I took it one day at a time, and it didn't cost me a dime...

My apologies to Johnny Cash for the title. Last week, (coincidentally) on the tenth anniversary of our first date, my wife and I were able to make it out for dinner and a movie. Dinner was pretty good, at a very nice (not top-of-the-line, but very nice) Italian restaurant in DC.

And for a movie, we went to One Day. This one hasn't gotten good reviews (in fact, we almost didn't see it, because the reviews were so bad, but the alternatives were worse. Sad), but we enjoyed it.

It tells the story of two people who met right around their university graduation. She liked him; he warmed to her. In any event, the title comes from subsequent coverage of their lives, looking only at July fifteenth of each year. Some years see them together, some don't. I'll warn you, though, the date is not defined by that "first meeting" (they actually alluded to casually meeting previously, although only she remembered).

I must admit to largely disliking the guy from the beginning; he was funny, but completely dissolute. The only thing he did of any worth for quite a bit of the movie was helping her move to London.

Eventually, they fall in love, but it requires a long time and him growing up. The strongest part of the movie, to me, was in how it showed him maturing. It didn't go so far as to show him going to a substance abuse program, but he definitely did become much more of an adult. The relationships between him and his parents were also fairly interesting, despite not showing a lot of depth there. Actually, maybe I'm phrasing that wrong. They didn't get a lot of screen time, but there was some depth in that time.

I did find myself wondering how things got where they were between the two of them. I can see her initial attraction; he was young, smart, rich, and good looking. But I rapidly wondered why that didn't quickly die off; she certainly saw all his flaws. Things came to a head when they met for dinner, and ended up leaving, saying, "I love you, but I don't like you". But I did wonder how things could keep going that long; it was over ten years already at that point.

In the end, it was a slow movie, but one with some payoff towards the end. As I said, we enjoyed it (well, outside of one absolutely brutal scene), and I thought it ended up being a pretty good movie.