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If the movie studios could somehow reproduce for a mass market the common Los Angeles-area experience of attending the local multiplex in the presence of our favorite celebrities, perhaps the inevitable, lonely backslide into a DVD-based home-viewing reality could be forestalled even longer. Over the weekend, a reader delighted in the antics of one Christian Slater, an actor most recently seen tumbling ass-over-widow's-peak off a roof at Paris Hilton's party:

It was Jan. 1 at the new AMC movie theater in Century City. The 10:15pm showing of Match Point. I got there at 9:45 and already there were no seats left in the theater except for those crappy ones in the first four rows where you can get serious neck damage looking at the screen. So I was sitting there pouting over my bad luck and waiting for the show to begin when lo and behold, Christian Slater and two girls sit down in the very first row. They were obviously pissed about the bad seats but decided on sitting there anyways. Two guys and one more chick joined the group and I felt as if I was watching middle schoolers at the movies. Christian and his guy friends would laugh at random times and then try to "outlaugh" each other.

Christian also spent a good portion of the movie balancing a soda cap on his nose. When Scarlett Johansson and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers had their first on-screen kiss—in the pouring rain, in a British countryside field—Christian yelled out "Unbelievable!" and that was not a cinematic critique. It probably had something to do with Scarlett's soaking wet shirt and the fact that she was on top of the guy. But the best part actually happened during the previews. When Mel Gibson's new movie Apocalypto came on, Christian pulled out his digital camera and was recording it. Hello, Hollywood! You have pirates in your midst.

Unfortunately, Slater's "Unbelievable!" falls just short of qualifying him for enshrinement in the incredibly exclusive Overheard Celebrity Movie Reviewer pantheon, but this report should serve a much more important societal purpose: alerting us to the existence of a cabal of underemployed actors trying to make ends meet by proferring shoddily recorded movie fragments on the black market. We can only hope that swift, vigilante action by the MPAA can break up this shadowy gang before it can destroy the very industry that once enriched them in a more direct fashion.