I saw this in IMAX with my wife when it came out, and I had one thought after: “I need to take my Dad to see this movie.” We always see the latest spy movies together, and every Star Wars film. We’ve done it since I was a kid. But he works odd hours these days and we were a couple hours apart by car, so the timing never worked out.
Because of that distance and his hours, this just never happened. Whenever we would see my folks, we’d spend time catching up rather than watching a movie.
This year, a few important things changed. The first is that (for uninteresting reasons) we got a new sound system in our apartment. We bought the best bookshelf speakers we could find for under a grand and got four of those and a matching centre speaker (all KEFs, if you’re curious or interested).
Then, after 9 months of continuous searching, we managed to get our first house. The house is a lot closer to my folks, so we’ve seen more of them, and we crashed at their place for a couple weeks while some contractors fixed parts of the house.
We gutted the basement since we moved in, and have been finishing a room at a time. My office is done, and the home theatre is done. We added a subwoofer to the sound system, since we’re not sharing walls anymore. The only thing missing was a new TV — our old one was 12 years old. We replaced it with a 77” OLED.
And finally, today, we had my folks over for dinner and I got to show my Dad M:I Fallout on the biggest screen I can find: ours.
I can always tell my Dad is impressed when he doesn’t have anything to say. When he’s silent, it usually means he doesn’t have the words. He didn’t say anything throughout the movie. When it finished, he didn’t say anything about it. He and my mother said goodnight and got in the car. 90 minutes later, he texted and just said “your home theatre is amazing and the movie was great. I loved it.”
It was worth all the effort.