date night

One of the central ironies of our marriage is that I'm a fellow who'll go see just about any Hollywood piece of junk at the multiplex as long as I can order a giant tub of popcorn, too, but my wife prefers serious films. Like documentaries about photosynthesis. Real edge of your seat type stuff.

We don't really go to the movies together lot. But we're on a bit of a run now--on three of our very infrequent movie date nights, we've gone to see films about Ethiopia, Somalia or adoption. These have not been feel-good movies. At the first, about a boy who gets adopted from Ethiopia by an Israeli family, we pretty much both cried through the whole fucking flick.

Last night wasn't too different. We saw a film about a doctor trying to survive the end of the Mengistu Communist regime in Ethiopia in the early nineties. I've read a little bit about these years there, and it sounds like they were a horrible time for a country that had already suffered too much under Haile Selassie. So it was interesting to see a film depicting the time. But the movie was badly acted and edited and conceived like something low budget from the sixties. Which is pretty much what I said when Anette asked me what I thought of it afterwards.

She took a more forgiving position, and said she was glad to see a movie about historical events that aren't known to many people outside of East Africa.

I got feisty about it. There were declarations about aesthetics versus content, supporting African cinema and the difficulties of overcoming racism in one's work and personal life. I drank two small beers and made many proclamations. By the time we got home, I was ready to start fighting about the treatment of women in Iran.

I get the Devil in me sometimes. Don't know why.

But maybe I ought to do some thinking about that one of these days. Before our next date.