This Monday, I will have been married for four months. So it’s kind of funny that I recently had to review two different films that are opening tomorrow, both of which happen to put the marital status of their protagonists right there in the titles.
I’ll post links to my reviews of The Honeymooners and Mr. & Mrs. Smith when they go up tomorrow, but for now, suffice to say that I was amused to see that, in both films, the couples in question have been together for six years and are beginning to wonder if the marriage has run out of steam. I have two basic reactions to this: (1) Gosh, I hope it ain’t like that for D and me in 2011, and (2) these are the sorts of moviegoing coincidences I live for. Who knows, I might even be able to pitch a “theme” piece on this.
But that’s not why I’m writing this post.
No, the reason I’m writing this post is that I have decided to stay home and watch something from the video pile or get some more work done or something, instead of dashing out to catch the last matinee of a movie that is finishing its first run tonight.
My reasons for skipping this screening are partly financial, and partly due to time constraints, but it all comes down to my wife, really: She has, shall we say, encouraged me to be more responsible with my money, and I suspect this film will probably come back on a second-run double-bill in the near future; and she is seeing another film with me tonight, at a theatre for which I have a media pass, so I might as well stay put and wait for her to get home from work, instead of rushing around from film to film and barely having time to pick her up between theatres.
On top of this, our marriage hit another “first” last night. Last night I saw The Honeymooners at a theatre just four blocks from where we live, and because the film opens tomorrow, my editor wanted the review by noon today. (Actually, he wanted it by first thing yesterday morning, but since the only preview screening in town wasn’t until last night…) And because there was a screening of another film at 10am this morning that I really, really wanted to catch, I basically had 13 hours between the end of last night’s screening and the beginning of this morning’s screening to come home, write the review, sleep, eat, say a few words to my wife, and go back to the theatre — and not necessarily in that order.
In my bachelor days, this sort of thing would have been no problem whatsoever — I crammed work in between screenings at odd hours of the morning or evening all the time.
But, you see, I share the alarm clock now.
So that was interesting.
Fortunately, D had to wake up around 7am anyway, but I still felt obliged to persuade her to set it for just a little bit earlier, to give me the breathing room I usually need so that I can read the paper and do whatever else I need to do whenever I take brief breaks during my writing. D and I had anticipated this sort of thing and had talked about it before we got married, and we had kind of agreed that, if I needed to work any particularly unusual hours, then I should probably sleep on the couch — but fortunately, we didn’t have to resort to that, at least not this first time.
And hey, it took us almost four months to get to this point. So we probably won’t encounter this sort of thing that often.
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