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I thought of that story today when I saw a picture of someone feeding presumably tamed cheetahs in their kitchen. It’s not the kind of animal I’d like to argue about who gets the sofa with, but maybe they’ve got lots of sofas. That made me think about those two showbusiness brothers in America who had a house and a circus act full of lions until inevitably, one of the lions wasn’t having it any more. And because I couldn’t remember their name I typed lions and brothers into Google and came up with a film I’d never heard of, Secondhand Lions.<\/p>\n
It’s an American film. It’s got Robert Duval from just about everything and Michael “Doors Off” Caine, big box office stars. So let me re-phrase that. It’s a Hollywood film. And if it’s a Hollywood film there are strict rules for the script. It will have a happy ending. It will leave the audience believing that love, mom, Gahd and apple pie will prevail. That good will win and evil will lose. That there is hope and truth and justice and bad things will happen to bad people sooner or later and they’re never happy, really.<\/p>\n
But for all that dishonesty it sounds like a good Sunday afternoon film. A misunderstood and lonely boy goes to stay with two old men who seem crusty and useless but really they had an exciting life and both have hearts of gold as well as a cellar full of it. There are filmic crises to keep the audience in the cinema and during one of them Duval responds with a piece of his “What Every Boy Needs to Know…” speech, that the actual truth is not as important as the\u00a0belief\u00a0in ideals like good winning over evil, honor, and true love.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\nHollywood. Or Claire and Ben, both believing that in Not Your Heart Away<\/a>, albeit for different reasons, she because she had to with her whole life falling to pieces and Ben because he thought ‘good’ resided within her jeans.<\/p>\nThe moot point is the Oxford comma, the issue of where you put the comma without altering the meaning of a sentence, changing Ella Fitzgerald’s despairing “What Is This Thing Called Love” <\/a>to the utterly fatuously funny, querulous “What Is This Thing Called, Love?” that Terry Scott or Bernard Cribbins might have sung.<\/p>\n“The belief in ideals like good winning over…..true love.” And sometimes, when things go completely wrong, that’s what happens. And it’s the saddest thing, when you know what had to be done had to be done, that it’s better for the person you love that it was done, but it isn’t going to get you closer to them at all. So maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s true. Today, these last few weeks, I don’t know the answer to that any more.<\/p>\n
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