In that original post I talked about how I might "give this one a miss," to use the Australian phrasing. Each year I like there to be a couple prominent movies that I could have easily seen before my ranking deadline but I just say "Nah." Another example from 2022 was going to be Bullet Train.
Now it looks like Bullet Train will be hanging out there by its lonesome.
I haven't watched Black Adam yet, but now that I own it, it'll just seem like obstinance if I don't.
See, we were looking for something for the kids to watch on New Year's Eve, to make the night feel a bit special even though we had spent the previous five days in COVID isolation. It was also the eve of my younger son's birthday, as he's a January 1 baby turning 9.
We weren't going to watch it with them -- remember that my wife and I were still in our five-day quarantine period -- but a two-hour movie starting after 8 o'clock would also get them closer to midnight, if they intended to stay up for it. My younger one wanted to, but either couldn't last or my wife made him go to bed, I'm not really sure. The 12-year-old barely stayed awake watching New Year's Eve festivities in Sydney: Australian bands playing a couple songs each with a host taking them through it and ultimately doing the countdown to fireworks. He went to bed immediately after the fireworks. Instead of watching the movie with them and potentially contaminating them with our noxious germs, we watched Clear History, as you will remember from this post.
Given that it's been nearly two and a half months since Black Adam was released, I was sure it would have come down to the $5.99 or at worst $6.99 rental price by now. Not so. I'd put forth Black Adam as a candidate -- which my wife immediately endorsed -- based on seeing it in the iTunes store, but hadn't investigated the details.
Interestingly, you can't rent Black Adam at all through U.S. iTunes, though you can purchase it for $19.99.
I shifted over to Amazon, which gets a little less use from me because our Amazon is set up in Australia, meaning that I can't get the movies that have yet to play theatrically in Australia -- a big factor at this time of year. Black Adam is available for rental there, but it was a $29.99 AUD rental, which comes out to a little bit more than the price to purchase it through iTunes.
Black Adam actually was supposed to be streaming on Binge, the local Foxtel-owned streaming service, to which my wife told me she had just subscribed. (And to which I said I didn't subscribe as recently as yesterday's post.) But it turned out it was one of those "If you subscribe to this, you can get this" deals, and that just seemed like too much of a commitment for one movie.
Simple math won out, and we bought Black Adam through iTunes.
The kids liked the movie, which was a nice validation for all the hemming and hawing that went into the choice. When I went to ask my son something -- I wanted to make sure he hadn't eaten the ice cream bar I had gone to fetch for my wife -- he said "Shhh, it's the climax." Good boy. (He hadn't. It was just underneath some other frozen stuff.)
Now that we own the movie, I'm obviously going to watch Black Adam at some point before my list closes on January 24th. Except ...
... except my wife said, in justifying the purchase, "If we own it, maybe you and I can watch it together sometime."
This is a potentially fragile situation. My wife hates to be pushed into prioritizing a viewing of something, especially if it doesn't have limited availability -- and for a movie we own, the availability is the very definition of unlimited. She doesn't watch a lot of movies with me anymore, so in order not to further put her off movies, I need to play the information I have carefully.
And we had also just come off a situation where I couldn't have known she wanted to watch a particular movie with me. Apparently she had been really keen on watching Noah Baumbach's latest, White Noise, though she hadn't mentioned that to me. That would have been perfect except that I watched it literally within an hour of its Netflix debut on Friday night. (Netflix movies debut about 8 o'clock on the night they are released, since that corresponds to the 4 a.m. drop time on the east coast of the U.S.) She seemed a little hurt by the fact that I'd already watched it, even though we had never talked about it.
Now, if I were to go ahead with a Black Adam viewing without telling her, it would be a case of acting contrary to information we'd already talked about.
I could watch it but not tell her I'd watched it -- the benefit of owning something is that it leaves no footprint of having watched it. Or at least, if it did leave a footprint, it would just be that the kids had already watched it. Then I could watch it with her at a later date and pretend I'd never seen it, since that later date might come months or even years in the future.
But then if I don't like it, I'm watching a movie I don't like twice. Plus there's the trick that she'll usually notice I'm watching a movie, coming through the living room while it's already playing, unless I try to watch it on the sly. But my isolation COVID film festival, in which my viewings were kept comparatively secret, has already come and gone.
I'll just have to see if an opportunity to watch Black Adam with my wife arises organically in the next three weeks, indubitably at her own suggestion. If it doesn't, maybe I just stick to my original idea and don't see it in time to rank it.
From not planning to watch Black Adam, to owning it, to scheming about how to watch it without violating the delicate agreement my wife and I have about watching movies together unencumbered by artificial deadlines. Who'd a thunk it?
One thing is for certain: With potentially as many as three Black Adam viewings on the docket -- as opposed to the original zero I had projected as recently as New Year's Eve morning -- we'll definitely get our money's worth for owning it.
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