One Day Like Rain (0 stars — really)

I made the wrong choice of watching a dull, ponderous sci-fi-ish movie called One Day Like Rain. Instead of watching this film school exercise (C-), read the Rumi quote the title is drawn from. I shall spoil this 90 minute waste of time for you: moody adolescent girl uses "physics and chemistry" to grow crystals in her parents’ garage and concocts a liquid from said crystals that causes hallucinations, catatonia, and, in the case of her best friend, death. I don’t follow the leap from there to the end/beginning of the world and rain on troglodytes on Mars (owing something to the rock monster in the original StarTrek). A troupe of surprisingly eclectic bibliophilic homeless people figures in, somehow.

In the end the moody girl has sex by the lake with her boyfriend, beginning or ending the world; "this is what the garden was for." Only a horny teenaged boy (redundant) could ignore her coital soliloquy (the third recitation of Rumi). All I could think about is how her boyfriend, twice as tall as she, must be humping her knees for their face-to-face missionary lovemaking. That tells you something about how riveting this movie is. Even the cameo by Jesse Eisenberg (Social Network) as the 20-year-old virgin brother was disappointing. At least, he didn’t confuse screaming with acting, favoring perplexed silence (as in, “how will this help my career?” — he may be the only one whose career didn’t sink after this). Five minutes of rain yesterday exceeded the best 5 minutes of this movie, if you can find that many. It is fitting that the stars all wink out near the end — the perfect metaphor for a zero star movie. Please don’t watch it.

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