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No meeting of minds on films to see with spouse

By JAN GLIDEWELL
Published February 13, 2006

I don't know whether men are from Mars and women are from Venus, but in my house when it comes to movie tastes, we live in different galaxies and regard each other with real puzzlement.

My wife isn't as big a movie fan as I, so it has taken a few years for the differences to be evident.

We enjoy each other's company enough to continue to go to flicks together, but each outing now is a carefully negotiated trade-off - either one of mine for one of hers, or a choice made on a carefully calculated point system that exists only in her head and to which I am made privy, occasionally, when there is a dispute - which I always lose.

This is intrinsically unfair because I have racked up something like 10,000 negative points for picking Dogville a couple of years back, and I don't get any help from the couple who was with us, because my wife and they were discussing putting me in a Dumpster on the way out of the movie, and the only thing that saved me was my weight, their diminutive stature and the fact that all the available Dumpsters were top-loaders.

Okay, at three hours, it was, admittedly, about 21/2 hours too long.

After that I was forbidden to suggest movies for the rest of that year, and to even say movies for the rest of that month.

And, as an added punishment, I am forbidden to complain when I am forced to sit through truly awful movies such as Memoirs of a Geisha or The New World , even though I think it would have been humane to print both on tougher film stock so that I would have had the option of rushing the projection booth, tearing the film off of the sprockets and hanging myself from the nearest stair rail.

The theater where we saw Memoirs of a Geisha had such an old projector that the film was so dark you had to look closely to see that it was also out of focus. Fifteen minutes into it I decided it wasn't dark or out-of-focus enough. I decided that the movie being fuzzy and looking as if it were being projected on dirty newspaper at the bottom of a mud puddle were small mercies.

The New World , which drew raves (and I think I use the word advisedly here) from many critics, had the flavor of a bunch of people who decided to run out to the woods, make a bad movie with not much in the way of sets and a horrible script - and hope that those qualities would distract us from remembering that Capt. John Smith, an Englishman from Lincolnshire did not, in real life, have an Irish brogue so thick you could plant shamrocks in it.

I did sympathize with the Pocahontas character who, at a given point must have wished she had let her father bash Smith's brains out early in the film. It would have given her closure and saved me an additional hour of excruciating boredom.

All of this, it is explained to me, is because I am an insensitive oaf without even a speck of romance in the weathered, tattered remnants of what once passed for my soul and wouldn't know meaningful cinema if it bit me on the part of my body I should be sitting on and watching Oprah reruns until I develop an appreciation for movies where nothing gets chased, killed, blown up or possessed by the devil.

We did manage to agree that Brokeback Mountain was a mediocre film that got more notice than it should have because of its producers' willingness to deal with gay issues in mainstream cinema, and that Felicity Huffman's Transamerica portrayal of a transgendered man's journey toward becoming a real woman and a parent at the same time was pure Oscar material.

Match Point , I am told, was bad because it failed to convey what my wife thinks is an adequate moral message about male infidelity and comeuppances.

Finally in exasperation, I blurted out the truth, "The kind of movies you like are the kind of garbage you see on the Lifetime network." "Exactly," she said.

I, admittedly, fled.

I was sure that if I was willing to brave delinquent adolescents sent to bother other people by their weary parents for whom the price of a movie ticket is cheap respite - and morons who don't know how really, really badly I want to force feed them their cell phones, that if I could handle that, I could find aliens, terrorists or Steve Martin somewhere invading something - and not a wet eye in the house.

[Last modified February 13, 2006, 17:03:22]