Well, I just happened to walk out of my first movie ever this past Saturday night. Will and I had driven back from Tampa during the day, and he was antsy and wanting to do something, so I took him to that great movie theater where they have the children's day care (and video games he loves to play) and I just bought a ticket for whatever was starting in the next half hour. BIG mistake. The only thing that was was "September Dawn." I read a brief blurb about it in the theater's pamphlet about currently-playing movies and mistook it for the one opening soon with Christian Bale and Russell Crowe about the outlaw being taken to be tried. It turned out to be about a real-life massacre of 120 settlers in Utah in the 1850s who the local Mormons decided were sinners and needed to be "eliminated." Could have been an interesting allegory for today's headlines about religious fanaticism gone horribly wrong, but instead played out like a particularly bad "Gunsmoke" episode. The dialogue was painful to my ears. Put it this way - it made Paul Haggis' sound like Shakespeare. I gave it a half hour and just could not bear it any longer.
Meanwhile, I'd paid for three hours of the Children's Playroom for my son and knew he'd be disappointed if I picked him up before even an hour had passed. Nothing else was starting that I wanted to see. I considered slipping into something already started for the heck of it, but nothing appealed (or I was just too irritated by that other movie to do it). I couldn't leave the premises, so I went to the restaurant they have upstairs (one of my ideas years ago - why not have a restaurant - and a decent one - IN the movie theater?) and had a very nice Mediterranean chicken wrap with hummus and feta cheese on a yummy, fresh-baked pita. So though I had to spend still more money, all was not lost.
I've been to many movies I wanted to walk out on - "Exit to Eden," "Kill Bill, Vol. 1," and "AI: Artificial Intelligence" spring to mind. But I used to have this warped rule that it was just wrong to walk out on something you just paid 5-9 dollars for.
I guess now that I'm in my 40s and really starting to see how fleeting time is, I just refuse to waste any of it watching something that's disturbingly bad. There are too many really good movies out there to justify it.
