tell me about it

Lions for Lambs is being panned by critics all over the place but…I actually kinda liked the movie. Sure, it was a little preachy and a little in-your-face with its preachiness, but I thought that the point of the movie wasn’t to, uh, make a point per se, but to make you think.

It made me think.

I thought about how George Bush is facing the greatest slump in approval ratings that any president in the history of the United States. I thought about how Hollywood is determined to have its say, even if their government won’t listen. I thought about how if a local filmmaker produced a film like this one, in a local context, he’d probably become the local example of why you don’t make films like these in Singapore. I thought about how if Singapore went to war, it’d be my father, my brother, my husband out there fighting and dying for the country.

(Okay, so maybe my father’s too old, and my brother would probably migrate his butt somewhere else, and I’d be begging my husband to do the same.)

But that’s the whole point of the movie. Made me realize that if there was a war, I’d be one of those cutting my losses and running, not staying behind to defend the country, or wanting my loved ones to stay and defend the country. And so I wonder - despite my inherent love of Singapore, even though I don’t think I’d ever want to settle down permanently anywhere else - why I have no desire to give up anything in its defense.

Maybe it’s just because I don’t like pain and suffering and losing my loved ones to war, and if I had the means to run, I would.