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Back in college I lived in an apartment with 6 other guys. One of them was very into movies about rock bands, The Who most of all, but others too. He frequently would want to watch back stage specials, documentaries about bands and things like that.
They bored me to tears.
I would always try and avoid going to them with him.

One day he said “There is a great new movie playing down town that just opened, want to go?”
The matinee shows were $2 at the time, so I went along.

I had never heard of the movie, hadn’t seen previews or anything like that.
So, when it started my thought was “great, he’s lured me to one of his stupid rock documentaries.”

I really thought it was about a real band. I never heard of them, but half the things he watched I had never heard of anyhow. I was raised on classical music, and didn’t know a lot about modern bands anyhow.

So, the movie was very strange to me. Why would anyone make a movie about a band like that?

About half way through, there is a scene where the base player gets trapped in a plastic tube on stage in a show.

“Why would they show this?” I thought to myself. “It’s very embarrassing.”
They kept trying to get him out of the tube.
“They must know it is embarrassing,” I thought. “This is the sort of thing you wouldn’t want people to know happened. Yet, they still chose to put it in the movie.”
They took a blow torch to the tube.
“They must want us to see them being embarrassed,” I thought. “Why would they want us to see them being embarrassed?”

Finally, I got it.

“WAIT!” I shouted. “THIS IS A COMEDY!”
The other people around me indicated they knew that, and I shouldn’t shout in the theater.

I’ve never been willing to watch the movie again. Knowing it is a comedy from the start would be such a different experience then what I had, I don’t want to change that.
Maybe some time I will.