Better man!

A friend and I were watching 'Lord of War'. I told her to watch the title sequence for I think it's one of the best ever. She saw the whole thing and said it was 'nice'. 'Nice'? Why was it just 'nice'. Why wasn't it 'awesome'. Or 'out-of-this-world'. I thought it was fucking fantastic. I wonder.

You see this friend isn't from my background. She doesn't work in advertising. She is a doctor and spent her life reading doctory things, and doing doctory stuff. While I come from advertising and do advertising things- which effectively means drinking all night, reading stuff you won't wipe your arse with, fucking around all day and being mean and horrid to people who don't belong in advertising. I'm full of myself, and liquor all the time. While she drips with the milk of human kindness.

The reason I think I liked the title sequence is sort of complex. Allow me to explain. First of all, the camera angles. Film opens on Nicholas Cage's head. Actually the back of his head, and continues with a first person view of the life of a bullet being manufactured and its journey across the world, to Africa. Now I know my friend is not schooled in the business of film shoots and doesn't know much of camera angles, and how hard it would have been to shoot it thus. So I concede the point.

The next shot sees the bullet loaded into a crate and shut, only to open and show a Russian officer inspecting the cargo. This I am sure, barely registers as a blip in my friends's radar. As its some news she read in passing. Like "The east block funds terror in Africa" or some such headline.

While I have read of it before my time, but with much enthusiasm, (I was 13 when the Berlin wall went down) I've followed ever step of the communist era, complete with Soviet vetted Russian Folk tales in every Russian book fair in India. And of 'Afghanistan' and of the 'Red Army Faction' in Germany and 'Ilich Ramírez Sánchez' and the 'Baader-Meinhoff' group, and how the CIA and Interpol stopped it. I'm not a Communist by any stretch of the imagination. I merely find the era fascinating. Where would Fredric Forsythe and Robert Ludlum be without them. In the gutters, I imagine.

The next shot arrives in an African state, for the person, once more prising the lid off is a black man. (I'm brown, so I'm allowed to say black. (You whites can wait till you qualify.) She also looks at with no response. Since it's again been a headline on a newspaper, years back. For me, I followed the african conflict and still do. I read about Che' in the Congo, the massacre at Rhwanda, the problem in Uganda and everything. I have read, watched and heard every news from these lands and feel the pain.

The third sequence is of someone who picks up the round and fills it into a magazine. And since I've been a state level shooter, I know how good the camera angle is. This we can leave out of discussion, since not many among you are sportsmen of this kind.

The final shot had the round chambered in the barrel and the barrel pointed to many people before firing the bullet from the chamber, that speeds towards an innocent civilian.

This is where it all breaks down. For when the shot hit the man between his eyes, I didn't. But she did.

And so my friends, the judgement is yours to make. Though I am not religious, merely spiritual, as most people who know me knows.

I shall leave you with something from the bible.

"If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love,
I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing."

She had love on her side. While I had knowledge. Who's the better for it.