Change Your Image
bonheim
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012)
A tough watch for guilt filled fathers...
This is not going to be some film critic's review of a movie. I'm not going to talk about cinematography, or plot, or anything of the like.
What I will talk about is a personal meaning that this film had for me...it tapped into a relationship that I have with my daughters, the adulation I see in their eyes for someone who is so riddled with faults, so undeserving of the love of such beautiful creatures...
The little girl in this film deserved so much more than she got...she looked to her father as the end all be all, and he was a faulted, bitter, sick and dying person. She didn't know this. She only knew that her father was her rock, her support, the source of her stability, and her life. She thought that if he died, so would she... But just as he was sickness and bitter regret, she was beauty and purity, innocence and hope. So he looked to her as the embodiment of everything that he was not. He was tough on her, but he was really being tough on himself, because she was the embodiment of all he could not give her. She was the embodiment of her mother, lost. She was the embodiment of the better life he should have been able to provide. If Hushpuppy was not there, he could be a sick, angry drunkard and kill himself with drink and self-hatred without responsibility...it was her existence, and his love for her that made for his guilt and bitterness...
I haven't cried more than I did at this film.
'Master Harold'... and the Boys (1985)
A major event in my life
I watched this movie once as a young boy, and it absolutely destroyed me.
I'm not sure how old I was, but I was just old enough to be home alone when my parents went out for the night. It may have been the first time I was left home alone, as a matter of fact.
Not sure how I ended up watching this movie - it seems an odd choice for a kid staying up past his bedtime because his parents were out to dinner.
In any event, it moved me in a way no movie had before. I was enraptured by the relationship between Master Harold and his servants, the beautiful fatherly care he was shown, and the deep love that existed between them. When Master Harold grows, and begins to see the separation between blacks and whites in apartheid South Africa - when he gets caught up in the evil and intolerance of that horrible time... I was devastated.
I had never cried like I cried at that movie, at the loss of innocence and the purity of the relationship that was so brutally tarnished. I felt like I had lost something myself. I mourned the love that was destroyed
and at the culmination of the film, the realization that a boundary had been crossed, that some words, and some actions can never be undone.
As a young white kid growing up in a sheltered, privileged life, I feared that I might grow to develop that kind of ignorance
in my naiveté I didn't see that I was already being raised to be a good, accepting person and that were I in a place where I could lose that basic humanity, the movie itself would not have had such an impact on me.
In any event, this movie was a formative part of my being, and the adult I have grown up to be. I have a visceral hatred for bigotry and intolerance, and I can say that – of course, along with my parents and their wise guidance – this movie was a significant part of the journey that resulted in this as a guiding principle of who I am as an adult, and how I raise my children.
I have not seen the film again since, and I would be curious to see if the impact would hold true so many years later. But based on my memory of the experience, I couldn't recommend this film more, for children, adults, or anyone who wants a meaningful and powerful look into innocence lost and the damage that can be wrought through ignorance and intolerance.