37.6 degrees Celsius

I don't know how the well-known movie critic duo Siskel & Ebert got their start exactly, but a good guess would be that they caught a cold over the weekend. At least for me, resorting to bed-rest and wearing down my cold last weekend with a barrage of movies seemed to work well. I watched both the dystopian story of a world without children in Children of Men and then Mel Gibson's Apocolypto.

Both movies were rather breath-taking depictions of a world in which none of us would want to find ourselves. The dire situation presented in Children of Men, where the human race faced extinction by an unexplained loss of the ability to reproduce for nearly 20 years, surely makes one think. The movie seemed a bit gloomy to me at first glance, but once I accepted the plot proposition, the movie seemed to take on a tone of hope in a situation where hope was all but buried under the rubble of a war-torn England ravaged by short-sighted self-interest.

Apocolypto went far beyond my expectations of Mel Gibson after I sat through Passion of Christ a few years ago. Although I wasn't a fan of Passion (all the controversy aside, I just thought it lacked any real passion to save it from being, simply, boring), this glimpse at Mayan era Mexico was absolutely enthralling. From the very beginning to the bitter end, the movie grabbed the viewer as if in a lasso and dragged us along for the ride. The concept was not new, but the setting and characters were almost awe-inspiring. Even though the film was done in a foreign language, it did not rely on dialog to move it forward. In fact, it relied more on the legs of its characters, who were running (or chasing, depending on the perspective) literally for days. Historical inaccuracies aside, it was a great movie.

And, the result... my cold is mostly gone. Granted, this is probably less because of the movies and more due to the homeopathic medicines given to me by J along with a bit of tender-loving care, but the movies certainly helped pass the time.

by the way, just for the nerds who didn't get past the title: °C = (°F − 32) /1.8