Could be the movie that had the greatest impact on me of all time, no doubt more than likely because I was going through the identical same struggle with fatherhood at the moment I saw it. It was shortly after release on satellite in summer of 1995 (we had an early 10-foot dish) and I saw it with my "new" family at our home in an old mining town in Arizona. I had just gotten home from work and in stone cold sobriety managed to see myself in turn so exquisitely entrapped in the same quandaries as "Hector" that specifically at the moment of the simple act of his being given a pair of boots during the African shipwreck vignette, I had to run outside into the cool starry night. The top of my head seemed to explode and my "self" spontaneously shifted levels and merged with the consciousness of the universe. I unaccountably became a bodhisattva for some months (i. e. you could say I flipped my lid.) My co-workers were terrified of me when I returned to work, but my family and most everyone else I knew marveled at the change and soon grew to approve of it. For a while I was like John Travolta's character in "Phenomenon." This kind of effect from watching a movie isn't unheard of in history. In fact it occurred to me on another occasion upon reading a tiny little book by an author with the pseudonym "Alcyone." That a movie or book can have that type of effect on another human being implies that it's nothing short of marvelous, some kind of mystic key. I don't want to be a spoiler so I'll say nothing more than that. I saw it only that one time, and it worked magic on me that I still can't comprehend. What a director...
Review of Being Human
