Three Movie Summaries from a One Day Flu

A spaceship heads for Mars, and dispatches a landing craft. Three astronauts go down to the red planet and meet a glowing red alien with soulful electronic eyes. “I am your mother, the mother of all things,” the alien says to them by means of holographic telepathy, “don’t you know I have never stopped watching you, never stopped loving you? My sweet lost children, why must you torment yourselves so?”

A regular dude with a sexy grin becomes the focus of a 24 hour TV show. The cameras follow him everywhere (except to the bathroom). Under their bright lights he becomes a celebrity but his life falls apart and he cannot get together with the woman he loves, a coltish UPS delivery person with over-plucked eyebrows and a kind of underwritten personality. The grand climax involves a penis pump.

Eisenheim the Illusionist seems to believe that the woman he loves has died. He’s devastated, bereft, lost. He wanders the streets of Vienna in a surly daze, his eyes like two dead things trapped in glass. At night he conducts magic performances which are like séances, raising the dead to life, hoping beyond hope that his departed loved one will return.