We were going to cancel it outright.It was no reflection of anything that was going on between my wife and me, or in our lives in general. It's just that my wife has never cared all that much for Valentine's Day, in part because she tends not to be very sentimental, and in part because her birthday is just five days later. (There's also the fact that she likes chocolate-flavored things, but not actual chocolates very much.)
Me, I wore a red shirt as I always do, and would have been fine to celebrate February 14th as we mostly always have because my wife is very nice about humoring me.
But to be honest, I'm about as tired as she is with a busy start to the school year and just feeling run-down in general. Not finding a card, a gift to satisfy the sweet tooth, and a special themed dinner was fine with me.
But when she suggested watching Coherence on Valentine's Day, I drew the line.
Coherence, a film I have out from the library, is a movie I very much want to see. But it's not a Valentine's Day movie. It has something to do with weird phenomena caused by Halley's Comet, or some other comet, flying overhead. I want to know what that weird phenomena is, but not on Valentine's Day.
We could let all the other traditional means of marking the day fall by the wayside, but not the Valentine's-themed movie.
So I went through our streaming services and came up with a list of ten options, which I later augmented to about 13 when I got an email from Kanopy specifically highlighting some of their options. Because why not, here's the email containing those ten items I sent to my wife, verbatim:
1) Hello My Name is Doris - Streaming on Netflix. If I remember correctly you might not have seen this. It's from the same director as that movie The Baxter that I think you really liked. It finished just outside my top ten a couple years ago. Stars Sally Field.
2) Forgetting Sarah Marshall - How about a classic? I saw that it was streaming on Netflix but of course we own it also.
3) The Feels - Streaming on Netflix. Care to be progressive by watching a lesbian romantic comedy?
4) Something Borrowed - Streaming on Netflix. (Probably bad) mainstream rom-com but I've never seen it.
5) How Do You Know - Streaming on Netflix. Copy the description from #4.
6) Hitch - Streaming on Stan. It's Will Smith so maybe it could be fun?
7) Eat Pray Love - Streaming on Stan. It's got Bali in it.
8) Begin Again - Streaming on Stan. John Carney's follow-up to Once. I don't think you saw it but I could be wrong.
9) She's All That - Streaming on Stan. "Classic" romantic comedy that I've never seen.
10) Ali's Wedding - Streaming on Kanopy. This is Australian right?
11) None of the above.
She didn't choose #11, but she got close to it with #10, the only of the initial Kanopy options I'd listed. So the Australian movie won out. Not only Australian, but actually set in Melbourne, where I live.
And though we hadn't thought it likely to plan a special dinner, we did order take-in from a local Mexican place. I ate too much and got sleepy on a margarita and a beer.
Which didn't prevent me from really enjoying Ali's Wedding, which may be available on your own iteration of Kanopy if you're looking for something to watch tonight. (Though offerings do differ depending on your local library.)
I was worried this might be another version of something like My Big Fat Greek Wedding, only with Iraqi immigrants in Australia rather than Greek immigrants in America. Not having been a fan of that movie, I was more generally not looking forward to a quirky comedy that focuses on, and makes all the usual jokes about, a big, lavish wedding.
That's not this movie. In fact, the title is a bit misleading. There is indeed a wedding that ultimately plays an important role in the film, of sorts, but this is more the story of a kid who lies about his score on the entrance exam to go to university to become a doctor, in order to please his father, and all the repercussions of that choice. One of those is meeting and falling for an Australian-born girl of Lebanese descent. I won't even tell you if that's his future bride at the wedding.
It's a really sweet, and I presume somewhat realistic (it's based on a true story), look at life in a community of Muslim immigrants in Melbourne, who are fixed in their ways but ultimately show more humanity than we might initially have expected of them. Yeah, they've got set ideas about gender roles -- the Australian Lebanese girl has similar aspirations to become a doctor that her father is trying to squash -- but they're capable of surprising us, and being counterintuitively progressive members of the community at large. (Ali's father, a cleric, has also written a musical about Saddam Hussein.)
Overall it was just a really sweet experience and a better way to spend Valentine's Day, I'm betting, than Something Borrowed.
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