Tha Dif

[thisnewday]

Holy sh*t! I just saw Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise on HBO! Been looking for it for months but never thought I'd see it there. (Although there are exceptions, the more interesting stuff is usually on Sundance or IFC.) Guess that's what happens when a movie, or in this case a pair of them, achieves the status of "cult classic."

I'd first seen the sequel, Before Sunset, which I then found on DVD and gave to my wife for Christmas. That was probably two years ago. To my knowledge, she's never watched it. This Christmas, she suggested that we not exchange gifts with each other--for "financial" reasons. Since something given from the heart can apparently mean so little, I agreed.

But now, more than ever, I feel like Jesse must have felt when he returned to Vienna six months later to find that, for whatever reason, Celine had failed to meet him as they'd agreed. Or maybe it's how he would've felt if they'd kept their original agreement to not meet at all but had then returned in the hope of finding that something had changed for her as well.

The difference is that one's a movie and the other is life. And in mine, there's little likelihood of a successful book tour framing the possibility of a happy ending...