If there was a theme to today's films, it was that you really don't choose who you love. Or you do, and it's just kind of inexplicable. Okay, maybe there was no theme.
Eagle vs Shark has been touted as New Zealand's answer to Napoleon Dynamite, and I can kind of see where they're coming from. You have the quirky characters, the curiously flat affect, but this has something else going on. In chronicling how wallflower Lily falls into and out of and back into love with perennial jerk Jarrod (imagine if Napoleon was just as geeky, but much more of a dick about it), writer/director Taika Waititi explores just how far love will go to find what's salvagable about a guy you'd dismiss at first, second, and fiftieth glance. Sweet, funny and, if the comparison must be made, a little bit deeper than Dynamite.
In a much more real-world application of love conquers all (or at least tries really, really hard to) we have the doc The Killer Within, in which a renowned environmental psychologist reveals to his family, friends, and co-workers that he killed his college dorm mate in 1955. That January at Swarthmore, with no warning, student Bob Bechtel took a rifle and killed fellow student Holmes Strozier as Strozier slept, in what was meant to be the beginning of a killing spree that was to take out the entire dorm.
Instead, Bechtel fired two more shots at random, dropped the rifle, and ran to his friend before confessing everything to the cops. Why he didn't carry out his plan is only one of a dozen mysteries at the heart of this film. Why come forward now? He'd served his time (after being found mentally unfit for trial he was shipped off to a mental institution for five years before being set free). Why did the victim's family forgive him? A note they sent to the judge was critical to his early release. If, as he claims, the killing was a Columbine-like response to being bullied, why does no one remember any such behaviour, in particular on the part of Strozier?
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