Movie night this weekend?

Yeah whatever, let me know when you decide on something.

Sure movie night sounds great, I'd be down for anything really but maybe something that isn't too heavy since it's been a long week and my brain can basically handle about thirty minutes of genuine emotion before I need to either watch cartoons or stare blankly at the wall which has happened a few times recently because every time I try to commit to a serious film there's this specific memory from third grade that resurfaces where we had to give presentations on historical figures and my group picked Napoleon but our leader—who was actually quite nice, named David, tall for his age, wore these wire frames that always kept sliding down the bridge of his nose—decided at the last minute that it would be 'more creative' if he played all the major figures himself which meant I had to stand backstage and hold a paper sign that said Napoleon while he ran around in an oversized trench coat we'd found in the drama department closet and honestly looking back David was probably doing fine but the confidence with which he performed those voices was genuinely alarming for an eight-year-old boy I remember this one bit where he did a French accent so thick that even our teacher who had studied abroad asked him to repeat himself and then he just kept going because once you start there's no stopping it and we got a B- on the project which is still etched in my memory as both a triumph and a tragedy depending entirely on how many drinks I've had by midnight. Anyway yeah movie night sounds good, totally down for anything that doesn't require me to think too hard about David or Napoleon.

I'm down for whatever, honestly — been wanting to see something good in a while because my streaming services have basically just kept recommending The Office on repeat and I can't find myself watching it again even though you know exactly what happens in every episode which defeats the purpose entirely of television as an experience. Oh man that reminds me of this one time when I was about seven years old and my uncle brought over a VCR tape of some obscure French film he found at a flea market in Paris and we watched it all the way through with no subtitles whatsoever and I think I understood maybe twenty percent of what they were arguing about but there was something so intense and dramatic about someone yelling in another language that just felt important. We sat on the carpet for three hours eating popcorn out of this metal bowl he'd brought from Europe which had a crease down the side because it had been folded into a suitcase for like six months. The movie ended and I remember thinking 'I want to be able to speak whatever language they were speaking so I can understand what the man in the hat meant by those three sentences at the end.' Anyway, yeah. Movies are great.

I am down for whatever — honestly, I have been meaning to finally catch some of those new releases everyone is talking about, though my actual plan was probably just going to end up being a 3-hour deep dive into something I've already seen six times because the comfort factor hits differently after work. Speaking of which, last week at my office we had this team movie night thing and nobody would pick anything because they kept trying to find that one film everyone said was 'important but accessible,' you know? The kind of pretentious indie darling where everything is a metaphor for something else and you need an essay afterward — I ended up just scrolling Netflix for forty-five minutes and eventually picked a rom-com from 2014 because it didn't require emotional labor. My brother actually came over to watch it with me and we both fell asleep by the second act, which is honestly a vibe at this point. Anyway, if you want to pick something that won't make us do homework after watching, I am good with anything from horror to comedy — just tell me where/when and I will be there

Yeah movie night sounds good, I'm down for whatever you guys decide — though honestly I've been kind of ambivalent about films lately because my cousin Sarah just started doing this thing where every time we hang out she makes me watch some obscure 1970s experimental cinema piece that she found on an old VHS tape in her dad's basement and the first one was like four hours long with almost no dialogue and I sat there chewing a cherry hard candy for ninety minutes just staring at what looked like grain. That actually reminds me of this time when my brother tried to film his own movie about a detective but he didn't understand how lighting works so every scene looked like it had been shot inside a refrigerator, which was the funny part because we ended up using that as a comedy sketch instead and everyone laughed — anyway what were you thinking for Friday? I could do something new or rewatch an old favorite.