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A very weird thing happened when I went to a movie last night.
To save time, I will just copy and paste
what I posted to my socials after it happened:
I’ve been an obsessive movie goer for 25 years. Tonight was the first time I saw a trailer to the movie I was there to see, before the movie started.
Then I wondered if I was in the right theater. I checked my AMC app several times. I wondered if the right movie would play. After many trailers, indeed, the wrong movie played. I had to go out into the lobby to confirm I was in the right theater. I was.
I was there to see The American Society of Magical Negroes. The movie that played was … American Fiction.
Maybe they thought we wouldn’t be able to tell the difference?
I actually wrote the above while they were trying to figure out how to get the correct movie playing. I was one of only three people in the theater, one of whom even said out loud, "And maybe skip the trailers this time!"
But then, trailers started. But they would go for a couple of seconds, skip to the next one, and repeat. This happened until it finally got to the feature film and it was the correct one.
The American Society of Magical Negroes does not have a particularly long run time—an hour and 44 minutes. Honestly, given its premise, it could have used a longer run time to flesh it out a bit. Honestly, it
really wasn't that good, and with the review I wrote after getting home, I gave it a rather generous B-minus. The only thing preventing me from giving it a C-plus was how much I liked the actors, which did a lot of heavily lifting with the misguided tone of the script they were working with. As I said in the review, I'd really love to see Justice Smith, who was the lead, in something better.
In any case, the wrong-movie snafu rather added to the time it took for the movie to end, and although I had gone to the AMC 10 in the U District for a 5:15 showing, I didn't get home until about 7:40. After heating up dinner and feeting the cats and settling in, I didn't get to starting the review until after 8:00, and only just barely finished it shortly after 9:15 or so in time to ride with Shobhit, just getting back from work, over to QFC to pick up some sale items.
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Beyond that, I just had my biweekly virtual Zoom lunch with Karen—although in this case it was four weeks later: we last did this on Friday, February 16. The one we had on March 1 was canceled, because a week prior, she broke her hip!
Karen has a condition called OI (
Osteogenesis Imperfecta), which is the reason for both her stature as a little person, and for her being a wheelchair user. The condition makes bones brittle, and she broke bones many, many times as a kid. I learned today that she had not broken a bone in a
very long time, though—not since she was in high school! But, when she heard her leg pop while she was in the bathroom, she knew instantly what the sound was, knew she had broken her hip, and refused to move out of the sitting position for a long time, indeed until she was actually driven to the hospital by her husband (911 and paramedics were called, but when they noted that they would make her get on a stretcher to get into an ambulance, the opted for having Dave drive her instead).
This also meant, of course, that she had a
lot to catch me up on, and talk about her hip facture took the first solid half hour. She's also had to work from home in the meantime, is getting stir crazy, and is hoping next week will be the last in which she has to work from home. She's sort of lucky in that she didn't have any travel plans until June.
Speaking of which! The last maybe fifteen minutes of the hour had me updating her, mostly on my own plans. I noted that Shobhit booked his return trip from India yesterday, and what plans I have for all the weekends during his absence. I didn't even get around to talking about my Birth Week which starts shortly after his return, but Karen and I have our next lunch in about a week and a half (rescheduled for earlier in the week due to my time off I'm taking for Barbara's Easter Weekend visit) and I'll have plenty of opportunity to talk more about all that later.
Right now I need to get back to the large amount of work I still have to get done today.
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[posted 1:18 pm]