I used to be a movies guy. I called the movies film or even cinema, and I was the film editor on my college newspaper. I had the same boring opinions every twenty-one-year-old liberal arts major has about movies, but I thought I was very daring. Movies, like much of my life in those days, were a higher-order form of sloth. Sitting on the couch sipping Wild Turkey to all hours is just zero behavior, but if you’ve got the interminable Mabuse the Gambler running on your laptop at the same time, it’s Culture. If you blow off your schoolwork to go to the movies in the middle of the afternoon, you’re a loser; if you’re writing a review of the movie, you’re a critic. This complemented another major interest of mine in those days: Women are unduly impressed when you take them to the critics’ pre-release showings of movies.

This all was lamewad stuff, and, when I emerged out of my embarrassingly extended adolescence into the stark light of adulthood, I left movies behind along with T-shirts, dating, and greasing my hair. In the past two years, I have seen three movies in theaters, and none of them were what the twenty-one-year-old Russo would exactly have called good film (let alone cinema): Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Megalopolis, and Gladiator II. Senescent Russo, however, enjoyed them all tremendously.

My favorite movies still have a whiff of film weenie about them, though. My ever-tolerant wife has fallen asleep to Wings of Desire on three occasions, and I have stopped trying to convert her to the cause. She has politely knitted her way through Being There twice, and 8½ more times than I could have expected. She even has expressed modest affection for True Stories. But, in the interests of preserving the domestic balance of credit, I have tried not to push my luck too far.

Children, also, have proven an obstacle to film weenie behavior. You can’t really just throw on Apocalypse Now when you’ve got toddlers running around; even tamer fare provokes confusion and occasional distress from the four-year-old. After a half-hour of constant questions about India, about why these men are in trouble, about Freemasons and newspaper offices, my New Year’s Day experiment of watching The Man Who Would Be King finally ran aground at the first splash of red corn syrup. And if you really want to burn the precious hours of the post-bedtime evening in filmic pursuits, you’ve got to stick to something ninety minutes or less. (Bedtime for the aged parent is only slightly less rigid than it is for the kids. The day cannot be faced with less than seven hours of sleep.) Film weenie movies tend to have what you might generously call luxuriant runtimes, so you can get in all those deep-focus shots of grass ruffled by the wind or whatever. Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, on the other hand, is a very to-the-point eighty-four minutes.

You miss it less than you think you will, though, the film-weenie bit. Death doesn’t seem so far off, and the idea of sitting still and watching a screen for a significant portion of your waking day is accompanied by mild anxiety—particularly if it’s not a movie that you already know you like. The movie industry has made it easier, too. So far as I can tell, almost everything produced now is frank pornography, one-note political propaganda, or a video-game demo. I once thought covering Cannes was interesting enough that I sent reporters to cover it. (I must note with a scrap of unsuppressed pride, a first for a college paper.) This year, I was surprised to discover that the Oscars had happened, and that dozens of people across America had watched them. I’ve washed out; I am simply no longer a movies guy.

My wife traveled to visit family recently, and I took the opportunity to rewatch The Seventh Seal while the children were napping. I was pleased to discover that I still like it, still think it’s top-shelf, in fact; but at the end, I had learned nothing new, and, distracted, I had burned dinner besides. (The children were very happy at my wife’s return.) Not much to show for the three-dollar rental fee and an hour and a half of mortality. I suppose disappointment is part of growing up. That’s enough of the movies to last me for a while—at least until it’s time to take Mrs. Russo to Godzilla x Kong 3: End of the Titans.