Month: July 2012

“And You Know These Bad Men by Sight?”

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / Leave a comment

Harrison Ford’s Witness is one of my all time favorite films. The Wiki entry includes these lines:

Witness was generally well received by critics and earned eight Academy Award nominations (including Weir’s first and Ford’s sole nomination to date).

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film four out of four stars, calling it “first of all, an electrifying and poignant love story. Then it is a movie about the choices we make in life and the choices that other people make for us. Only then is it a thriller—one that Alfred Hitchcock would have been proud to make.” He concluded, “We have lately been getting so many pallid, bloodless little movies—mostly recycled teenage exploitation films made by ambitious young stylists without a thought in their heads—that Witness arrives like a fresh new day. It is a movie about adults, whose lives have dignity and whose choices matter to them. And it is also one hell of a thriller.”

I’ve never been able to shake some scenes, and the clip above is one particular sticky example. It replays in my mind often, and lately every day.

Some critics dismiss Witness as “just another cop movie.” Others praise it for being “devoid of easy moralizing.”

This Sunday morning I am asking myself, what does my country want to be? Is the 21st Century U.S.A.  just another cop movie? Or will we be willing to go deeper?

Wishing you a day of peace and reflection.

Intimacy Musings: Being There

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 11 Comments

I keep threatening to write something rather lengthy and formal about intimacy. I’m not sure  that I ever will, but I had an experience this morning that reminded me yet again how that kind of closeness and trust reaches beyond most other relationships.

The doorbell rang. A friend I haven’t spoken to or even emailed with in the better part of a year was on the doorstep. “Here,” she said. She handed me three different containers of alcohol. “I need to get these out of my house.”

You don’t have to drive to my house to get rid of alcohol. You can just pour it down the drain. Sometimes, a person drives to your house because they need you. They need you to know they are in trouble, and they trust you to help.

We have choices, don’t we?

We can accept things at face value, or we can choose to see what people are trying to tell us.

I need you.

I remember the line in the John Cusack film Say Anything, when the girl who broke his heart shows up and says, “I need you.” He asks, “Do you need someone, or do you just need me?”

She hesitates. I think she hesitates because she really doesn’t know the answer.

Then he says, “It doesn’t matter.”

Building intimacy is about letting it not matter. It’s about being there, without too many questions. Just be there.