Sunday

I feel better. I woke up still feeling a little fuzzy, so I took things very low-key all day; but I can now safely say that I'm finally coming out of the lingering light cold that hit me early last Thursday. We've had a day evenly delineated between entertainments excruciatingly good and entertainingly the opposite. Good news first: most of the afternoon we spent watching the second season of the Sopranos* while I convalesced lazily. This season of this series is so utterly good that it's confusing my previous ranking: how many different HBO shows can cluster in my number one slot? Later in the afternoon, we drove to the Ballston Commons Mall to see the bad news. That would be the newest predictable Sandra Bullock movie, Premonition.* I don't mean "predictable" in the sense that the plot was obvious before we stepped into the theater. Actually, I was surprised to discover that this was more of a Butterfly Effect* or Memento* -like scrambled-time narrative type of movie rather than the It's a Wonderful Life* or Final Destination* –like "how do you stop the future?" type of movie that its previews make it out to be. No, the predictability is in the quality: its another inconsistent, overwrought telegraphed right-wing screed posturing as the newest potboiled conceit thriller with pretensions of armchair para-psy-fi-chology. In this respect, the previews were dead-on. To be as fair to the movie as I can possibly be, I have to say that, in those rare moments when Bullock managed to wrestle the performance of her 2D character from the heavy hands of the filmmakers, she was really pretty good. All other bets are off, though: it is a movie told by an editor, full of sound and fury, with all attendant significance and subtlety. [Cavin]