Morgan

In the Blink of an Eye
"Morgan" is a charming, believable and heart-wrenching story about staying true to yourself and doing the best you can everyday.

Even with relentless support from his family and friends, Morgan still feels hopeless and uncertain about his future. In the blink of an eye, Morgan's life is changed. Crippled from a bike race many years ago, he struggles with the idea that he will no longer be able to do what fuels him and makes him happy: bike racing.

But when he meets a man named Dean, everything changes. He and Dean go out. Talk. Drink beers. Get to know each other. Morgan likes his newfound friend, and Dean's feelings, as Morgan will soon discover, are mutual. Days turn to weeks, weeks to months, and both boy's lives are dramatically altered. And when the obsession to return to what he loves best, even amid his doctor's warnings, Morgan turns his back on everyone and forges ahead toward the only thing that makes him fulfilled.

Until tragedy strikes. And...

Better every time I watch it
Morgan Oliver is recently paraplegic, T-10 incomplete, as a result of a bicycle accident during a race he was competing in. He has recently returned home from rehab and he's now unemployed and living on disability, adjusting to his new life and the new adaptive setup in his apartment. His preferred way to pass the time is drinking beer and watching television, and the main events of the film begin when he runs out of beer and neither his mother, Peg, nor his best friend, Lane, will enable him any further. They refuse to buy him more beer, forcing him to leave the house on his own. It is during his trip out to replenish his beer supplies that he meets Dean Kagen, which is where our romance begins.

The drama unfolds once Morgan decides he wants to compete in the wheelchair division of the very same race that cost him his ability to walk, where Morgan, because of his hyper-competitive nature, caused an accident involving himself and two other competitors on a very...

Good beginning deteriorates into absurd, annoying melodrama
The first half of this movie is very good, refreshingly low-key and original, with a believable, slowly-developing romance between Morgan and Dean in Inwood, the far northern tip of Manhattan almost never seen in movies. The relaxed, small-town, almost rural character of the place is a welcome change from the frantic pace, hard-edged greed and shallow posturing that dominate in the more fashionable areas downtown where most movies are made. The city used to have many such low-key neighborhoods that we never see in movies, so it's good to see this one while it still exists.

Unfortunately, the movie sort of disintegrates in its second half. Producers Akers and Berg must have thought a simple love story would be too boring, so they shoehorned a boatload of dramatic tension into the gentle, lovely story and ruined it. There are no gay-beating thugs, which is the stock drama-injector in gay movies, and its absence here is a great relief; but the absurd and highly annoying...

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