Something about MI7...DUCK!

Our first Spanish movie theater experience got a little salty. 

Rebecca and I decided it would be fun to go see Johnny English Returns, essentially a 007 spoof starring Rowan Atkinson in all his bizarreness, dubbed in Spanish. It had been a quiet Sunday afternoon, relatively uneventful, until we bought our popcorn and slipped into the theater as the opening credits started to roll. 

It was dark when we found our seats, so we didn’t realize we were sitting behind six middle to high school spanish boys until a few stray pieces of popcorn fell into our laps. We peered around in the dark for a minute, trying to figure out where they had come from, when a few more arced up from the row of seats in front of us and landed in our seats. Some muted sniggers confirmed our suspicions: the boys in front of us were chucking popcorn. 

So, naturally, we returned fire. A couple pieces of popcorn here and there, scattered among the six of them. We had the advantage of higher ground and of course visibility, so they didn’t stand a chance. They were turning around and looking at us, laughing and tossing back more ammo, and admittedly Rebecca and I were having a real hard time suppressing giggles too. When someone hushed us a few rows up I made “shhh” gestures at the boys and returned to watching the movie. 

But oh no, they weren’t done. After a brief hiatus, more popcorn started raining down. Well, I just couldn’t take that sitting down, so I tossed some more back at them, keeping up my “shhh” gestures to try to keep the fray a silent one. Rebecca took a small handful and sprinkled it right in one guy’s hair. They were in absolute hysterics. 

Then, though, the battle got dirty. When a small stream of (what we think was) coke squirted over the seat backs, we called it quits. “Para, para,” (“stop, stop”), we whispered, and we laid down our edible weapons in an effort to encourage the cease fire. It wasn’t a very successful plan: when we stopped responding, the boys just pushed harder, dumping out the rest of their popcorn boxes on our feet. “Para, para!” 

So, we adopted plan B, which consisted of completely ignoring them. After a couple more popcorn showers and what I think were some cat calls in jest, the boys gave up. They left halfway through the movie, in fact; Rebecca and I at first feared they were going to buy more ammunition, but they never did return to the theater. Alas, as a result of our popcorn skirmish, we hadn’t been paying much attention to the movie, and we had missed all of the sections where the plot was set up. Fortunately this was Johnny English Returns, not Inception, so it wasn’t too difficult to pick back up what was generally going on, although we were a bit baffled by a couple details of the story line. Hint: the good guys win.

We also plan on going to see Tangled in Spanish when it comes out in theaters here, partly because we doubt a crowd of five-year-old girls will be quite so rambunctious.