This post has been a long time coming, Dave and I finished The Music Man all the way back on July 18th. I say "finished" because we started it a week earlier and then got "distracted"—which we all know is code for "started making out and turned off the movie". Needless to say TMM, didn't hold Dave's attention the way I thought it would, and come to think of it, it didn't hold my attention the way it did when I saw it as a kid. I should also mention that July 18th also holds a special significance because it was our one year anniversary and while we may have grown bored with Meredith Willson's songbook, we still haven't grown bored of each other. After the jump I'll explain the better movie story from our anniversary and why I've put off writing this entry.
Netflix's description:
It doesn't get any better than this slice of Midwestern Americana: Charming con man Harold Hill (Robert Preston) wants to steal River City citizens' money with a "boys' band" scam, but finds it hard to skip town when lovely librarian Marian Paroo (Shirley Jones) steals his heart. Composer Meredith Willson's valentine to his own hometown packs great songs and wonderful performances from, among others, Buddy Hackett and a young Ron Howard.I have to give Dave and I credit for finishing in spite of the fact that it too us two tries to do so (the movie is almost three hours long!). I think our excitement for Professor Harold Hill petered off just a short time after "Rock Island". It would have been a better use of our time to just YouTube the songs I love from the musical and call it a day, but I still stand by the fact that the film is a classic and I will always love it because it reminds me of my grandparents taking my sister and me to see it when we were kids at a local dinner theater in Florida.
Original trailer:
The more exciting tale from our anniversary (that went slightly haywire): Dave and I drove up the Pacific Coast Highway to a hike in Malibu that I had only done partway with my sister several months prior. What Dave and I didn't count on was the enormous amount of traffic along the way, so by the time we got to the hike itself we were already a little "over it". When we got to the part of this "out and back" hike where my sister and I had left off, we noticed a problem: it was steeper than expected and I'm afraid of heights. The pay off of this trek was supposed to be this amazing upper falls, Dave suggested we cut our losses and head back without seeing the waterfall. Why? To him, whatever lay over the other side of the hill couldn't possibly be worth my anxiety surrounding the climb and Dave's worry over my anxiety about the climb. I apologized most of the way back, the whole point had been to share in the "wonders of nature" together, a synthesized romantic moment by yours truly. But it didn't bother Dave one bit, he didn't care. But that's Dave, he doesn't ever lie awake at night (to my knowledge) wondering about the path not taken. I can recall a conversation we had last year where I was talking about my the cycle I go through here in California where I wonder about what I would be doing and who I would have become if I had never left NYC. Dave said to me, "You gotta stop. That life doesn't exist. There isn't some alternate universe where you're living in New York. You're here and if you don't like it here than move, but there's no "other" you living in NYC."
So we headed back without ever seeing the upper falls and hit even worse traffic on the way back. I suggested we stop off at the Malibu Country Mart to grab a bite before getting on the road, when Dave spotted that we were gonna be just in time to see the newly released Inception that all the kids on the Internet were talking about. We made a decision, I would grab the burritos, Dave would grab the tickets and we would sneak the burritos into the theater and chow down while we watched Leonardo Di Caprio do something in his dreams. We successfully smuggled in the Mexican deliciousness when the trailers started rolling. One for a Zach Galifinaikis movie started to run when Dave leaned over to me and said, "Hey, don't say anything bad about this one." (I'm a constant critic and complainer though I mean well, whereas Dave managed to even find the value in Tyler Perry's I Can Do Bad All By Myself) "Why? Did someone you know work on it?" "No, one of the actors is sitting right in front of us." I assumed it was Jamie Foxx. Great! Now we had to quietly open the tin foil around our contra ban without a major Hollywood actor knowing. We were so busy trying to quietly chow down on our burritos that we may have missed some major plot points, because over an hour into the movie I said to Dave, "What is going on?" "I don't know and I don't really care. [Pause] Should we leave?" "I don't know we did pay for it, but I honestly don't care what happens. I would only be staying to get my money's worth." "Okay, wait for me to give you the signal and we'll head out." And head out we did. After we left the theater lobby, it turned out that we had just eaten burritos behind Robert Downey Jr!
Again, Dave and I had opted to cut our losses. Again, it wasn't worth it to either of us to stick it out just to say we had done it. We had nothing to gain by staying and neither of us left with any feeling of "have we made a mistake?" "Did we just miss out on the year's greatest film—and several months of conversations surrounding it?" To me I'd rather have my feelings attached to Inception surrounded by the joy of doing the unexpected with the man I love the most. There's an old saying, "Man plans, God laughs." And if you're with the right person, one who can teach you how to let go a little of your beloved plans—as long as you stick to the most important plan, staying together —you can laugh right along too.
Over the last month, I've put off this post because work plans (both for Dave and for me—but mainly for Dave) got in the way of pushing forward on this project. If I had written up two of our most recent flicks, I'd be left with the realization that the reason we hadn't knocked off another film from our list was that we hadn't been alone (and awake) long enough to watch a movie together in weeks. And that was just too much for me to bear—dramatic, I know. But now we're finding the time when we can and this project, as we promised ourselves, will continue. As I said in the beginning, none of this is really about the movies themselves or our opinions of them, it's about the things that happen when we watch sit down to watch them and about making a sacred ritual out of something the two of us enjoy: watching Netflix with each other.
Up next: Snake Eyes (Dave's pick)!
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