For possibly as long as two years now, my wife has been wanting to show my kids Hunt for the Wilderpeople. In fact, with my older son turning 15 in August, his best possible window for it may have already passed, but he sat through it dutifully enough and laughed a few times, though he didn't venture an opinion of it afterward and we didn't ask.
I think she feels a certain ownership over this film, having quite the affection for New Zealand as a neighboring country (separated by a fair amount of water). It may not be introducing our kids to more Australian culture, but it's close enough.
And I was not about to let a pesky little thing like dinner get in the way of that.
And so it was that we were scheduled to start watching it around 6 o'clock on Easter Sunday. That got delayed to about 6:20 while we were reworking things in the garage in order to create a new projector viewing environment on a different wall. See, the place we used to project it now has a linen cabinet, which got pushed out of the place where our rabbits now live in the laundry room. Consequently, the projector has been accumulating dust since before September.
But we did get an alternative worked out, where a sheet would hang down from above our garage door, though we had to change sheets midway through our setup when my wife agreed that one of our "antique" sheets would be better than anything we currently have. I'm not sure she would have volunteered the antique sheet for one of my movies, but for hers, it worked just fine. :-)
Now, if I were in charge of this, I'd schedule it to end before dinner, start after dinner, or involve a dinner that was delivered to us by Uber Eats. Making a normal dinner, with all the fussy details involving my younger son's standard dinner, would not be the way I'd have drawn it up.
My wife doesn't care about that, and she doesn't care about stepping away from a movie for however long that takes. It irritates me when she does this, and I'm sure I've written about it before. If it's a family movie, the whole family should be watching it.
I'm sure she thought she was going to be the one to step away to do all that. There was no way I was going to let that happen.
I slipped out about 15 minutes into the movie to preheat the oven, then went back another ten minutes later to put in the pasta bake that the other three of us were going to have and that needed to cook for 45 minutes. She didn't realize that this was the reason I'd left either of those times, so after the pasta bake was already cooking for about 15 minutes, she volunteered to start preheating the oven. At which point I got to tell her that it was already taken care of and that we were farther along than that. (And good thing, too, because on her schedule the dinner probably would have arrived after the movie ended.)
My two quick departures hadn't eaten up more than about two minutes each, so there was no question as to whether I'd basically caught the whole movie up to that point. I hadn't really anticipated that the last stage -- when I had to remove the foil from the pasta bake for the final ten minutes and put in the garlic bread, plus make my son's special pasta, his toast and the fruit for both of them -- would really knock a good chunk out of the movie for me. That one took at least 15 minutes.
I usually don't like to give myself official "credit" for a rewatch if I didn't sit down and watch the whole thing. But that usually applies to a situation where I came in late to a rewatch already in progress, or started a rewatch and didn't finish it. If I'm there for the beginning and there for the end, I think it counts, probably assuming no more of the middle was missed than the 20 minutes collectively I missed here.
Besides, I got to show my wife that I'm not so precious about the usually sacred experience of watching a movie. I can take one for the team, especially when it's her movie.
She does the same for me, but the thing is, I don't want her to. Even if it's "my movie," I want her to be there for the whole thing. That's a better service to me than missing 20 minutes doing dinner stuff. If our roles were reversed, I'd have been distracted to no end.
But the roles weren't reversed, and she couldn't have been happier to have an uninterrupted showing to our kids, even if I couldn't be there for the whole thing. As far as I know, this doesn't bother them either.
It only bothers me, which is maybe why I'm the only one in our family who can be classified as a true cinephile these days.
A cinephile who can let his own rigid rules slide on occasion, if it's for the good of the family.
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