Giving a film three stars on Letterboxd because I didn't like how my husband looked at me after | Eric Orosco

I am not a cinephile, but I’ve watched movies my whole life, and to me a three star review is decent, and you shouldn’t feel bad to have one—in fact, you should be grateful it’s not lower—and trust me, I get why people rate this five stars, I really do, but we saw this at an AMC that didn’t have reclining seats, and I wasn’t able to wrap my arm around my husband comfortably, so we sat stiffly next to each other for 100 minutes, and when the credits started to roll I stared at him and thought, he’s aged a lot since we first met, and then he got up and exited the row while I scrambled to collect our trash, and he was walking so fast that two old queens got in front of me, and I could only see the back of his head as he turned the corner, and when I finally got into the hallway, he was taking the glass side exit, so I started running, and I felt all those eyes on me as I pushed through the doors and saw him standing in the middle of the parking lot, and even though I was in a rush to catch him, I slowed down.

We made eye contact as I stepped off the sidewalk. He was looking at me in such a peculiar way. I wished we had brought jackets because the weather was turning and I hadn’t planned for this. When I got to him, I fell to my knees and said, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry,” but he had me stay like that for so long that I felt my body fuse with the asphalt. I heard cars take off around us and smelled the heat of another man’s cologne carried in the breeze. When he finally grabbed my chin and pulled me up, I was little more than a husk. The wind shook my body, and if he didn’t have such a tight grip, I know I would have blown away. I tried to say anything that would make a difference, but do you know how difficult it is to talk in a position like that? So he just held me there and looked at me—at all of me—until he saw what he finally needed. And then we went home. So yeah, three stars.

Eric Orosco is a queer, Sacramento-born author with a handful literary magazine publications from mutiny!, The Tiny, Jokes Review, and American River Review. After stumbling through four community colleges and one university in Idaho, he graduated from University of the Pacific with a bachelor’s in English and more than a handful of student loans. Currently, he works as a senior communications specialist while living in San Jose with his husband and two pear-shaped cats.