a new kind of moviegoing experience

me and m.o.p.s. up and saw paranormal activity last night, which i always want to call paraNOID activity, even in writing. it's a blair witch-style "homemade" movie about, well, paranormal activity. and i have three things to say about it:

1.) it made me so sick, that hand-held camera did. carsick. motion sick. swooping around corners and getting dropped and walked around with, it makes me woozy just recalling it enough to write about. it all takes place in a house, too, so there's an element of claustrophobia as well. oh god, it made me sick.

2.) instead of leaving, i decided to tough it out, because the movie is fairly suspenseful, and because i just stared at the ceiling when i needed to, and because about midway through i had the fairly interesting experience of having motion sickness and adrenalin-fueled tenseness actually battling it out in my body. something like "i want to barf but i'm too scared!" or "i'm holding my breath and on the edge of my seat but i need to breathe deeply and look away or else i will vomit on my own personal spouse and my cool new jacket!" the unpleasantness apparently was outweighed by the interestingness of experiencing those two physical sensations at once.

3.) other people in the audience seemed to be teenagers with foul mouths who had no compunctions about just talking out loud as though they were in their own living rooms. and there were several different groups of them. and one group of girls actually gave a bloodcurdling scream at one point. and you know what? that was fairly interesting too and not totally unpleasant! the movie's not exactly dialogue-driven, and it's about rather dumb and annoying young adults, so there was some kind of additive aspect brought by the foul-mouth teenagers who kept remarking on how scared they were. almost like they're part of the show.

in sum, how i could have possibly enjoyed myself under such conditions--sick and woozy and with foul-mouth teenagers yelling their surprise about onscreen events--remains a mystery. who would have thought that could count as a good time? not i! nay, not i. and yet here we are.