had read it - or if she’d read it herself - but then she answered that last question by asking the staff, “What’s it about?” The staff member told her it was like “a teenage James Bond”, whereupon she said something else that I didn’t catch, gave us another long, dirty look and waltzed off down the aisle to sit with some of her students and giggle.

In a way I wish she’d said something to me directly, or at least close enough that I could have challenged her easily - I’d have told her that it was examples like hers we were trying to avoid… or I might have pointed out that we were organised enough to show up on time, courteous enough to get seated quickly and quietly and polite enough not to be making faces at people!

As we were leaving afterwards, one of the cinema staff actually stopped me and apologised for the teacher’s behaviour, and another staff member came over and said they’d been talking about it during the movie and the kids with me had been far better-behaved and more attentive than the ones with the rude teacher