Monday, May 10:
I’ve spouted on about great stories once before, long ago. Great in all the truest, most important senses of the word. After tonight, “21 Grams” joins that privileged crowd. It leaves you in perfect calm and satisfaction. It piques your curiosity and your spirit, and somehow manages to leave you open at the end. Loose ends to follow into yourself, into the weight of a shirt seam on your back, the pattern of a splayed light from a dimming bulb. You know, the important stuff. And with that, the floating up of some silly, forgotten memory. The drowning of pretence and disillusionment. But what if the movie had nothing to do with it. That cathartic type of present rooted nostalgia, the fresh humidity of a fallen thunderstorm and the slightest edge of cold and damp prodded through the delicate certainty of a window screen. Maybe these are equal, greater, or the sole culprits. It might be wholly foolish to try and untangle where this inspiration (a most true and important sense of the word) came from. But ’cause and effect’ makes us what we are and is always a good candidate for examination. My theory has long been that this type of feeling is the root of honest belief in God. It’s like love, but not for another person. No one to share it with, but not a regret. A mood I don’t ever want to leave. And for that, I must give thanks. Not to the holy father, since I am agnostic bordering on atheistic, but to Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu and all the people who worked on this film that may or may not have directly contributed to my great sense of contentment. Since I am a firm believer in the power of the human spirit, and I don’t see that we have to blame what powers we have on someone else. But that, my dear friends, is a whole nother can o wurms.
It has just dawned on me as well, that this film really encapsulates the sort of mood, and even some similar relationships to what I have hoped to realize in my currently very much in progress novel/novella. And now that I’m in this wonderful mood, I naturally become almost unbearably tired at speed. Great.