The Impossible & Hatred

I don’t think Naomi Watts, for her role in The Impossible, will win the Oscar for best actress. I don’t even think she deserved the nomination for what she did in The Impossible. This movie has gotten a bunch of praise from any number of critics, but other than the awesome opening when the tsunami came rushing in and killed over a quarter of a million people and caused all the destruction and devastation, there wasn’t much plot. Okay, so it was based on a true story about this family that somehow survived and somehow found each other again, but still, the search wasn’t enough story to hold me. Just nothing much happened. I had the feeling all through it that I was watching people acting like people in tragic circumstances, especially Lucas, the oldest son played by Tom Holland. He kept screwing his face into what he must have considered anguish, but to me it looked like he was really on the verge of cracking a smile. And Naomi Watts just didn’t have much acting to do. She did a lot of groaning and sobbing but had almost no dialogue. So where is the great acting? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just too out of synch with modern film trends. I don’t much care for vampires or werewolves or zombies or gnomes, and until they get rid of the glasses, I can skip all the 3-D gimmicks. I just found it impossible to get very excited about The Impossible.

A neutral feeling for The Impossible is one thing, and dislike is another. Then there’s hate. I don’t think there’s ever been a movie I hated. I just like some less than others. And I haven’t hated a person in a long time. I guess the last one was that really hateful student I once had in one of my writing classes. But he shouldn’t have been worthy of my negative emotions. The nature of hatred is that it does absolutely no one any good. The object of one’s hate isn’t any worse off for it, but the hater often finds his own soul poisoned, life gray and grainy, nights sleepless, tension in the belly that just won’t go away, a whirling in the brain as he gets so caught up in the hate he forgets all the good stuff in life. But oh, the satisfaction of getting even. Even that, though, leads to sorrow. Such is the nature of retribution—everyone gets splattered and no one wins.