I’m behind. Five movies, ten days in bed, a birthday, and writing progress.

“Every Day” is a movie based around the sort of “What if?” premise that is only discussed by adolescents and drunken college students. It makes no effort at all to explain “How?” or “Why?”, and digs right into the matters of romance and ultimately ethics. Oddly enough, it all works pretty well, aided by an excellent cast. We enjoyed it.

“15:17 to Paris” has a great core story that would have made a good 20 minute segment in a documentary anthology show. The effort to pad it out to a 90 minute drama was doomed from the start, even though the original participants turned out to be tolerable actors. So… GREAT story, questionable movie.

“The Hurricane Heist” is a fairly typocal action movie, full of visually interesting but impossible special effects. It is distinguished from the herd of such (which are usually pretty entertaining, anyway) by having Maggie Grace’s very pretty face in the middle of it. She does a good job of it, coming across as competent and dependable. If you like this kind of thing, you should like this one. I did.

“A Wrinkle in Time” is an effort to film a story that has been widely regarded as impossible to film. It comes close enough to succeeding that its success is a matter of debate. Sadly, the scene where the matter of “wrinkling time” is discussed got cut between the trailers and the final production, and the definition of “tesseract”, which matters a bit, is also never given.

“Annihilation” comes close to being exactly what the trailers promise: Pretentious, pseudo-intellectual horror with psychadelic effects and a side order of environmentalism. The trailers don’t warn you about the soporific pacing, though. There was one interesting really line: “Don’t confuse being suicidal with being self-destructive. Very few of us ever commit suicide; all of us are self-destructive.”

In other news, something went wrong in my stomach on February 23. My temperature wandered all over the place (but kept swinging back to normal), and it felt like something was torn. I spent four days in bed, and then things started to improve slowly, and by March 6 I was symptom free (really). Weird.

I had a birthday on March 8, number 62. There were a few presents, a lot of well-wishers on Facebook, and pie.

I have been writing again, 9000 words on a single project since the March 1. Watch this space.

Uncle Hyena