When we were dating, and then after we were married but still had no kids, my wife and I went to the movies at least once a week. It was something we really loved. Even after our first child was born, we still saw pretty much every movie we wanted, if not in the theatre then a few months later on video.
Then came child number two, almost eight years ago, and our movie watching came to a standstill. We still get to see some on cable, but finding two hours or more to do nothing but watch a movie is exceptionally difficult. And forget about going out on a date. Even if babysitters weren’t hard to find, our kids are at the age where they each have something scheduled on various night of the week.
I first noticed exactly how out-of-touch we had become a couple of years ago, when the Oscar nominations came out and we had seen like one of the movies that was nominated for best picture. Not only has that situation not improved, it’s actually deteriorated. Here are the major Golden Globe categories for this year, along with our batting average for seeing the films involved.
Best Picture – Drama: 0-for-7
Best Picture – Comedy or Musical: 1-for-5 (my wife took our daughter to see Hairspray)
Best Actor – Drama: 0-for-5
Best Actress – Drama: 0-for-5
Best Actor – Musical or Comedy: 0-for-5
Best Actress – Musical or Comedy: 1-for-5 (again, Hairspray)
Best Supporting Actor: 1-for-5 (you guessed it, Hairspray)
Best Supporting Actress: 0-for-5
Best Director: 0-for-5
Best Screenplay: 0-for-5
You get the idea. If not for the fact that we didn’t think The Simpsons Movie was a good fit for our daughter a few months ago when we were on vacation, we would have been completely shut out of the films or performances that were judged to be the best of the year. In other words, the on-screen display of Bart Simpson’s dingleberries is the only thing that kept my wife and I even remotely attached to the decent films of 2007.
Wow. Date nights seem a long, long time ago.
The Everyman Blog 
You may have seen from my recent post my wife and I (no children) used to see over 100 films a year in the theatres. (we met while working at a movie theatre!) Now, we see maybe a handful of films on pay-per-view and one or two on the big screen each year. As a cinema buff who actually took film criticism courses in college as part of a journalism/humanities degree, I will offer the opinion most of the stuff you and I think we want to go see is crap…since the few movies we do exert the effort to watch usually turn out to be awful. Yet another example of “it was better back in the day.” Date night is now reserved for sitcoms…even if it’s reruns of “Seinfeld” or “Raymond” we’ve seen a million times before! We’ve turned towards the tv for our “creative fix” and this writer’s strike is killing us.