We got an entire movie theater to ourselves.

This has never happened to me or anyone I know. Then again, everyone I know is a tool so that either means God smiles on people who aren’t the biggest tools or there is no God and we’re all on our own. So if you don’t think I’m a nice guy, then God doesn’t exist. It’s as simple as that.

We were stuck in our parent’s house on the Easter weekend with nothing to do and Paul, my brother, wanted to share the sheer joy of Will Ferrell’s latest movie, “Semi-Pro,” with me. We had to drive a little out of way to find a theater that wasn’t playing it so far ahead in the day, we could buy, kill, defrost and roast a whole pig and still have enough time to sit down before the trailers rolled.

We got there early, so we picked our favorites seats: high up and right in the middle. It’s the perfect view in any movie theater. Your neck requires absolutely no bending up or down in order to look at the screen and your eyes can take everything in without having to scan back and forth in order to keep every scene in context. I’m sure in 30 years, it will prevent me from having any serious neck or eye problems, but the popcorn and silo sized colas will turn the rest of me into a large lump of flesh who has to shift three layers of fat away just so doctors can feel for a pulse.

The lights went down and the commercials started rolling and we were still the only people in the entire theater. We had the whole joint to ourselves. We were like Will Smith in “I Am Legend.” We could go where we wanted, say what we wanted and do what we want and the only company we had were the echoes of our voices and our shadows on the walls.

I immediately put my feet up on the back of the seats in front of me like the rebel that I am. Paul took it to a whole other extreme. He broke through every conceivable barrier that stands between men and their movie theaters that will earn my respect for years to come. He took his shoes off and plopped them down on the floor, not even bothering to place them together like he just got home from a hard 12 hour shift at the steel mill. Then he raised three pairs of arm rests on the seats next to him, stretched his legs across their cushy goodness and lounged across them like a fat Roman emperor watching gladiators battle to their death for his enjoyment for the entire movie. The manager didn’t walk out of his office/closet to tell us to sit up. The pimply teens who cleaned the theater didn’t call for their bosses. The guy in the projection booth probably didn’t even know he was there. I must have been the theater’s biggest loser of the week sitting in a theater all by my lonesome watching a third-rate Will Ferrell movie on the day Christ died of my sins.

I couldn’t bring myself to do the same. Paul knows an opportunity when he sees one. I’ve always admired people who live life that way. I spend every waking minute worrying about the consequences of my actions. Every cheeseburger I eat is sure to give me a heart attack. Every cigar I enjoy is sure to give me mouth cancer. Every girl I meet is sure to break my heart, wreck my car or leaving me buried in a ditch under 50 pounds of concrete and a plastic tarp.

I admire people who have learned how to turn off their own personal alarms and just enjoy the things life has to offer. It’s just too bad they all like crap like “Semi-Pro.”

Danny Gallagher is a freelance writer, humorist, reporter and power forward living in Texas. His website is DannyGallagher.net.

“What is your major malfunction, numb nuts?” he screams as I’m wiping the combination of sleep and Marine spittle out of my eyes. “Don’t you want to be successful? Don’t you want to be somebody? Everybody else is somebody while you’re practicing to be dead right now! You’re nothing but a lowlife scum-sucking parasite with syphilis that only sucks the life out of other people just to prolong your weak pathetic existence! You make me want to punch a baby! Ahhhhh!”

You can guess where it goes from there. I bolt out of bed and skip my morning pee because I’ve done it already. I brush my teeth with visions of more successful people swirling around my head like a mobius strip and use their success as fuel to further myself. I’m a green Hummer that runs on pure unleaded hatred and only needs a fill up once a day.

Case in point, W. Bruce Cameron. He is a syndicated columnist, writer and author, best known for his book and TV show “8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter” and its sequels “8 Simple Rules for Boinking My Teenage Daughter,” “8 Simple Rules For Ruining the Life of My Teenage Daughter” and “8 Simple Rules For Getting My Teenage Daughter Pregnant and Then Getting Your Ass Ripped Off and Beaten to Death with by Me, Your Future Father-In-Law…Daddy.” It was originally titled “Juno.”

We haven’t exactly exchanged friendship bracelets. I’ve run into him at a couple of writing conventions and swapped jokes with him between other writers and he became a personal hero and fan. He also picked up two days worth of bar tabs in Oklahoma City. The man is either an angel or a devil in disguise.

Last week, the Hollywood Reporter announced that a major movie production company with producers who have worked on films like Forrest Gump and The Devil Wears Prada bought the rights to his latest book with plans to turn it into a major motion picture, probably for more money than I’ll ever see unless I take a PR job with Satan.

