Philomena (2013)

09 Feb 2014

silly humor

thought provoking thinking
empathy and sympathy

fresh perspective
cliché message

unexpected outcome
acceptable suspense (developments predicted minutes before)

untraceable (natural) acting

it is an interesting story. But the philomena character is very out of the standard as it seems. I will never understand why she still has her faith: is it an act of following the “true” and original spirit of jesus or is it just cognitive lazyness? either way, her respect for the nuns in the end is astonishing. I can see her point on being angry is tiresome and hard and pointless, but the fact that she want no retribution is fundamentally against my philosophy: if certain people are so apathetic and unable to even accept the existence of regular human emotions (a.k.a. the nuns), then they shall be punished before there’s natural death to warn others of similar background to behave.

another interesting pov is from the nuns. I can “see” (but not understand or agree) why they separate the children in the first place (say, to save them from their “sinned” mothers etc.) but I absolutely cannot understand why would she stop Michael A Hess from finding his true mother at the end of his life (esp. lying about how the mother just abondoned him). I really want to see her justify her action (and then laugh at her). That is clearly an abnormal artifact of a stongly organized, fundamentalist church. Which brings me so much closer to the Buddha again. No Buddhist monk would do esp. the said last act as 孽缘也是缘，因果轮回，一切都是自然。 Which brings me another point: the real good things never advertise how good they are. That’s why 高僧从来不传教，只是点化。