ANONYMOUS COMMENT

A lot of people have been responding to my posts with e mails to me personally (I guess you can get it at my web site, set up by a good friend and run by her, which you can connect to on the profile page here). I thought this response was so perceptive and even poetic at times that I wanted to share it with whoever checks this blog out:

read your post on babel. did not read the pursuit of happyness part, haven't seen it yet.
my thoughts on babel:
Did the white people really end up okay? One of the themes of Babel is loss. The white family and the Japanese family suffered their losses prior to the start of the movie. Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett had lost a child to SIDS, and the Japanese young woman's mother had committed suicide. None of them seemed emotionally okay to me by the end of the film. And the physical suffering that each member of the white family went through during the movie wouldn't be easy for them to forget: the wife/mother is shot, the husband/father must struggle to get her care, and the children almost die in the dessert.

I liked the heaviness of it. It seemed to me that one of the messages was, "This is life. One minute you might be doing your everyday thing, you might be joyous, you might be optimistic, you might just feel average. Things might go incredibly wrong. Unexpected tragedies might occur. You may feel as though your life has been turned upside down, like you've lost everything, like your life has been taken from you, that you have no control over the events that befall you. But, life will go on. What will you do next? How will you survive and function? The butterfly effect of actions may alter your life irrevocably. You are not being punished or rewarded. This is just the way life is, the way energy is, the way that force moves through the world. Find your way to deal with it. You cannot undo the past."

The Japanese actress blew me away. I felt everything she was feeling with her. Every actor in that movie was amazing.

I like movies filled with honest pain, b/c I think there is a special beauty in emotional pain. I am reminded of physical pain. Of the splash of boiling water on my skin that feels cold and clear for a moment. The burning sensation of brutal cold. The richness of fresh blood. Genuine pain seems to combine heartache, clarity, and release. I don't know how to express the images in my mind right now. I guess what I found beautiful about the pain in that movie was that it was pure and harsh and undeniable. It was honest.