Home is Where the Heart is - Beasts of the Southern Wild

"The whole universe depends on everything fitting together, just right."

The night after watching Beasts of the Southern Wild in a stunned, silenced audience at Petaluma's downtown movie theater, I dreamed of weird floating devices, open water and attempts to make a sort of stone soup for my sons from old socks. I couldn't bring myself to serve them this strange, desperate dinner of broth and cotton and awoke with the oddly distinct taste of old socks in my mouth. Asleep and awake, I haven't been able to, nor feel inclined to shake off the images and the music and the unforgettable characters of this stunning film. We are all beasts. That's perfectly clear right at the start of this sublime spotlight on the defiant people of the Bayou cut off from the world by a broken levee.

Comments

[Frank Simpson]

As we entered the elevator in the parking deck after the movie, we got into a discussion of what the beast represented with another couple. The collective take of that discussion--whether we were right or wrong--was that the beast represented adulthood. Going to have to see it again. By the bye, I really liked the technical aspects of the film. Then I read that it was shot with handheld 16 mm cameras. Now that is truly remarkable. On a personal level I can testify to the "accuracy" of the settings conveyed in the film. If this film does not win big at the Oscars, I will be amazed.