Warnings

"If I had my life again,
I would not think of gain and pain,
Or if all's slain but for the rain.
I'd simply live it all again."

-- Anonymous

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Three things of note today.

(1) I am finally the sole owner of my bank account. Mom and Dad signed their names right out of prowess and power, and I feel a little like a stringless puppet, either about to fall down the steps or become a real boy.

(2) I worked out in the Offut Field House. I played basketball, lifted, and cycled. I feel pretty.

(3) There was a tornado warning while we were at the gym. I discussed the Koran with the guy squatting next to me in the men's locker room while middle-aged sweaty men fresh from the racquetball court spouted Anti-Communist Domino Theory.

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Horton Hears a Who is so darn cute, and Vantage Point is awful. Horton asks the ultimate questions with bugged eyes and tongue calmly wagging, a sort of Einstein in children's clothing: the great triumph of the film is that it makes real the tension of believing in the unbelievable. Horton believes in the invisible community on the surface of a speck, and this belief controls his actions. The struggle of the Whos is that they must choose to believe in the same thing, infinitely larger than them, which controls everything but their actions.

Vantage Point's central problem is that it provides opposing and concurrent perspectives on the same event without saying anything at all about the question of perspective. That question is, simply, What did this person observe, and how did that affect their actions, versus what that person saw and what they did, and how they intersected. What ought to be innovative is essentially trite and empty, a series of events that connects several people who experience a lot of turmoil but apparently take nothing from it. Not only that, but after providing exclusive points of view (the media, the agents, the tourists, etc.), the film devolves into a free-for-all omniscience, so the whole idea of piecing together an event from different perspectives gets completely forgotten. And frankly, any movie that ends with dialogue like, "Thank you, Barnes," "You're welcome, Mr. President," is just asking for it.