My husband said to me Sunday night, in a dim and lonely theater while waiting for a movie to start: “Don’t you ever see a movie without reading the review before?” I blinked at him, trying to remember the last time I’d done that. As the theater darkened I sunk into my seat and wondered what that meant about me. Had I become dependent on others for perspective? I rarely come out of a movie unsatisfied, I reminded him, and that’s because I do my research before going in. The movie we were seeing was “The Disappearance of Alice Creed,” selected by my husband after a slightly pouty, isn’t it my time to pick a movie comment. Last week I dragged him to see “Cairo Time,” at the IFC, where a married woman, played by the natural aging beauty, Patricia Clarkson, falls for a handsome and demurring Egyptian played by Alexander Siddig. By the end of the movie I was falling for him too, something my husband spotted in the misty, far off look on my face as we walked out of the theater. “Great, now you’re going to go to Cairo and fall for some…” his voice fell off for a moment. “And he’s exactly the kind of guy you’d fall for too.” He’d never said something like that to me before. I searched his face, and then reminded him that I’d already fallen. So this weekend I let him have his Brit styled guns and madness via “Alice Creed.” It wasn’t a Guy Ritchie film but I was pretty sure it was going to have that edgy, bloody pointlessness that I wasn’t always in the mood for. Not to mention that Cockney accent I could never understand. The LA Times didn’t like the movie, I forewarned him. “It never rises above the mechanical and contrived, finally lapsing into the improbable…” I read off, to which he countered, “Two guys, a gun, and a naked woman tied to a bed. That’s all you need to know, Jackie.”
Afterwards I decided that he was right, about not relying on reviews that is, because I did like the movie. But I still had to wonder as we left the theater. Did I like it because he liked it, or because I did?
