When I say "7:15", of course, I really mean 7:45. Those commercials -- idiotically hyped by an unctious announcer as the pre-show entertainment -- eat up a lot of time, you know.

I am not talking about movie trailers, which have always been part of the moviegoing experience and which moviegoers love. These are honest-to-peaches TV commercials, which have been creeping into theaters for the last few years. Exhibitors have decided that patrons are now used to them and one more (and one more, and one more) won't hurt. Now commercials drag on for twenty minutes or longer. It might be a way to make a quick buck, but it's a shitty way to treat people who just paid $8.50 to get in the door.

AMC is already well-known for its shoddy customer service (the bovine popcorn-shovelers behind the counter at AMC theaters always seem astonished and completely unprepared for the arrival of customers) but the inexorable piling-on of more and more loud, stupid and obnoxious "rolling stock advertisements" is ruining the whole experience of going to movies. I used to go to the movies two or three times a week. Now I go only when there's a movie I particularly want to see. And I dread the whole godawful ordeal.

At movie theaters, it used to be a simple bargain. I buy a ticket and you show me a movie.

Now I buy a ticket and you make $5,000 showing me advertisements on slides, and then you make $20,000 showing me TV commercials, and then you show me nine trailers when the absolute limit used to be four, and then -- a half-hour later -- when I'm tired and pissed off from being treated with such disrespect by the exhibitor, the movie starts. And they want us to be grateful to them for providing us with such great entertainment. They should be paying us $8.50 to see the movie. If only Peter Brown could have heard the groans and curses from the audience when another and another and yet another TV commercial started.

But what does Brown care? He probaby hates the movies. Anyway, he doesn't seem to think much of moviegoers.