The timing of our move was pretty perfect as far as the TV season goes.
Since all the network shows stopped airing within the past couple weeks, our DVR was pristine by the time this past weekend rolled around. I managed to finish the season finale of Fringe on Friday night, and that was our last obstacle to a clean DVR. Something you never otherwise see in our house.
And so there would also be no obstacle to saying goodbye to the old house with a couple movies, one on Friday night and one on Saturday night, before we tore the equipment out of the wall on Sunday.
Ah, but what movies? What movies would best encapsulate the three years and three months we lived in this place? What best to encapsulate the house where we lived when our son was born? The house where we lived when, uh, we bought our first house?
How about Date Night and Wild Hogs?
You laugh, but I'm serious.
Our Netflix instant queue is chock full of movies we never want to watch right now. They all feel like homework of some kind. And we wanted to watch something light, but also something that had the possibility of being really good. Since we were pretty good with catching up on our 2011 comedies, that left the new releases in the Redbox machine largely lacking in palatable options.
So I swung by the library on Friday and selected a couple contenders. I started with a classic I knew my wife loved: Big. But then when it came to the other two, I developed sort of a theme: underappreciated comedies that we discovered while living in this house.
That's where Date Night and Wild Hogs come in.
Speaking of the birth of our son, we watched Date Night the day after we got home from the hospital. You'd think the sheer panic of parenting on our own for the first time would have sapped our senses of humor, but we just laughed and laughed at it. About a year before that we watched Wild Hogs on a random night in September. My wife was researching road trip movies for a script she was writing, so I brought it home from the library on a lark. We ended up really enjoying it.
What surprised me is that my wife opted for both choices over Big. It's not that she likes them better than Big, just that they ... felt right for the occasion.
We got a late start on Friday night, so we went with the shorter one, which was Date Night. So the cinematic classic Wild Hogs was left for the grand finale on Saturday night.
And sometime in the middle, I realized that these two movies both feature Ray Liotta.
It was certainly a coincidence. He has a sizable role as the primary antagonist in Wild Hogs, the menacing leader of a biker gang called the Del Fuegos. I definitely remembered that he was in it. But in Date Night he has about five minutes of screen time, playing a mob boss.
Still, I thought it was funny that the comedies of Ray Liotta would be the way we would say farewell to our old house, cinematically speaking.
But kind of appropriate, right? I mean, Ray Liotta is consummately that guy who would show you the door. Or else he'd get one of his lackeys to do it. Either way, Ray Liotta wants you to get the fuck out of here.
Which we did yesterday. Last night, we slept in our new home for the first time.
For those of you seriously doubting our taste in comedies right about now, I should tell you that neither film tickled us the way it had the first time. But both did serve to remind us of some of the unexpected movie-watching joy we attained in the last place we lived before we owned a home.
Now, our first movie in the new place should definitely be ... The Money Pit.
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