In a story that’s been going around the internet for about a day and a half now, Kevin Williamson, a theater columnist for The National Review, is currently being hailed as a hero to anyone who’s ever lacked the balls to shush a fellow theater goer. While attending a performance of the musical Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 this week, he was sitting next to a woman who refused to stop playing with her phone during the show. Eventually he took matters in to his own hands, grabbing the woman’s phone and chucking it towards an open door, never to be seen again. (I say “defenestrates,” because it’s possible it went out a window, and hey, it’s a fun word).

I suppose it should be noted that this whole story came from Williamson himself.

“The main offenders were two parties of women of a certain age, the sad sort with too much makeup and too-high heels, and insufficient attention span for following a two-hour musical. But my date spoke with the theater management during the intermission, and they apologetically assured us that the situation would be remedied. It was not.”

I’m assuming the age he means is 4, but I’ve been watching a lot of Toddlers and Tiaras lately. Gothamist picks up the story from there…

Once the performance resumed, the woman sitting to Williamson’s right on his bench would not, he says, stop using her cell phone. “It looked like she was Googling or something,” Williamson tells us. “So I leaned over and told her it was distracting and told her to put it away. She responded, ‘So don’t look.’ ”

Blood boiling, Williamson says he then asked her, sarcastically, “whether there had been a special exemption for her about not using her phone during the play. She told me to mind my own business, and so I took the phone out of her hands. I meant to throw it out the side door, but it hit some curtains instead. I guess my aim’s not as good as it should be.” Asked if the phone was damaged, Williamson says, “It had to be; I threw it a pretty good distance.”

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The drug cartel wars in Mexico have killed as many as 60,000 people in the last six years (!!) so you might expect Mexicans to be a little jaded when it comes to murder. But just how jaded? Well, a 10-year-old was shot in the head and killed during a Wreck-It Ralph screening last week, and after they carted him out, THEY KEPT PLAYING THE REST OF THE MOVIE.

According to an ongoing police investigation and local media reports, the shooting occurred Nov. 2 while young Hendrik Cuacuas, accompanied by his father and sister, were watching the animated Disney film Wreck-It-Ralph in a southern Mexico City theater.

The boy’s father, Enrique Cuacuas, told investigators and radio station Radio W that the child was sitting on his right side in a full theater when about a half-hour into the screening he heard something whiz past his ear, followed by the sound of a thud. He then turned to his right and saw his son convulsing and bleeding from the head. At that point, he realized his son had been shot. The boy was rushed to a hospital in critical condition but died two days later.

An autopsy report revealed that the child was shot from a distance of about four to six feet and it said the bullet entered the front of his head. However, adding to the general confusion, the coroner was quoted as saying that the shooter was not necessarily standing in front of the victim. [Or maybe it was the chupacabra. What am I, a doctor?]

Even stranger, the boy’s father and others in the theater said they heard no gunshots. Without offering proof, Cuacuas told Radio W that he learned there had been similar incidents in the past in the same theater. [THR]

Sad yet? Oh, it gets worse.

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I’ve never been to India or watched a movie there, so I can’t tell you how representative this is of their usual movie-watching practices, but if it’s even close, Indians put the worst stereotypes about catching a picture at the Magic Johnson theater to shame. Shouting? Pfft. If you’re not throwing rose petals and confetti and trying to climb up the screen, why are you even there?

As to whether this is standard practice, again, I don’t know, but there were reports about the posters for Endhiran being showered with milk, and “some celebrated the release by bursting crackers, beating drums and showering the movie screen with flowers.” So yeah, I guess they like their movies over there. In related news, a friend of mine once saw Lars Ulrich at a sushi restaurant during the whole Napster thing and threw a California roll at him.

My favorite YouTube comment on this? “You should really put your camera away in the theater these people are trying to watch a movie.”

[via Reddit]