the corner office

Sat on the couch with pups climbing all over me, and watched two movies this evening. First, She's All That. Sweet escapist oh-happy-days-at-high-school movie with young love and likeable characters who have everything, a la Beverley Hills 90210. I'm always a sucker for these sorts of movies, but don't tell anyone. But who is this Freddie Prinze Jr chap? Have I missed a whole chunk of popular culture in the past decade?

The second movie was A Time To Kill. Not a bad courtroom drama. In this, Samuel L Jackson (always rocking) plays a father in the deep South who kills two white men who are being tried for raping and trying to kill his 10 year old daughter. His case is taken on by a young lawyer, who tries to argue a case of temporary insanity. [Spoiler] Of course, Ronwen says to me "I've seen this before, it's hectic, and he just goes to the gas chamber in the end." So there's me watching the whole damned movie expecting the movie to end one way, but thankfully Ronwen had remembered incorrectly, and it ends on a happy note.

I like happy endings, but in this case I have to admit that the ending was a little shaky. Ultimately, the temporary insanity charge boiled down to 'would you blame him for killing these men' - which nobody in their right mind would, except that revenge and vigilantism are different things to the rule of law, and a violent attempt to seek justice is not necessarily the same thing as being insane. The real issue in this movie should have been reconciling the anger and sense of powerlessness of seeing injustice happen, especially when racism seeks to pervert any notion of justice, with the desirability of not taking the law into one's own hands. The movie tends to skirt around that and focus instead on simply establishing that if a crime is awful enough, you should be allowed to get away with murder for avenging it. Despite being emotionally stirring, it's a little frustrating because I have no doubt that it's a rare case where one would get away with something like this in real life. Still, any movie with a cast that has Donald Sutherland, Kiefer Sutherland, Oliver Platt, Kevin Spacey and Sandra Bullock doing their thang is well worth the watch.