Then my wife unexpectedly started me on 2024 movies with a trip out to see Night Swim.
It all started on Sunday, when it was raining all day and we were desperately looking for something to do with our 13-year-old that didn't involve hours and hours (and hours) of Fortnite. His younger brother was squared away on a playdate, meaning our options were opened up to things that a ten-year-old couldn't or wouldn't want to do. But then the rain closed many of those options right back up again.
It was my wife who suggested a movie. I don't want to draw further attention to a sometimes problematic obsession, so I endorsed the idea without showing I was desperate to endorse it.
But then I did a quick calculation in my head and determined there was little I had yet to see for 2023 that would also appeal to a 13-year-old. Aquaman would have been perfect, even though I'd already planned not to prioritize it for myself, but he had already seen it with his friends on a trip to the mall the previous weekend. (About which I secretly rejoiced. Any reminder of a thing I would have done with my friends 30 years ago goes a long way in convincing me the times aren't so different.)
If it had only been the ten-year-old, we could have pushed him towards Wish, on which I will almost certainly miss out before my list closes. The casualties of no longer having children who are single digits in age.
So I said to my wife "Well, there's a movie about a haunted pool," thinking I was making a joke.
My son rejected outright the possibility of seeing a movie, so we trudged through some errands as our afternoon activity. But the seed of the haunted pool had been planted in my wife's head.
It's summer here, so we're all doing things that can loosely be described under the maxim "change is as good as a holiday." For example, yesterday I rearranged my office.
My wife? She went out to the movies.
This would not have been unusual when I first met her. But over those nearly 20 years, she has steadily transformed into a person who vastly prefers television to movies, mirroring the larger shift in our society. Now she gets out to maybe five movies a year. Usually less.
Night Swim, apparently, was what she wanted one of those five for 2024 to be. The very inconsequentiality of the choice seemed to encourage a behavioral shift on her part in its own right.
So on Monday night at 6:30, we went to the show, leaving the 13-year-old in charge of the 10-year-old until our approximately 8:30 return.
I thought about pushing her toward a movie I have yet to see for 2023. I thought about telling her that I preferred not to see a 2024 movie before I finished my 2023 viewings. I thought about trying to save some money by going to see it at a place I could get my ticket for free, rather than the closest theater to our house, which does not accept my critics card. I thought about telling her that I had originally envisioned Monday as a night off from watching movies.
But really, I was just thinking how lucky I was that my wife wanted to go out to the movies with me.
Night Swim was not great, despite the presence of two compelling actors in Wyatt Russell and recent Oscar nominee Kerry Condon, despite Russell playing a former major league baseball player, despite the idea of a haunted pool being so bad it had to be good. If you're looking for this year's January horror sensation, like M3GAN was last year, this ain't it. (Imaginary, for which we saw a trailer, is probably the movie they're positioning to be that, though it doesn't come out until March.)
But did I care? No. We pulled off a casual date night. We ate pizza in our reclining seats. We had fun laughing at the movie afterward. And perhaps my wife was reminded of the idea that going out to the movies is an activity she enjoys.
Hey, I'll take what I can get.
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