A Random Movie Review

So much of our lives is mundane. There are things that can be counted on every day, which in a lot of ways, makes for security in knowing what’s going to happen, like the sun rising and falling every day, the ebbs and flows of the tide. But today, quite unexpectedly, I was moved by a story. It wasn’t one of those sappy emails with the animated dogs or a Hallmark card, but being sick laid up in bed, watching a movie called “Resurrecting the Champ.” I knew it was going to be about a real-life story of a writer down on his luck who comes across a heavy-weight fighter who had found his way to live on the streets. So I knew going in it had the sap-appeal, but what I also found unexpectedly was truth at the heart of the story found in all of us. The kind where people want to believe in something, sometimes so badly, that the truth gets distorted. We complain about the media twisting and bending the truth to make things easier to swallow. But what about the writer in this story who wanted to believe something so badly to get a foot forward in his career believed the homeless man on the street was who he said he was. Only to find out after the story he ran in a prominent location of the paper that it was all a lie. It almost destroyed his reputation and career, but something miraculous happened when he came to eventually learn that what was most important was the truth. He no longer needed to lie to his six-year old son about being friends with celebrities to gain his affection. It makes you wonder how much of everything we come across in life is a little bit of a twist of the truth. A commercial, a political campaign, a white lie ... We’ve all come to accept them. This movie made me question how much of these twisted lies is too much? Where is the integrity of our grandfathers? What kind of world are we creating for our children and their children? It made me want to take a step back and look at my own life. Am I as honest as I’d like to be? We’re not perfect, but if we all could strive for honesty and integrity damned the costs, I think we would be a better society, town, city, nation, world.