The Day After

Here I am, looking at both ends of the bridge.

Thursday night I saw Hereafter, a film by Clint Eastwood and written by Peter Morgan who deals with a very septic topic involving death and what happens after that.

The first minutes of the film you find yourself amazed by the scenes from a vicious tsunami that takes the lives of hundreds of thousands letting us feel quite astonished and perplexed about how they made it so ‘real’ and frightening. If you are open enough about themes you can feel some disbelief or skepticism you can find this to be an extremely interesting and reflective film about life. I personally loved it.

Here’s the curious thing, I wake up the next morning I look at the TV and I see Breaking News, Japan just suffered one of the most horrific natural catastrophes in history. When my mom sees scenes like the frightening tsunami in “Hereafter” she usually asks “How they do that?” Well she certainly didn’t ask any of that when she was looking at the horrifying images from Japan. The curious thing I’m trying to reach here is that my mom also comments how when she was little and was watching films she feared at some point, she always had that inner relief of saying “Oh that’s just a movie…” Now she’s realizing she can’t say that sentence much often. We look at the images and there is no special camera with depth neither visual effects and it’s more frightening because, well, it’s real.

There’s also this form of telling stories visually called a Documentary, once described as “creative treatment of actuality” and that’s something we should think when it comes to trying to send a message and can also be both interesting and entertaining.

So, here it is another strong reminder that films are here to entertain us when things seem pretty messed up and scary and that’s why I’ll be keeping writing posts with films that might makes you forget the world outside for an hour and an half.