Everybody else in my little e-mail writing circle was happy for him. They showered him with congratses and good lucks and well wishes, and he graciously accepted them with humor, grace and self-deprication. He deserved it. No one reads anymore since buttons were invented, and this only happens to one man once a generation. Humorists Dave Barry (Big Trouble), Jean Shepard (A Christmas Story), Robert Benchley (the Oscar-winning short How to Sleep) and Dan O’Brien (The Da Vinci Code) have had their books turned into some of the funniest movies ever committed to film.

I didn’t send him word one. Why should I? I’m not his equal. He won’t notice me. Besides, why give fuel to someone I should be trying to surpass? The rest of the day made me feel moody and irritable. Anything that could tick me off did and anyone who slightly got in my way got a cold callous pair of eyes staring back at them that wanted to jump out of my skull and tear their hearts out.

Envy didn’t make the deadly sin list because hate, murder and karaoke got promoted. Envy may not be able to stab, bankrupt or starve someone into death. Envy just lets you to do it to yourself. If you’re tearing someone down in order to pull yourself up, you’re still in the same place you started from and once they get down there, they can probably kick your ass.

That day, I didn’t need to fill my self-loathing envy quotient by going to a gym, endorsing a paycheck or trying to pick up a girl in a bar and getting rejected like a Joe Pesci 3-point shot.

I was already full of it.

Danny Gallagher is a freelance writer, humorist, reporter and crow taste tester living in Texas. His website is www.dannygallagher.net.

Some people have very rare fears. For example, coulrophobia is the fear of clowns. This, of course, is a very misguided and unnecessary fear because if they go to a carnival and see some dope in full makeup and baggy pants, he shouldn’t be afraid of it. He should afraid of the carnie inside the clown outfit. They can pass diseases only monkeys have just by handing you a balloon animal.

The point is we all have fear. It’s a fascinating emotion. We’re repulsed by it and yet we seek it out with the same fervor and determination as happiness, an orgasm or love. Some people are actually addicted to it. Clawing at the seats and screaming for one’s very life is the same to them as having the first bite of a chocolate chip cookie after a long hunger strike. These people scare the living crap out of me.

My girlfriend is one of these people. I like horror movies, but she loves them. It makes for an interesting relationship. Usually when I date a woman, I worry about having to compete with other better looking men for their affection and attention. In this case, my competition is Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger and those poor bastards have to wear masks when they go out in public.

The weekend before Halloween, we get together at a friend’s house to watch horror movies. I, of course, get to pick the menu because I make a living writing about and reviewing movies. It’s what I do. One of my other friends is a chef, so he cooks dinner and bakes a cake for dessert. Another friend is an electronics expert, so he sets up his bad ass, big screen TV for the moment. I buy a slasher satire called “Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon” and the original “Dawn of the Dead” because the remake made me wish there was a zombie apocalypse on the off-chance the slow moving zombies would find the geniuses who thought it was a good idea to make stiff, dead zombies world-class sprints and tear them into tiny bite size pieces.

We watch both and there’s not a scream out of any of us, not even a minor jolt or a small jump in our seats. Both movies were excellent, but they weren’t true horror. Eventually everyone wakes up and we go to bed to dream about happy bunnies, rainbows and storm clouds that drop jellybeans on all the happy, shiny people.

I can not tell you the disappointment that permeated in that living room that cold, dark night. It hung on my collar like a cheap, drug store cologne. One friend showed us zombies that were so clear, you could see the maggots crawling around in their eye sockets. The other made a banana nut cake so good that it could make you believe in Jesus. I turned everyone into the Care Bears.

Fear is weird. When it’s there, you feel stiff, immobile and completely helpless and when it doesn’t show up when you want it to, you feel let down, abandoned and disappointed by life. It’s just like watching the “Dawn of the Dead” remake. Maybe next Halloween, I’ll watch that instead.

Of course, just because you enjoyed a movie doesn’t mean that love will transfer by osmosis to the rest of the people in the room. If the movie sucks to the majority of the people in the group, the evening is not going to turn out good and they are going to blame the whole thing on you. The only way you’ll be able to win them back is if you can control people’s minds or are carrying some sort of a concealed weapon.

Last New Year’s Day while my friends and I were sprawled out on my friend’s couch like war casualties waiting for service in an HMO waiting room, we watched movies to pass the time. This friend has an entertainment system that if he dies, I’m going to insist he leaves to me in his will…that is, if he really cared about me. A plasma television, huge speakers, a Blu-Ray player, a TiVo that acts as his media slut and a satellite hook up with 2 billion channels that will allow him to witness any event in the history of the world as it happens that we end up it to watch loud rednecks pitching pocketknives on the Home Shopping Network at two in the morning.

