Movie sense

Production people who are responsible for impossible or unlikely scenes to work, must employ ‘tricks’.

One movie I was watching, whose name was something like “Falling for Christmas”, Was about an heiress who goes skiing, goes over a cliff, bumps her head and has amnesia. She doesn’t know her name and a doctor tells her that doing ordinary tasks might help her remember. So that’s the complicated set-up. She has never done household chores. She ends up being rescued by a lodge owner and staying there, where she offers to help out because she has no other way of paying them.

That was a long way around to get to the point where she’s making a bed for the first time. The bed sheet is a bottom, fitted one, with elastic around the edges to keep it in place. Here’s where the production people make a visual trick – the sheet is too small. Say a queen instead of a king. It would be impossible to fit on that bed, the poor inept woman!

Here’s another that falls in the category of. “suspension of disbelief”. In “The Father’, a woman who is left at the altar sees her father, who abandoned her when she was a child, in attendance. They get drunk together and go on her honeymoon together in the Caribbean. She has a lot of resentment and bad feelings toward him added to being jilted. Naturally they become buddys. (spoiler). The scenes include jumping over a waterfall. OK. And she rescues him from his financial disaster. OK, again. That’s a lot to accepta real.

My computer won’t let me correct ‘accept as real’. The point is, and this is rote, the script writers and producers put a heap of expectations on the viewers with these imaged set-ups.

Separately, I made a discovery that solved one problem. The last couple of days, I’ve had very bad stomach aches. A first. Looking up one medicine I recently began taking, diclofenac -for arthritis, has stomach pain as a side affect. Bingo!

And now, PSA, or reader alert: “Possible Side Effects” by Augusten Burroughs has its charm. But, small minded and somewhat prejudiced. In this case, you can’t take the Southern boy to objectivity.