At this very moment I am convinced– and am willing to throw down over my conviction– that 88 Minutes is the most heinous and shocking of mankind’s many, many crimes. A worse thing has not been known. An affront to human dignity. And I am fairly certain that the dextromethorphan in my cough medicine has nothing to do with my opinion.

Truth be told, the only feasible way in which a person could sit through the entirety of this film is to: (a) have a half-insane freak cough all over you a week before the screening, (b) develop a cold that’s not serious enough to impair fully but serious enough to debilitate and (c) drink a lot of disgusting medicine to fight the illness, thus creating an unpleasant high that makes the world appear through an opaque haze, as if one was in a 1930s screwball comedy and a hapless DP had smeared vaseline across the camera lens for the big kissyface.

And even that will not be enough. Even that will not protect you.

Afterwards, I checked: 88 Minutes runs one hour and forty minutes, but in my present condition, I felt as though I had lived from the Dawn of Time until the End of Eternity– from Genesis to The Revelation of St. John the Divine, and not even Alicia Witt, Notable Ginger, could help.

Please let this sickness pass, O Lord.