I Can't Believe You Haven't Seen It

Posted Thursday, September 18, 2008 12:20 AM

I learned a lot about my husband when we went on our first date at CityWalk. While sitting at Howl at the Moon, he with his Smirnoff Ice, me with my Appletini, we made a list.

It wasn’t a list about our hopes and dreams, about our future plans or even about questions we had for each other. It was a list of movies that each of us thought the other should see.

The list of films I thought he needed to see had at least 40 movies on it, including: “Singing in the Rain,” “12 Angry Men,” “Inherit the Wind,” “The Godfather,” “The Music Man,” “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” and “Casablanca.”

He made a list for me, too. I think it had three films on it.

As we went through film after film, I was shocked. My father is a film guru – and I have followed in his footsteps. I knew my husband needed to expand his pop culture knowledge – a lot.

Over the past three years, my husband has been a very good sport. In addition to seeing at least 65 percent of the films I thought he would enjoy, the most recent being “Guys and Dolls,” he has found new films that he loves.

He even has ended up watching made-for-TV movies he never in a million years would have watched before being with me: How many guys would have ever made a conscious effort to watch Hallmark’s entire “Love Comes Softly” series? We have a sort of “in joke” now.

Whenever we start watching a film that he, at first, wasn’t sure he wanted to see, he’ll look at me and say: “I hate you.” As in “I hate you for showing me this movie because I love it, dammit.”

I still have to watch “The Last Starfighter.” He still has to watch “Field of Dreams.” Tell me who got the better end of that deal?