So what do you do when you're a hundred miles from home and too wiped out from fighting a kidney stone to work?
Watch movies.
Been a very long time since I reviewed a movie, largely because it's been a while since I've watched any. But with nothing else to do, I pulled up the free movies on my Amazon watch list and binged.
Zoombies is perhaps the perfect kidney stone movie. A schlocky B-horror flick from the kings of such things over at the Asylum, it has precisely no real character development or plot. Monkeys at zoo develop unexplained (beyond "enzyme in their brains") zombifying virus that can somehow infect other species, including birds, but not humans (yet?). After the unprepared security team fails to contain them, our plucky band of disposable interns must escape the zoo while keeping the animals from doing the same. Can easily be followed while on hydrocodone.
Leave No Trace was a much less appropriate choice for the circumstances, but a much better movie. Kindasorta based on a true story from the '90s, it's about a vet whose PTSD precludes living a normal life trying to raise his daughter in the forests of the Pacific Northwest. Eventually, the park service busts them, and they have to try to adapt to a "normal" work and house life. The solution they find at the end is elegant, and the general theme of the movie--that individuals should be allowed to live in whatever way suits them, rather than what society deems proper--resonates with my own experience.
American Ultra was another good kidney stone pick. The plot was obvious, the action over-the-top, and Jesse Eisenberg always makes for a quirky lead. The plot centers around successor programs to the well-documented MK Ultra hijinks those crazy CIA kids did for twenty years back in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. Eisenberg portrays a sleeper agent dropped into a dead-end West Virginia town (redundant, I know) that gets activated by the program supervisor who can't bear to see him bumped off by her colleague's competing program. Cartoonish violence and other hilarity ensues. It did make me want to try some medical marijuana for pain relief. But I don't think Montana has 18-hour green cards.
The Silencing was a decent low-budget thriller. Set in Alaska (I think), the story centers around a classic drunk whose daughter left his car while he was in a liquor store five years ago and never returned. His penance was to turn his hunting and trapping land into a wildlife preserve in her honor. Meanwhile, the local embattled sheriff is trying to crack the case of a serial killer who appears to hunt girls for sport. It also feature the always-excellent Zahn McClarnon (Matthias from Longmire) as, well, basically Matthias from Longmire.
The Vast of Night was a very well-acted, well-paced, artistic film. The story of a small midwestern town being visited by aliens on a night in the 1950s, it went all out to capture the atmosphere of post-war/cold-war American culture. Think a Norman Rockwell painting that a UFO flies into. Unfortunately, like most artistic films I've seen, the ending seems to be phoned in.
And not a movie, but I watched the South Park Pandemic Special. An excellent sendup up pandemic dissonance ("I'm not talking to you until you put on a chin diaper!"), it has everything good about old-school South Park: biting social commentary served up on a bed of moderately perverted toilet humor.
So there it is, the playlist for your next case of renal calculli.