We’re flipping around for something to watch when he flips past “The Big Lebowski.” I’ve seen it more times than my own beer gut, but my friends never have, so I insist we watch it. One of them asks me, “Are you sure this is any good?” with a treble of foreboding in his voice.

I insist that it’s funny. Then my friend, like a gerbil walking through Richard Gere’s house, cautiously made his way over toward the movie.

We caught the movie about a third of the way through just at the part when Julianne Moore makes her entrance, so I had to explain to everyone the plot thus far, which is fairly twisted and complicated if you haven’t seen the whole thing for yourself. Moore plays a feminist artist who is the daughter of the rich Jeffrey Lebowski, so to my friends, this film could have been a screening of “The Vagina Monologues” starring Some Old British Chick You’ve Never Heard of Talking About Her Vajajay. A sense of bewildered confusion hung in the air like a broccoli fart.

Then the film kicks into gear and all of the funny parts fall without a single laugh. John Goodman tells Steve Buscemi “Shut the #&$% up, Donnie.” No one laughs. Jesus licks the bowling ball to the rhythm of a Spanish version of “Hotel California.” No one laughs. The Dude wrecks his car after a joint falls in his crotch. No one even measures a chuckle.

Not even me. I’m too embarrassed to laugh. I felt like everyone in the room was glaring at me and picturing me in a French beret and a black and white striped shirt smoking some fruity sounding cigarette brand and turning my nose up so high at them, I can smell the back of my head.

I wanted to give my friends the benefit of the doubt. I wanted to just chalk it up to a misunderstanding over the fact they didn’t see the whole thing beginning to end. I wanted to just calling the whole thing off as a temporary brain lockdown since just before we flipped the channel over, we were watching the end of “Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector” and trying to get over such horror is like trying to erase the sound of your first born baby’s death rattle from your mind.

I couldn’t because to acknowledge it would deny me what I believed to be true. They were wrong and I was right. End of story. Roll credits.

I just kept it to myself. Everyone walked away from the crime scene where the laughter died quietly and I stay in my comfy cushiony spot on the sofa knowing full well I was able to grasp concepts and emotions far above the heads of mere mortal men. When I see Jeff Bridges taking a coffee cup to the head, I see more than just slapstick humor and comedy that lets us laugh at someone else’s pain. I see the very face of God.

Long story short, it’s good to be me and it sucks to be you. Deal with it dude.

We are living in one of those times. “Juno” opened three weeks ago and people are still talking about it as if a screening will help you see the eyes of Jesus Himself. The premise seems fairly ordinary. A teenage girl gets pregnant and has to deal with the rapid changes her life is about to undergo as she struggles with the fate of a human life that didn’t ask to be born. The difference with this film seems to be the execution. Unlike other movies, it’s genuinely funny and unique and doesn’t make you wish you weren’t born for having watched it.

This review isn’t based on my personal viewing of the film. In fact, I haven’t even seen the bastard (no pun intended) yet. This is based on the review of the film from everyone I know who has seen the film and insists that I either see it or suffer the wrath of God.

These people are everywhere. It’s easier to escape from Guantanamo Bay with only duct tape and plastic sheeting than the phrase “You have to see ‘Juno’”.

“Dude, you have to see ‘Juno.’ If not, you should donate your eyes to someone more deserving – like a guy who edits dogfighting films.”

“You haven’t seen ‘Juno’ yet? You should. How do you sleep at night? On a bed of nails made from the bones of baby elephants? I’m assuming since you’re so unfeeling.”

“You should see ‘Juno’ because if you don’t, than the terrorists win. The CIA said they’ve seen it and evidently have a better sense of humor than you. That’s right, terrorists are funnier than you.”

I’ve even gotten the “You should see ‘Juno’” drop from so-called friends who haven’t seen the movie. They’ve only seen the trailer. They are telling me to see a movie they haven’t even seen for themselves. This is the same reason I never let them set me up on blind dates.

It is for this very reason that I will not see “Juno.” I’m not saying the movie’s bad or not worth seeing. I loved director Jason Reitman’s take on “Thank You for Smoking,” one of my all time favorite books and writer Diablo Cody is on her way to becoming an edgy scribe whose words will echo throughout the world long after her lifetime. It’s probably better than half of the films on the marquee. Why should I see a movie just because everyone else says I should? On the one hand, it’s good to see that something as simple as a movie has managed to touch so many hearts and minds and bring people together on so many different levels. On the other hand, that’s also how Nazi Germany started.

