Now You See Me

Now You See Me was slick, shiny, sparkly... produced within an inch of its life. It had no plot to speak of, except in tones of aggravation, e.g.:

• why is the camera continuously spinning?
• why were there 5 main characters? It would have worked with 2. (It would have been better with 1, who wakes up at the end and dreamed the entire movie! There, I improved it.)
• why were there so many attempted plot twists? Unnecessary.
• why does each magic show last 90 seconds? wouldn't a real-life audience riot after such a short show?
• does Morgan Freeman simply walk onto the set of a movie and declare, "I am in this movie now"?

If you want a film with a clever caper, watch Ocean's Eleven instead. If you want a film where Morgan Freeman is a shadowy authority figure, watch Wanted instead.
If you want a film about magic which will make you think, watch The Prestige instead. (Thinking during Now You See Me may result in sprained neurons, and should be attempted only by professional movie critics receiving hazard pay.) If you want to turn off your brain for a 120-minute experience, go take a nap under a tree.

Honestly, you should nap under a tree anyway. It's beautiful outside.


This post's theme word is charivari, "a confused, noisy spectacle." Avoid the charivari of this movie; I have endured it to forewarn you.

Coventry Cathedral memorials

Previous experience from only Connie Willis' To Say Nothing of the Dog had incompletely prepared me to visit Coventry Cathedral. (And inaccurately, for there were no time-travelling historians to be found. I looked.)

The destruction wreaked by the bombing and fires was accurate, though.

What remains is a memorial of and to World War II. The Cathedral was a real thing before it was a destroyed monument, and so it itself contained memorials like this one for World War I.

This post's theme word is intromit, "to enter, send, admit." Coventry Cathedral now intromits sunlight and the elements, as well as tourists and the religious.