Reasons:
1) It's the newest release from one of today's top directors, whose new movies always get gums flapping.
2) It's just the kind of movie my young- and left-leaning readership would be interested in, since it's weird and wild and an antidote to a summer of mostly disappointing blockbusters.
3) It's my personal antidote to feeling like I haven't really seen many of the independent-minded releases of the current year, that I'm stuck in a rut of Hollywood movies and the newest marginal releases on streaming.
So why has Kinds of Kindness not yet been reviewed on ReelGood?
My wife is holding it hostage.
This is an intentionally inflammatory way of describing a nice thing she's doing for our relationship. But it's a nice thing that interferes with my mission statement for the site -- to the extent that I have one -- which is to review new movies, especially those that are challenging or confronting, within approximately two weeks of their release.
A little background is required here.
I have made passing mentions of the fact that my wife, at home on a Friday night, will see me starting a movie she is interested in seeing, and mention that it was something she thought we might watch together. Depending on how far in I am, either I'll stop watching it and save it for her -- knowing that it could be weeks before she sees it as fitting into her schedule -- or she'll relinquish her interest in watching it as a joint viewing, considering that we never actually discussed that viewing.
In the past year or so, she's supplemented this behavior by making more mentions of us going on dates to see movies. This is more possible than it used to be because my older son turns 14 in a month, and we are now comfortable with him staying home with the ten-year-old for periods of several hours, even at night. We won't do anything that gets us home after, say, 10 o'clock, but that means that a 7 p.m. movie is perfectly doable. (We aren't quite to the point where we want to give our older son the responsibility, or more like the burden, of having to tell his younger brother that it's time to go to bed.)
Another thing that has changed is that my wife has started to come out of the wilderness a bit, that wilderness being the land of TV. Early on in our relationship, she loved films as much as I did -- well, almost as much. I don't know if anyone loves films as much as I do. But in the last ten to 15 years, possibly coinciding with having children, she's made television her primary focus. It's not that she doesn't want to watch 90 minutes to two hours worth of content on a given night, but that she wants it to be broken up into smaller chunks, after any of which she can stop watching. Many nights she'll watch a Lord of the Rings: Return of the King quantity of television, but it's the continued choice of one more episode that makes it feel different to her. But the time commitment is just one of the reasons that she has tired of movies as her primary, or even as a secondary, entertainment sustenance.
Lately, though, she has put forth the notion -- a notion I certainly agree with -- that we should do more date nights, and that it doesn't just have to be dinners. She is perhaps realizing an absence in her life of something she once loved, and is trying to make up for it. (That's both movies, and probably social time with me. If you aren't married with children, you may not have a good sense how difficult it can be to keep up things like socializing with your partner, if you don't put in a little effort.)
The only trouble is, she is not usually ready to watch a movie on its opening weekend -- or, more to the point, she does not want to have to watch it on its opening weekend if she doesn't happen to be feeling it that particular weekend. As soon as she feels the pressure, it ceases to seem like a fun activity.
Me, I pretty much have to watch it the first weekend or I can't review it.
So I had the chance to watch Kinds of Kindness last Thursday night, ten days ago now, on the night it was released. The family went to see a 6:30 show of Inside Out 2 -- another film I delayed so we could watch it together, as discussed here -- and I knew I was going to try to stay for a second movie. I didn't mention it until after Inside Out 2 was finished, because you don't want to pre-curdle the evening by making your wife suddenly think that seeing Inside Out 2 is merely a pretext for getting out to see another movie, or planting the seed that you're going to bail early on a family activity by not accompanying the family home. (The plan was executed well and my wife agreed that I should stay without any apparent annoyance about it, but then I ended up perturbing her about a different thing, so we parted ways less than ideally anyway.)
My choices were Twisters, MaXXXine and Kinds of Kindness, though the first two had the benefit of being nearly an hour shorter than the third. Left fully to my own devices, I probably would have chosen Kinds of Kindness, because a) it's the movie I wanted to see most, and b) it feels like the review my readers would most look forward to reading.
But when I mentioned the three I was considering to my wife, she put "claims" on both MaXXXine and Kinds of Kindness. By that I mean she mentioned she wanted to see them. Without her having to say it, I knew that was code for that she wanted to see them with me.
Husbands are dumb and we don't always get the code, but this time I got it and opted for Twisters, in which she had no interest. Secretly, I was just as glad on that particular night to be watching what promised to be the least challenging of the three.
Since I didn't get to it that weekend and since my wife was at a conference for the first three days of the new week, Kinds of Kindness missed out on a review in its first week in Australian cinemas. And as you would have seen from my post on Friday, my schedule worked out to fit in MaXXXine and Longlegs last Thursday, both of which I have now reviewed. (In choosing to watch MaXXXine even though my wife had "claimed" it, I decided it isn't fair for her to claim so many movies that I fall into a complete standstill.)
I still had a plan for Kinds of Kindness though.
I have a few days left if I want to meet that goal of reviewing the movie within its first two weeks in the theater, which, to be fair, is a restriction purely of my own making. (I have a newspaper background, and you have to write about it something while it's still hot. They call it news. They don't call it olds.)
So I asked my wife if she wanted to go to the 4:30 Sunday afternoon showing of Kinds of Kindness.
I could tell she wanted to, but she thought we shouldn't. You see, although the rest of us have tested negative, my younger son tested positive for COVID on Friday morning, and has been on screens on our couch ever since. He didn't need us around Sunday afternoon to minister to his needs, but it was probably correct that we aren't really in the clear despite continuing to test negative. It was not really responsible to wilfully choose to go to the theater when you can just as easily choose not to do that.
The logic was sound and I immediately dropped the subject.
I did get credit for thinking of the idea, though. I could tell she was chuffed, to use the Australian term. Even though we hadn't discussed it since the night I saw Twisters -- in fact, especially since we hadn't -- it showed that I had remembered that she had wanted to see it, and had tried to make a date out of it on something approaching the relaxed schedule she likes. Earning those points is obviously worth more to me in the long run than reviewing Kinds of Kindness, if you consider "points" in a relationship not to be the crass sort of currency that it sounds like they are, but rather, a sign that you are thinking about the other person rather than just yourself, and prioritizing the health of the relationship over your own needs.
This does, though, probably mean that Kinds of Kindness is done in terms of a potential review.
I still have a couple nights if I want to write a review before Thursday, though who knows how long we still consider ourselves potentially COVID contagious. But I will lose those hard-earned points if I then shift to the pragmatic mode of just trying to see it without her so I can review it. My next attempt to see it must also be with her, but it can't follow on the previous attempt after only a day or two, because then it starts to approach that pressure she doesn't like.
If that one fails, maybe only then will I be free to see it myself.
But if that one fails, by then it might be just as easy to wait and watch it on video. Which of course can occur with her at my side, meaning an eventual realization of our date, if only on our living room couch.
You can't expect to be both a film critic and a thoughtful husband at all times, not if you have a normal wife who isn't a crazy person who has to see all movies on their first weekend of release.
I'd rather be the thoughtful husband than the crazy person.
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