Celebration Cinema in Lansing
When Celebration Cinema opened I had no choice but to start going there. The mall theatres that I used to go to were closing and they had uncomfortable seats and little screens. Celebration boasts stadium seating and super-sized screens. They have state of the art sound systems and the capacity to show more movies on more screens. However, I hate them.
I don't blame the teenage movie geeks who work there. In fact I'm surprised I was never one of them. The people who go to the theatre are always nice too. Theatre owners dictate policy and it's upon them that I place all of the blame.
The concessions are ridiculously expensive. I realize that this is how theatres make their money, but seriously, when the treats cost twice as much as the movie, things have gotten out of control. I usually stop at the gas station and buy snacks before I get there.
I have a tendency to hold a grudge. On May 3rd, at the Spiderman premier, Celebration Cinema went flying up to the top of my "hate you forever" list.
It started days before the premier when I went to buy advanced tickets. It was three in the afternoon on a weekday and I pulled up to the front of the empty theatre, ran in for about 60 seconds, bought the tickets and drove home. A few days later I get a parking ticket! Apparently the circle drive in front of the theatre, where I have seen countless thousands of cars picking up and dropping people off, is a fire lane. When I called the police to try and get the ticket excused, they informed me that they now have zero tolerance toward parking violations at the theatre. The old policy was to approach people in the fire lane and ask them to move. The Celebration owners decided to confront the police and tell them to quit harassing their customers. So the police now have no choice but to ticket. At this point my Spiderman ticket has now cost me $37.50.
In anticipation of opening night, my brother-in-law Jeff and I bought Spiderman silly string web shooters to wear to the premier. Although Holly tried to coax us to spray everyone in the theatre before and during the movie we decided that the time to attack was after the show. Even then we decided to only shoot at each other. We chased each other out of the theatre and across the parking lot blasting silly string at each other. When we got to the car, I noticed that Jeff was being pursued by three of the parking lot attendants for the theatre. The three kids went off on us about how we were littering and spraying cars, and that if we didn't clean it up they would call the police. One of them conveyed my license plate number to someone inside on a walkie-talkie so that we knew they were serious. We tried to tell them that the stuff would dissolve by tomorrow and that it was no big deal. They would have none of our explanations and insisted that we retrace our route and collect all the silly string. Apparently we were not the first offenders of the evening, and the kids were at their breaking point. We walked about halfway back to the theatre collecting string under the watchful gaze of the theatre kids, who eventually released us from custody when Jeff explained that we were now collecting string that was a different color than ours and was obviously from an earlier show. Revenge fantasies immediately filled my head as we drove away from the theatre. I pay $45 dollars to see this movie (don't forget about the concessions) and my evening ends with a civics lesson and reprimand from children. My first thought was to drive up to the theatre later and empty my back-up canisters of string all over the front of the theatre lobby windows. By the time I started considering red paint and bricks I decided that I would just write a scathing editorial, post it on my website and add them to my hate list.
Future Celebration Cinema patrons be warned, The owners of Celebration Cinema will tolerate absolutely no "celebrating" on their property. Apparently they require a level of decorum that does not include silly string. Recall the ordering procedure for the "soup nazi" on Seinfeld and you will understand the requirements they expect from their customers. Unfortunately we have no choice but to live under their regime.