When the chief conversation during Date Night is how expensive Date Night is, you know the cost of living has truly arrived at your front door. We peruse the menu with careful calculation. I silently note how many bottles of perfectly decent wine we could buy at Lidl for the price of a mediocre one in the restaurant. Probably six. In the interests of both our waistlines and our bottom line, we skip the sides.
Married just a year, we’ve both learned the lessons of our first marriages — oh, so many lessons — and want to keep the romance alive. Regular date nights are important, even if the very act of having one now feels like a minor financial scandal. Life has got expensive. When your weekly food shop makes you gasp, a dinner out is not so much a luxury, it’s a treat bordering on sacrilege. It’s not just us, surely? And family meals out feel impossible now, especially with four teenagers who could eat their way through a small nation in one sitting.
Anyway, where was I? That’s right, we were supposed to be out, basking in each other’s company, forgetting the woes of life and the ever-hovering bank balance. So, we gritted our teeth, sipped our overpriced wine, and yes, we did enjoy ourselves.
Dinner was followed by the cinema, which we can justify thanks to our annual membership. The tickets are technically ‘free’ each month, though let’s not dwell on what the membership costs in the first place. Soft drinks and popcorn from the Co-op, and we are good to go.
Then we settle down for the film. In the current political and economic climate, I’m drawn to romcoms, triumph-of-good-over-evil stories, and the pure escapism of sci-fi and fantasy. The Husband prefers the more traditional macho fodder: war, political thrillers, black and white with subtitles, misery served up on a platter, you know the sort of thing. Not that I am complaining, I am charmed by his manly manliness. And of course, we get to practise the art of compromise. Usually, this involves him watching what I want. But this time, he chose.
And boy, what a choice. One Battle After Another has been hailed as a “masterpiece,” scored a very solid 8.2/10 on IMDB, and is apparently destined for a fistful of awards. I’d like to know what drugs the reviewers were on. Despite the hype, it’s not exactly flying off the box-office shelves.
Okay, going to the cinema is very expensive these days. Dinner and a film now costs roughly the same as a weekend in Paris once did. But I don’t think that’s why this one flopped. I think it’s because the film is, at best, a load of woke tosh and, at worst… evil. Yes, I’m going there. This film is literally evil, a direct inversion of everything that should be good.
If Black Lives Matter commissioned a writer to produce a film, this is probably what it would look like. Violent, anti-authority, anti-police, anti-borders, anti-family, anti-morality and, yes, racist.
The film opens with a radical left-wing group called the “French 75” raiding a detention centre in the USA. They may see themselves as freedom fighters. We might see them as violent, thuggish terrorists.