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Today, people can have almost any cinematic viewing environment they desire. A sparsely crowded theater at noon on a Tuesday (that would be my choice), a midnight screening with a jam-packed house (only for comic book adaptations, they bring out the crazies), the comfort of your own home with OnDemand, TNT and Starz – why not let television make the decision for you, or pretty much any place else with your laptop and a recently downloaded film from iTunes - unless you're one of those shameless people who just go and download the torrent. That's stealing!!! If it weren't for you, Hostel: Part II would have been successful (please, I believe that movie's failure was due to online pirating as much as I believed Eli Roth's performance in Inglorious Basterds. Ba-zing!).

But all that is just the climate. Once you've decided where, when and how many people you want around, there's figuring out what to watch. And with Netflix offering pretty much every movie ever put on DVD it's quite a vast range of options. Romcoms? Art-house? Vin Diesel (he's gotta have some fans, right?)? The movie viewing world has become an endless decision process wherein, whatever your tastes, habits or sleeping patterns people are free to experience any film, in any manner, at any time. That is, with one exception. On an airplane.

True, you aren't there to watch a film, it's not a movie theater. And that's a good thing, because if it were there would be rioting. Imagine a movie theater that forces you to remove your shoes before you go in. A theater that doesn't tell you what's playing until you're in your seat that's as comfortable as To Wong Foo Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar (I'm assuming everyone reading flies coach. If not, I'm sorry, but it's going to cost you $500 to continue reading this column). This theater has a screen that is 5x5 inches and never fully visible no matter how much brightness adjusting you do. You may be given a choice of what to watch, sometimes from dozens of options. But no matter how many are offered, it's always going to feel constrictive. I find the fewer the choices, the better. Things really start to get dicey when there are several tempting picks, but no obvious winners. Ace Ventura or Minority Report!? Ahhh! And once you've made your choice there will be likely be intermittent interruptions where the sound cuts out and a bland yet irritating voice comes on to recite something redundant (If the plane is going to crash I can't do anything about it. Leave me and my creamed chicken alone.).

But the worst part about this theater chain is that unlike those affixed to the earth, here people in the seats around you aren't watching the same movie, if they're watching one at all. They act like you aren't even in the same room, even though he distance between you is actually smaller that the screen you're watching. On the ground, when you go to a theater, people all paid money to see that movie like you did. They sit (reasonably) quietly. But up in the air it's the freaking Wild West. There's shifting of chairs making you constantly adjust your screen that you already can't see (I don't care how tall you are, that's freaking un-American), excessive hitting on/berating of stewardess by people so self-obsessed they start to asphyxiate when not getting attention, and, of course, there are the unidentifiable noises that, while subtle enough to ignore in everyday life, unrelenting exposure to over 10 straight hours is akin to Chinese water torture. On a personal note, the person sitting in front of me on my 14 hour flight from NYC to Johannesburg did all three of these. Jim Caviezel, let the smiting begin.

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