Wednesday 20 June 2007

Was It On Screen Or Did It Really Happen?

Yesterday I turned up 10 minutes or so late for a movie I wanted to see (Beaufort, about Israeli soldiers in a fort on the border with, or possibly in, Lebanon). Before I went to see it I didn't really remember what the movie was about (more than a week earlier I had read the programme and marked what I wanted to see, and since then I have just been mindlessly turning up to watch things). When I arrived there was a man on screen who was there to defuse a bomb, and he seemed to be the centre of all the action, so I assumed he was the main character and that I should become emotionally attached to him. And so I did. About 10 minutes later he was killed by the bomb that he apparently failed to defuse.

It was kind of more like real life than a movie (not that my life is packed full of mines and soldiers and international unrest). I was missing all those clues that you normally get in a film as to who is important and interesting and who is expendable. I was shocked by his death, and spent the rest of the film thinking that he had been hardly-done-by because he was mourned so little.

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