A Not So Amazing Trip To Century Theater in San Leandro

Going to the movies is usually one of the small joys in my life, unless I find myself going to Century Theater in San Leandro. This past weekend was the last straw in terms of my tolerance for their inept security and shoddy service.

Noise and chatter in the crowd are standard for any theater. There's always a moron or two in the crowd who are going to be disruptive and I've just come to accept it as a fact of life. But going to see a movie at Bayfair? Prepare yourself for the worst a theater has to offer.

See, the loud mouths that find their way here to SL to watch a movie are pretty typical in terms of behavior and obliviousness to the captive audience suffering through their disruptions. What gets me about Century is the management at the theater. I've been going to there since it opened and it seems as though each year that passes management takes it upon themselves to bring service down a notch.

Let's go back to last summer when Captain America came out. A pack of miscreants in the crowd were talking on cell phones through the first half of the movie with no sign of an usher anywhere to be found. So, I go to find one... and am told that there's no security in the theater until mid-afternoon. Now, thankfully, the manager-person I spoke with did end up sending someone in to remove the group, but what galls me is that if I didn't go out there, not one person representing the theater was going to pop their head in for the duration of the movie.

Over the course of the past three or four years I've been to multiple midnight showings and regular showings at Century and have had to tolerate a portion of the bottom of the screen appearing at the top for an entire movie (twice), audio going out for the first ten minutes of a movie, the end of a movie getting cut off and having to be taken with the entire crowd into another theater to re-watch the past twenty minutes of the film to catch up to where we were previously, delays while the film projector sputtered out continuously, and worst of all, the lack of security keeping losers in the crowd in check.

This past weekend I had the pleasure of "watching" The Amazing Spider-Man with a hyperactive pack of pre-teen to middle school-aged kids who spent the entire time talking loudly, playing music, running up and down the aisle, and throwing things at people in the crowd. The real cherry on top, however, was having to go find help (as usual) TWICE and never were these kids removed.

So thanks, Bayfair, I like to do what I can to shop and do things here in SL, but your Century theater is so pathetically run that I'll go all the way to Alameda, Union City, and Oakland to watch a movie just to avoid your nonsense.