It would be one thing if everyone said, “You might enjoy this film.” That would imply that they like me and know me well enough to recommend something they think I might enjoy. It’s the “You should” that makes me want to claw their eyes out with dull fingernails so they can’t ever tell me what movies I should or shouldn’t see again.

“You should” is a very smug and subtle way of saying, “Hey dumbass, I’m smarter, deeper and more knowledgeable about this than you ever will be.” I know because I used to say it a lot and most of the time, it was a worse idea than letting the Insane Clown Posse open a Wiggles concert.

I said “You should” all the time, especially when it came to movies, and whether or not I was right, a part of me garnished my id with a smug self sense of superiority that made me feel that I was better than them. It was a good feeling, but now that the lampshade is on the other drunk’s head, I couldn’t have looked more pompous if I was French.

Opinions are personal beliefs, not widely held facts. You can share them with others. You can stand on top of a building and shout them to the world until the police talk you down. You can let the people you know your take on the world whether it’s politics, religious beliefs or movies.

When you start a sentence with the phrase “you should,” your opinion becomes a fact whether it’s right or not. I don’t want to live in a world where people feel their personal opinions, feelings or beliefs should be pushed on other people as indisputable facts or France.

I don’t know why other people spend so much time complaining about movies and the media. In the big scheme of things, it doesn’t seem like a very big cause to be championing. If the U.S. Department of Defense announced tomorrow they were pulling out of Iraq so they could launch a pre-emptive strike to keep Hollywood from making bad movies, I would be the first one to speak out against it, although it would take five seconds of arguing with myself and I’d need some time to set my TiVo to record CNN before the first missile landed.

Believe it or not, our music, our television and our films define who we are as a culture and as a people. When our media goes out into the universe and some foreign land that has never even seen our country on a map, that’s the closest thing we have to an ambassador. What comes out of the screen tells them a lot about us a people. In a lot of cases, however, that ambassador makes fart noises with his armpits, asks everyone he sees to pull his finger and tells other countries that “We’re number one” because we’re the world’s largest exporter of fart jokes.

Imagine what that image will be in 2 million years when archaeologists stumble upon a dusty laden copy of “Meet the Spartans.”

First off, he’d have no idea what the movie is about based on the cover. It is about giant fat hairy guys pretending to be robots? Is it about hot half naked chicks pretending to be hot half naked Romans? Is it about bald chicks falling in holes? He might think this is porn and if he watches it, he will be very mad at us, so there’s strike one right there.

Then when they take the time to study it and review it, they will have no idea what it is. It’s not a comedy because it’s not funny. It’s not a drama because it’s hard to take something so ludicrous so serious. They’ll stare at the screen like a dog watching a monster truck show.

After they watch all the movies it is referencing, they’ll still wonder exactly what its purpose was to the audiences who watched it. That’s when the idea will spark in their brains. The people during this time must have been complete idiots.

They’ll do some research and discover the same movie was the highest grossing film at the box office during the week of its release. They’ll also discover the number one show at the time was a game show where people would admit in front of their family and the nation that they stuff their underwear and secretly hate their parents for money, and the number one comedy album is by a man called Dane Cook, the only man in history paid to have epileptic seizures on stage.

They’ll present their findings to the National Historic Archive. They will give them a huge government grant to allow them to continue their research and they’ll unearth even more astonishing artifacts to back up their bleak findings: the Not Another Teen Movie, the Date Movie, the Epic Movie, the Scary Movies. Then they’ll present their findings in a special wing of the Smithsonian entitled, “The Du’h Ages: See What the World Was Like Before Brains.” A copy of “Meet the Spartans” will be featured right between the “jackass” memorial and the history of Scientology.

So go ahead, if you want to see “Meet the Spartans” because you think you’ll have a good time, don’t let me stop you.

Let humanity stop you.

I haven’t been to a theater to see a movie in a long time. Even when I was just going by myself to see something I actually wanted to see, the thrill wasn’t as remotely high as it once was. It seems so uninviting, impersonal and different.

Maybe it’s because my happier days of theater going were when I was a kid, when I didn’t have to deal with the hassle of shelling out cash for movie tickets and junk food that my parents knew was just going to rot my underdeveloped brains and organs before I hit puberty.

