Bang-up film

May 15, 2005

I like Apple.com/trailers because I can watch movie previews on my computer, and I don’t have to worry about been a few minutes late to the theater, when I do go, because I’ve already seen all the current trailers.

The trailers over the last few months haven’t given me much to want to see, so I haven’t been to the movies in a while. Tonight, though, I snuck out to see Crash. It was a dynamite film, a story about race relations in Los Angeles (and America).

One scene had me teared up and trembling: a Hispanic man finds his five-year-old daughter curled up under her bed, thinking of the bullet that flew through her window in the family’s previous home. He kneels down to tell her the story of a fairy that gave him an invisible protective cloak, and he removes it from himself and carefully drapes it on her shoulders, gently placing her innocent tresses back in place. It’s a touching scene, all the more gripping to a father of daughters who wants desperately to keep them safe in this world.

Later, the daughter and the cloak figure in a man’s redemption. The film, though, has other scenes of redemption – tears, a bonfire and a rare LA snowfall. The upturned faces reminded me of two other movies in which something falling from the heavens signals redemption: in The Shawshank Redemption, rainfall cleanses an escaped convict, and in Magnolia frogs plop and splat down onto the city at night.

I guess the theme and the moral is that, if you’re looking for salvation, look up. But be prepared to have the world crash into you. See the movie. Then, let’s talk.

Anton Zuiker ☄