Cell phones in the theater

[starscream]

I feel like I've been waging a war on cell phone use in the movie theater lately. Sure, phones go off and people still feel like they can answer, but that's actually getting more and more rare. But rampant now are people using their phones for all the myriad things for which they can use them during the movie. And I can only assume they don't think all the intermittent blue lights are distracting to anyone and everyone behind them.

I'd had a bunch of successes in a row in getting people to put their phones away, but I suffered a great loss yesterday. I asked the girl in front of me to put her phone away and either she didn't hear me or she did and purposely moved her phone more into my view so I started kicking her chair and when she turned around to tell me stop that I told her I would when she put her phone away. It seemed to work, but I guess maybe she was just done with whatever she was doing because she started using it again a little later. So I kicked the chair again and she flipped out. She threated to go have me kicked out. I said, "Please. Let's see how that goes." So instead she threatened to throw her drink at me. And then of course made sure she had her phone out. So I kicked and she had to follow through on her threat then, so she threw her drink at me. It kind of hit my arm, but wasn't terribly disturbing. A few minutes later she left and came back with another drink. The phone didn't come on again, but as she was leaving she called me a douchebag. I laughed at her so she threw her new drink at me. This was a good throw. It was Hi-C I guess so my shirt looked like I'd killed somebody in it. A mother and daughter siting in the same row came by and asked me how I could let her get away with that. I said there wasn't much I could do to a fourteen year old girl. But I suppose there must have been something.

I did get a free pass out of it, but only because the mother and daughter complained to the manager on my behalf. I didn't because I thought they'd ask to see my ticket which would have been bad as the movie I paid to see was three movies earlier.

I don't think this is necessarily an age related phenomenon, I stopped a 50 year old from doing it a few weeks ago, so there must be some people here who think it's perfectly acceptable. Please explain yourselves. It's more than that it's annoying to other people, I just don't get why you pay so much to see a movie and then don't pay attention to it.