Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Catch a Fire



The only real complaint I have is that this movie is too short. There seems to be so much more to the main character's story that is left out. His time in prison is presented more as a footnote. What happened in all those years? That was a question I felt that needed to be answered. The performances are good. Derek Luke is an actor I'd like to see more of. Check him out in Spartan if you get the chance. Tim Robbins is good as always. He's a brutal monester, but the film grants him the complexity of real conviction that wah he's doing is not only necessary, but also right. I feel guilty watching all the horror of what people went through (and still do go through) in Africa that I have largely been ignorant of for the majority of my life. And once I know, I am given the ability to turn the movie off when it is finished and eat some ice cream or start a dark comedy about growing up in the suburbs. And I forget. I remember and I want to forget. I see depiction of horrible things that people do to other people and I think "how is that possible? How does one person do that to a human being?" And I realize the movie's only PG-13 and what we don't see is far worse that anything we do. I like that the movie ends on the words of the actual person the story focuses on. We see his face and it's more real than we could ever want it to be. It's at that moment that the film becomes real. Real events. Real tragedy. And I can't forget it now.

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