Dear Gossips,   

Let me start the week off by being an old lady. When it comes to watching movies, my ass is bougie AF. Here in Canada we have VIP theatres – you pay a little more for 19+ and food and drink service to your seat, and the seats are loungers with trays, they’re more comfortable and they’re also more spaced apart. 

 

But yesterday I saw Challengers in IMAX, a friend of ours insisted. Naïve as this might sound, I’ve never understood how clips from movies that came out like five minutes ago that were not included in any of the trailers make it on social media. Now I know. 

 

Because I was sitting beside a girl who did not put down her phone the whole time during the movie. Literally filming the movie and turning scenes into GIFs while it was playing. And did not have the sound off on her phone. And kept talking to her friends. Piracy, interruption, rudeness – half an hour into it I actually got up to switch seats. Turns out my body had been a buffer for the noise they were making and when I switched seats it got louder for other people and eventually they were reprimanded by another person in the audience. But whatever, by then she still got all her TikToks in. And none of this was surreptitious! They weren’t being sneaky about it, there was no fear, it was ordinary, like they’ve done it a thousand times! 

 

But also, on top of all that, the disrespect of it all, this is the reason why some of the takes on the art these days on social media are so bad – because how can you engage with the art when you’re making TikToks out of it in real time, ffs? Or, you know, another way of looking at it is that I’m an ancient c-nt and this is just how this generation engages with art these days. So I guess eventually this will happen in VIP too, it’s only a matter of time. 

I was there with Kathleen and we’ve been texting about it all morning because, like me, she woke up angry about it too. And, ever empathetic, she concluded by saying that she ultimately feels bad for them because “imagine not being able to sit for two hours without your phone and without talking”. Which means that basically they could only appreciate Zendaya’s performance with one eye. 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey