I was scrolling through Netflix again the other night, and decided to give Struck by Lightning, written by and starring Chris Colfer, a try.  My expectations weren’t that high, but I do enjoy a good high school movie.  

The story opens with Carson’s death.  He is, in fact, struck by lightning.  The rest of the movie is a flashback that tells his story.  Carson’s parents divorced some time ago, and his mother didn’t take it well.  Allison Janney plays his mother, and she is pretty brilliant.  Christina Hendricks was also very good as Carson’s father’s new fiance.  

Carson wants to be a journalist, and he runs the school newspaper and decides to start a literary magazine to improve his chances of getting into his college of choice.  

He blackmails his classmates into submitting, and things get really interesting from there.  

The movie has a few flaws–his father is an unbelievably terrible person, and the school authorities are pretty ridiculous, but overall, the movie is funny, sad, and surprising.  The scene near the end after Carson’s mother learns of his death made me cry, and the subplot about his grandmother was heart-wrenching.  

It’s definitely worth checking out.  

In other news, I just learned of an online grammar checker called Grammarly.  It seems pretty cool.  It checks for plagiarism, spelling errors, punctuation, and style word choice issues.