June 28, 2012

I was at a showing of Pixar’s “Brave” the other night. When the credits rolled, the armrest highjacker next to me was getting silly, thumbing through his iPhone, muttering about boring parts in the movie. When I asked him what he was going on about, he promptly began geeking over how cool his new, seemingly big-secret, moviegoer iPhone app was. I had him thoroughly explain it to me and afterward realized that it was a perfectly, nerdy, iPhone app for me, and one that I’d be blogging about. Yes, its kind of that awesome.

The app is called “Peerun”   wait, no…… “Runpee”!  In short, an app that tells you the boring parts in movies so you don’t have to miss the good parts—when you have to pee. Or as the app cleverly puts it, “because movie theaters don’t have pause buttons.” I know that for me, I consistently pick awful times to run-pee.

For instance, a film I really liked this past year, “Drive”, had slowed down for a moment after a sweet car chase and I wrongfully assumed the movie was about to take a nice, long, mellow breather. I dashed out for a minute. When I got back into the theatre *spoiler alert* one of the girls was dead, two extra people were in the room(dead) and Ryan Gosling was covered in blood. No idea what happened, and my better sense of movie theatre etiquette wouldn’t allow me to bother my friend to fill me in on what I missed.

Well, not only does “Runpee” tell you the exact times the boring parts are that aren’t crucial to the story, it additionally exhibits these neat features: a synopsis of what you missed while you dashed out of the theatre, a synopsis of the first 5 minutes of the movie in case you’re running late, and a funny gif at the top of the app with the letter ‘N’ (in the word run) that looks like it needs to pee real bad.

The app is even considerately dimmed with a black background and grey font for those who are rightfully conscious about bothering your fellow moviegoers. Pretty smart app—with one really funny exception. They kinda need spoiler alerts on some of the pee time cues. Knowing that we can run-pee right after a character dies kinda ruins something. But that might just be me. A petty issue when you really gotta go, though. Anyway, feel free to upsize your soft drink and check it out!

Geekin out over Runpee,
Joel

app, film, movie