Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Too Fast Forward

Tonight, as a family, we watched It’s A Wonderful Life, except it was called Click. This is a funny and heartwarming movie about a guy who misses all the good stuff in his life thanks to Christopher Walken. When he realizes it, he’s allowed to go back and do it all over. It’s like a 107-minute video for “The Cat’s In The Cradle,” with The Fonz.

I can’t believe I’m reviewing a year-old movie, but it was actually pretty entertaining and, mixed in with the adolescent humor, simulated dog sex and science fiction, was a message. Our society is busy. Somewhere among work and school and planned activities and meetings and phone calls and E-mail, we need to just stop and watch each other. I need to watch my kids grow, learning to crawl and then walk, talk and become little people. We should stop to sit with our friends and ask them how their day was or how their kids are doing, and keep in touch with family members scattered across the country.

Adam Sandler, of all people, shows us that when we race through our lives to get to what we think is important, we miss the small things, the truly important moments that make up life itself. His days speed up into weeks and months and, before he knows it, he’s skipped entire years of his loved one’s lives until, in the end, he’s dying and he feels alone, even with his family close around him. In this last scene it’s night, dark, and rain is falling, mixing in with his tears, and what we take from this is that life is too short, whether we have a special remote control to speed things up or whether we’re simply not paying attention.

Well, we take that from this last scene, and we take the urge to find whoever put all that make-up on Kate Beckinsale’s flawless face, making her look 40 years older, and punch that SOB in his stupid throat.