I can imagine a husband and wife breaking up over sharply diverging views on certain films, but why would they get married in the first place if they strongly disagree about the look and sound and soul of great cinema? I could never feel close to someone who disdains Zero Dark Thirty or I Confess or Manchester by the Sea or The Battle of Algiers. You can always smell where a person is coming from or how deep their passions are when it comes to film. It’s not rocket science.
Back in the early ’80s I squired a promising new girlfriend to a Manhattan repertory theatre screening of From Here To Eternity, and she loved it. That in itself convinced me she was quality material. Plus she was beautiful and the sex was so good that I cried, but we didn’t last that long…two, three months. Go figure.
Sometime in the late aughts a once-adored ex-girlfriend, a longtime male friend and I were watching L.M. Kit Carson‘s “Direction Man” short. You can’t watch this thing and not at least chuckle, and the ex just sat there like a piece of granite, stone-faced. I snuck a glance at her while we watched, and I muttered to myself “God, what’s happened to her?”
There was a fascinating woman (a former film and TV actress) I was seeing in ’15 or thereabouts, and I recall how difficult it was to convince her to watch Paths of Glory. I mean it was fucking hard, grueling work. What did that say about her, I wondered? She was not only ignorant of one of the greatest films ever, but had to be wrestled into seeing it.
