Spoiler Alert

 "i've seen that movie too." That was a sentiment expressed by Elton John on his sprawling double album, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road." To be fair, the words themselves belong to Elton's lyricist, Bernie Taupin, which is not exactly the point, but I feel like Bernie doesn't always get the attention he deserves for providing rhymes for the Rocketman. The reason for me to bring this phrase up here and now is the way it describes my feeling lately about going out to see a mseovie. It used to be that you could stop by this corner of Al Gore's Internet and expect that every so often you would be treated to another episode of "Dave Goes To The Movies."

But not lately.

Because Dave doestn't go to the movies like he used to.

Somewhere after COVID, around the time that watching movies as they streamed into our collective living rooms in a literal flood, my compulsion to rush out and put my posterior in a seat anywhere else began to lose its specific appeal. Certainly the habit of sitting in a darkened theater with a group of strangers wasn't something Doctor Fauci recommended, but my wife and I still looked for opportunities to make that communal venture to support the medium that we both love so dearly. It has only been over the last year or so that my need to venture out into the cold hard world to see the next big thing Hollywood has to offer has slowed to a trickle. 

Over the holidays, it was my wife who did the movie duty, taking in both Wicked and Gladiator II. Our son bought himself a ticket to see Sonic 3. I stayed home. There was nothing that moved me off of my spot on the couch and into the aforementioned darkened movie house to take in the latest and greatest. I like to think of myself as a pretty astute arbiter of taste when it comes to motion pictures, but there seems to be something else at work here. 

I may have become old and fussy. 

The suggestion that yours truly might have picked up the mantle of "they don't make 'em like they used to" is on this side of hypocritical when one considers the films for which I have waited in line for over the years. Maybe I've just topped off. This theory was tested when this past week my wife cajoled me out to dinner and a movie. It was a date. Lately this experience had included a lot more trips to Target than our neighborhood Cineplex. We went to see A Complete Unknown, the story of a young Bob Dylan's struggle with fame. 

I liked it. 

And dinner was good too. 

It gave me a smidgen of hope that maybe I could shake off this lethargy and get out to the picture show a little more often than once a blue moon. But we will have to wait and see. 

Won't we?