Over the past two days, I’ve seen two movies that left me empty.
When we were at the library the other day, Jef found “Tuck Everlasting”, a movie starring Alexis Bledel (Rory from “Gilmore Girls”). I’ve wanted to see that movie for a while now. It was ok, but that was it. The Tuck family had drunk from a spring and were everlasting – no bullets, disease or old age could overtake them. Winnie (A.B. character) stumbles into their world unknowingly. There were some cryptic comments made, but nothing ever came of them. Things such as Winnie’s being there was the best thing to happen in that house for 80 years. That made me think they knew she was coming or there was some hope in her being there. None of this occurred. The movie moved on, and Winnie & Jesse (the youngest son) fell in love, or so it seemed. The Tucks had to leave or be found out, though. Just as they were leaving, Jesse tells Winnie to drink from the spring & he’ll come back for her when it is safe.
Winnie goes home to a Grandma who is dying. She thinks about drinking, sits by the spring, plays in the water, but never drinks. The narrator of the story says that Winnie decided to have adventures, but they would be ones of her own choosing. The last scene of the movie shows the town in the present. Jesse comes back, and finds Winnie’s grave/headstone where the old spring used to be. It says she was a devoted wife & mother. The narrator says, “Tuck told Winnie not to be afraid of death, but to be afraid of the unlived life. Winnie chose to live life.” (or something along those lines)
The movie was just such a disappointment. I guess what they were trying to say was that you have to live life to the fullest, because there isn’t anything else. I agree that our day-to-day lives should be faced with vigor. We cannot undo the past & we have no control of the future. We do have today, however. But there is more than just this life – there is a whole other realm of existence. I guess it gets to me when I see the hopelessness in movies because I know they don’t have to be hopeless. Jesus is our Hope. He makes everything better, more worthwhile. 🙂
So then, today, we get two movies in the mail. “6 Degrees of Separation” and “A Streetcar Named Desire”. We watched the first one while we ate lunch. It, too, is a dumb, existentialist-type movie. I totally didn’t get it. And there was unnecessary language, and stupid scenes – scenes that were just gross. Will Smith did a good job of acting, but that is about the only redemptive quality this movie had. Throughout the film, there is a double-sided painting referred to – on one side it has no structure, on the other geometric designs that present a structured whole. The characters joke about it by flipping it back & forth & saying “chaos”, “control”. At the end of the movie, Will Smith’s character whispers “(the painting) was painted on both sides.” Jef & I didn’t understand that. We didn’t get the movie, it was too existential. Or maybe it was just nebulous. 😉
