Once again, it’s me and my husband against a hostile world. Or, to be fair and accurate, we’re cocooned in shared hostility against a world of blithe hilarity. We’re sitting in a darkened theater watching Dan in Real Life, which earned a man falling out of his chair in the pink section of the San Francisco Chronicle.

People all around us are falling out of their chairs, too. We sit there stone-faced and silent. Just like we did at Amadeus, Forrest Gump and countless other highly acclaimed movies. There’s nothing more intimate than swimming upstream together against the torrent of popular taste. We also love movies everyone else hates. And it’s not just a matter of simple snobbery: Miss Congeniality and Legally Blonde are high on our list.

We even devised a foolproof rating system for couple’s compatibility based on 10 most loved and 10 most hated movies. Movie taste in the middle tier doesn’t affect the ratings. This allows my husband to indulge his craven appetite for Die Hard 3 and me to favor movies about dying mothers without triggering a call to an attorney specializing in divorce. However, we once ran into trouble with a serious dispute over a real movie, The Piano, which my husband mistakenly disliked. All is well, though. We decided to jettison our theory -- instead of our marriage.

Come to think of it, our first fight was over a movie. Emerging from The Breakfast Club, which he had loathed and I had merely disliked, I asked, “Why do they make movies like that?” Jonathan replied, “Because people like you like them.” It was the meanest thing he’s ever said to me.

But our first dates were also movies. I remember The Marriage of Maria Braun. Or, to be fair and accurate, I remember nothing about it except the mutual groping and falling into lust and love.

Now it’s just as likely to be mutual griping, which is every bit as fun.

By Lorrie Goldin

Labels: Lorrie Goldin

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