I just got back from a catastrophically abysmal trip to the movie theatre to see X-Men Origins: Wolverine. The first quarter of the movie was pretty damn lame. I could not get into the plot of the movie for a while; the moment Adamantium bullets are pulled out I immediately thought “when is this trainwreck going to end”. It picked up toward the middle, that’s when the film promptly melted before our eyes and the screen went white.

Yes. The film literally caught on fire and melted. Some time passed and a staff member told us that they were working on fixing the film and we should be watching the movie again in 20 minutes. He was going to work on getting everyone a free small bag of popcorn, in the meantime.

GREAAAAAT.

Due to the burning we lost about 5 minutes of the movie (gaah) so I’m missing a chunk. BUT OKAY, it continued and things seemed to be kind of picking up and getting better.

With probably 5-10 minutes left in the movie before the credits, it happened a second time.

TWO TIMES.

Later one of the staff explained that they were doing some crazy thing involving using one reel of film between two theatres. Heh, so that means — yes — TWO THEATRES suffered the same burning problems simultaneously.

I missed the ending, but I did get a free pass … so … .. that’s good.

This begs the question: why wouldn’t theatres switch to some kind of digital means of playing movies? Then you wouldn’t have to share a reel of film between projectors, right? Bleh.