"I'm outta here..."

By Keith Phipps | August 17, 2005 | 11:46am

Aux Features The A.V. Club Blog

I went to see Last Days (or, to give it it's full onscreen title, Gus Van Sant's Last Days) on Sunday at a modestly attended matinee. By the time it was over, only about 2/3 of the original audience was left. Some people bailed early. Some waited until the I'm-too-messed-up-to-make-macaroni scene. (Me, I liked it. It has some problems, but it's kind of like a rock-and-roll horror movie and there are some incredible moments in it.) It was the most disastrous public screening I've been to since a showing of Roberto Benigni's Pinnochio that left children crying, parents fleeing in terror, and Nathan Rabin, our fellow-critic pal Josh Rothkopf, and me quietly amused.

I can't remember walking out of a movie since Encino Man. There have been plenty of shut-offs at home, but I always stick out what I'm watching in the theater. Obviously, I can't bail on anything I'm reviewing but even beyond that, once I've put down the money I'm content, or at least detemined, to stay put no matter what's going on up on the screen. So this is really more of a conversation starter than a proper entry but what does it take to drive you out of the theater? And for my fellow A.V. Club people (and anyone else who does this for a living), what was the moment when you most wished that professional obligations didn't make you stick around?