Winged Creatures

Just the day when my facebook page collapsed and I found myself watching at the TV again. I saw a whole pack of movies: I started with The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, then I moved on to see the last half of The Holiday; in between I saw American Idol; and then into this movie called Winged Creatures.
I was surprised because I thought the movie was about something else...maybe kind of supernatural stuff or something like that. It was a story about what happens to people who have experienced some kind of disaster (in this movie, it was a shooting; but it can also be applied to storms, hurricanes, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, and so on) and how they move around in their lives after it.
There were a couple of good actors in the movie: Kate Beckinsale, Forest Whitaker and Dakota Fanning. It was interesting seeing how many different kinds of reaction people can have after these events. You have the typical person who sees that somebody they love is in some kind of trouble, but instead of looking for the help they need, they insist that they should neither see nor talk to somebody because it doesn´t help. I wonder how people can think like that, specially when the person you care is unable to speak because of a trauma. And yet, I was able to see this girl that even though she was dealing with her own grief, hatred and anger come to see her best friend and stop him from killing himself.
What really scared me was that doctor who, with all his best intentions, gives his wife some medications mixing them with food, not being fully aware of the consequences until it´s too late and then have to run all the way to save his wife´s life. Couldn´t he be more stupid? I mean, he was a doctor, he should have known better and he was lecturing the waitress about how to care for her kid. Very hyppocrite I think.
Annie, Dakota Fanning´s film name, gave an overwhelming sense of disconnection with reality. She hung on to  her faith beliefs, although they had been forgotten, to justify her father´s death and try to ignore what had really happened. I could see that she had a problem as she kept on gathering followers but there was something in her eyes that showed the nasty, ugly truth: she wasn´t being sincere or really wanted to relive her experience. Who wouldn´t after what she saw? It was hard for her to face how her dad had been murdered and learned that people on extreme situations, no matter how tough or brave they are, still have fears and react differently: she just couldn´t understand why her father had wet his pants while he was trying to save them. She was expecting something else and she felt ashamed of what she saw, and I was taken by the way her mother talks to her and her friend to assure them that it wasn´t their fault, that it wasn´t ok to omit facts just because you didn´t like what you see (maybe she was the only true grown up with enough sense to realize how serious it was).
On the other hand, you have this man who has left gambling for good but dives right unto it as he tries to understand what happened. His lucky number seven was only fit for one night, and one night only and then he just couldn´t stop gambling and ended up mixing with a couple of shark loaners. He should have followed his own advice- quit when you are winning- instead of getting into deeper troubles. It struck me how he left the hospital, practically unnoticed and not even telling his daughter where he was headed. It seemed like he went all in because he couldn´t manage the idea that he was also dying of cancer; I don´t know but he seemed to have problems handling both difficult situations.
I just wish I´ve had some kind of experience like that, so that I could also relate, but luckily I haven´t. The closest thing that I was able to see was my sister after the 2010 earthquake in Chile. She was alone in our apartment and she had a total break; she even had to be a couple of weeks in the hospital because she couldn´t talk well (she just spoke like a million words per second) and started forgetting where the bathroom was, and even couldn´t remember where the store were at the mall. It took her all last year to recover from it, so I can say, for sure, that one thing is experiencing the disaster and another is to be a spectator, and that it sucks to be the last one because you have to rely on other people to do that (but in the end, I realized that was just what she needed).