My husband and I
couldn’t have more different taste in movies. And a few other things. But for
the sake of brevity, we’ll stick to movies here. He likes action – the more
guns, knives, tanks, ropes and leaps off tall buildings in the film, the better
he likes it. My youngest son is still at home and he feels pretty much the same
way. This means I’m out numbered. There’s no one joining me while I watch
Driving Miss Daisy on the family television. Something like that causes the
menfolk to go upstairs to the “other” television where they can sit in an
overstuffed chair or even lay on the spare bed and watch the blood flow to
their heart’s content. Not me.
There are a few
tough-guy movies I like but that’s generally because really good-looking men
are in them. I’ll watch Denzel Washington recite the alphabet just to get a
good look at him. And back in the day, I would never have missed an Al Pacino
movie. I even had a giant poster of him with the photo taken while he was
starring in Serpico. His dark eyes seemed to follow me in my bedroom – the one
with the giant, white, furry rug shaped like a foot lying on the red and black
carpeted floor. Those were the days. Lately I’m into Mark Wahlberg. I don’t
know if it’s his acting ability, his biceps or his devout Catholicism, whatever
it is, there’s definitely something there.
Our taste in movies
doesn’t usually create a real problem other than the fact that the spare TV is
in our “loft” in what is a pretty small house, which means if you spit at the
living room TV from the loft, you’ll definitely hit it. So we end up with
dualing televisions with one of us begging the other to, “Turn it down,
PLEASE!!!” So much for the “open concept” in our house. Thankfully, my
husband’s movie choices are short on dialogue.
My idea of a great
night of television is a Sidney Poitier marathon on AMC. Don’t make me sing
“Amen” here. A Patch of Blue and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner back-to-back is
the epitome of good luck in my book. I’m the kind of person who will consult
Wikipedia to find out whether Katharine Hepburn’s niece was Joey in Guess Who’s
Coming to Dinner or Selina in A Patch of Blue. It’s that important to me.
My husband just
doesn’t get it. He watches a house blow up, three people die in a car crash, or
an alien infestation at a supermarket and he’s good to go. I think his logic is
like most men’s – you watch the movie as an escape and then it’s over and done.
Not so with me. I watch the movie, agonize over the dialogue and the
expressions on the actors’ faces and then I ponder it all for the next several
days, finally coming to terms with the fact that, as my son often says, “It’s
just a movie.” I think I’m going to go Google where Mark Wahlberg goes to Mass.
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