Going to a critics screening at night is nice. But you don't really feel like a critic until you go to one in the morning.
I got a chance to do that yesterday for the first time here in Australia, but I hope not the last.
The film was the excellent The Diary of a Teenage Girl, and I have a septuagenerian man to thank for being able to do it.
See, Tuesdays are my day when I have just my 21-month-old to watch after. It's usually a lovely day around the house of cleaning and playing together. He can be a tyrant when his brother is around, but when he's the only one vying for your attention, he's a peach.
My son naps in the mid-morning, starting as early as 9:30 but usually more like 10:30 these days. Nine thirty was also the start time of The Diary of a Teenager Girl at Cinema Nova, which is just a stone's throw from my father-in-law's house.
Put two and two together ...
Anyway, he agreed. He'd never watched just the younger one by himself, so there was a little trepidation on my behalf when asking. But his rule is basically that he can handle one of them at a time, but not both. The younger one's probably easier right now anyway, as long as you don't have to change him, and fortunately, he went #2 just before we left the house. Besides, I knew that even if things got hairy, his nap could start pretty much at any time after I dropped him off. Fortunately, my son's cute wave bye bye when I left told me that hairiness was not in the forecast.
It was funny to arrive over at Nova well in advance of any of the other showtimes, when the box office was still closed. I wondered for a moment if I'd even be able to get in, which was ridiculous, because this was the time of the screening. But the escalator up to the screening rooms was running, and sure enough, there was a woman waiting at the entrance who got a big smile on her face when I arrived, as if she'd been waiting just for me. As it turns out, she'd been waiting for me and about five other people. This was a true media screening, not the preview screening they send media along to in the evenings. Of course, I don't know who could attend a preview screening on a weekday morning other than members of the full-time, paying media ... and dads who have a father-in-law who can watch their toddler.
And the movie was, well, fantastic.
Better yet, there were no problems with my son and it seems as though my father-in-law really liked spending time with him. He's not very effusive in sharing his feelings -- few Australian men are -- but there was a telltale twinkle in his eye when he talked about the things they'd done before my son took his nap. He was still sleeping when I got back, so I had lunch with my father-in-law, which timed out perfectly to end when my son woke up.
Now that this has been an unqualified success, I'm hoping other Tuesday morning screenings may be in my future. I've got possibly as many as nine months more on this part-time schedule, and it seems that Tuesday morning screenings are a somewhat regular occurrence, as my contact at ReelGood has since invited me to two others, both of which I turned down because I wanted to see how the first one went. Now that it's gone well, I'm hoping to repeat the experience sometime soon -- in fact, I'm hoping that my father-in-law will even volunteer his availability.
If not, well, I felt like a really real critic for one morning anyway.
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