Even though I was smaller, the theater didn’t seem as big and mall-like as they do now. I lived in a fairly big city as a kid and the theater I frequented had four screens. The lobby didn’t look like the taxiway of a major metropolitan airport. It was quite small and modest, which made it very inviting as if the building was saying, “Please, come in, enjoy yourself” instead of “I am so massive and huge and big and I will make you feel small and meaningless!” Nowadays, it’s like walking inside The Rock.

As you walked in the doors, the theaters back then felt like a giant hug that greeted you as if they were happy just to see you. It enticed you into the building. They had video games machines in the lobby with my personal favorites like “Metal Slug” and “NBA Jam,” not in a flashy arcade that made it look like a room where doctors test people for epilepsy.

It had one concession stand with a very cheery teenage girl working the counter who always gave you that extra smile when she handed you your nachos and jug of cola. They didn’t have a goddamn army of them lined up in a long trench run by people who weren’t smart enough to discover Clearsil and career counseling.

The movies had zero commercials. The movies realized the reason you paid extra money to see something in the theater was so you could avoid being bombarded with advertisements that guilt you into buying crap you’ll never need, so you can watch movies uncut and commercial free that guilt you into buying crap you’ll never need.

The theater liked you and accepted you for who you were. They didn’t try to flash themselves up or make themselves seem bigger than they really were. They didn’t need to because they just wanted you to enjoy yourself for who you were. That’s right. They didn’t hide their emotions or keep secrets about how they really felt about you for weeks until after you shelled out hundreds of dollars of your own money just to drive into town and see them and dragged you to some stupid bar with her ditzy, drunk friends to listen to some dumb cover band that thinks they can play music, even though they sound like the screams of a helpless baby climbing its way out of the jaws of an alligator.

Oh and Happy Valentine’s Day. Bitch.

All you “Star Trek” fans can take your final frontier and shove it right up your deep space nine.

All you die-hard “Star Wars” fans can go suck an Ewok.

“Indiana Jones” has been the movie hero by which all movie heroes are measured. He has a trademark weapon, an unmistakable look, a wicked sense of humor even in the deadliest of situations and a will and a spirit that cannot be broken. He’s even taken on Hitler, the biggest and most evil enemy in the history of the universe, twice instead of some drooling, snarling alien with no sense of personal hygiene or a giant masked Jedi who has to wear a special suit that keeps him alive and makes him sound like the fat kid on a little league baseball team.

Most importantly, he has a longevity that can’t be matched. In the past 27 years, only three “Indiana Jones” have been released. Other franchises have had to release, re-release and even re-re-release six, 10 or 20 films just to match the level of quality and style of just one of the “Indiana Jones” films. “E.T.” had to be remade and ended up softening it. “Alien” has implanted its eggs into more film projectors and mutated into sequel after mindless sequel. “Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace,” if that title alone doesn’t make you quiver in your skivves, you need to stop reproducing and chances are if you’re that big a “Star Wars” nerd, you already don’t.

The time is perfect for another film. So when the trailer for the new “Indiana Jones” movie hit the web last week, I couldn’t have been more excited than a diabetic kid in a sugar free candy store.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been dying to see something at the theater and the “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” trailer was just the adrenaline my heart needed to pump the life back into me. It was just like the “Indiana Jones” I remembered seeing the trailers and commercials for as a kid: car crashes, whip cracking, the screams of angry German babes, loud punches that sound like someone is punching celery and cabbage with a giant hand made of granite.

Of course, when I first heard another “Indiana Jones” movie was coming out, a little part of my brain perked up and fired off a warning shot that this may not be such a good thing.

Another “Indiana Jones” movie with Harrison Ford in the title role is bound to be good. But what happens when it becomes a success, which it most certainly will? Does that mean we could see a fifth, a sixth or even a seventh installment in the franchise? Ford’s 60 years old. What is Indiana Jones going to dig up after the 10th or 11th film? Himself?

Part of me hates to say this but I hope and pray this next “Indiana Jones” film will truly be his last crusade. I hope Indy saves the day and then right at the last minute, he gets killed in the final frame. I hope he’s crushed under a pile of collapsed Incan ruins as he tries to keep the Nazis from getting their grubby little hands on whatever artifact threatens to destroy the world. I hope he’s shot cold by some hot German Nazi whose ark he raided earlier in the film. Even better, I hope the giant 20 ton boulder he outran in the first movie finally catches up to him, rolls into the frame for no reason whatsoever and squashes him good, then rolls back and runs over him again just for good measure.

I’m rooting for his death. I just don’t want to see something so great and something that’s so sparked so much imagination in so many people run past its prime until people hope that it finally dies. Then where will that boulder be when you really need it?