You've surely heard about the huge fire at Universal Studios, right?
Thank God, no one was hurt in the fire. But lots of material things got burned in the fire. Well, did you read that the fire burned the prop used in the movie Bruce Almighty?
Why is this of interest?
Bruce Almighty is the blasphemous movie in which the movie character named Bruce complains to God that He is doing a bad job in governing the world. So, in the movie, God gives Bruce power to be God for a while and do as he wishes.
Here's a longer report on the movie Bruce Almighty from Wikipedia:
Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) is a TV news reporter at Eyewitness News Channel 7 in Buffalo, New York (WKBW-TV) who fails to get a job as an anchorman and, after a series of other bad luck incidents, complains to God that he is both treating him unfairly and is doing a poor job as supreme deity. Bruce is then contacted by God (Morgan Freeman) who grants Bruce all of his supreme power to see if he can prove that he can do a better job.
Bruce quickly uses his new-found powers for personal gain. He sabotages the colleague that screwed him over so that he can get a better job, transforms his car from a Datsun 240Z to a Saleen S7, allows his favorite hockey team, the Buffalo Sabres, to get over a slump and move to the Stanley Cup, and enhances his girlfriend's breasts and sex drive. He is then reminded that he also has to take care of other people's problems. Meanwhile, Bruce endangers his relationship with his girlfriend, Grace Connelly (Jennifer Aniston), through his self-centered behavior. In the end, Bruce realizes that God's powers are best left for God to handle and graciously asks for God to take control of his life.
The movie portrays God as a wise but smart-aleckey elderly man. God quotes a line from one of Carrey's other movies ("Alrighty then", from Ace Ventura), and tells Bruce that if he wants, Bruce can fix all the world's problems in a few minutes, knowing full well from eons of experience that he cannot. Bruce receives millions of prayers, all from, according to God, his single town.
Having to listen to the prayers of the whole world, one can only imagine how God feels. Bruce is thus able to realize just how much work God must do to keep creation "in line." As Bruce and God themselves put it in two scenes, where Bruce wants the person he loves to love him:
Bruce: How do you make someone love you without affecting their free will?
God: Heh, welcome to my world, son. If you come up with an answer to that one, you let me know.
And a second scene over prayers:
God: You made a mess of things, huh?
Bruce: There were so many [people]. I just gave them what they wanted. [Bruce had answered YES to all incoming prayers.]
God: Yeah, but since when does anyone have a clue what they want?
This scene continues with poignant lines in which God allows Bruce to understand the true nature of people's problems and how to resolve them:
God: Parting your soup is not a miracle, Bruce, it's a magic trick. A single mom who's working two jobs and still finds time to take her kid to soccer practice, that's a miracle. A teenager who says no to drugs and yes to an education, that's a miracle. People want me to do everything for them, and what they don't realize is - they have the power. You want to see a miracle, son? Be the miracle.
Bruce then begins to use his powers to make sure that he runs things in Buffalo the way he should. He goes through the prayers properly and doesn't just say yes to all. He apologises to Evan(the employee who he sabotaged) and informs him that he quit the job and it is now his. He stands with the homeless man who has appeared to him at times with messages about life and supports him in his written sign messages to people on the street.
He toilet trains the dog properly without using spiritual intervention. At the moment he succeeds in doing this, Debbie, Grace's sister talks to him about how when she gives her kids one last bit of ice cream or tells them a story, Grace prays, a lot of the time for him. That evening looking at the prayers he is receiving he looks for those from Grace and notices one just coming in. He then uses his powers to see a vision of where Grace is. He sees her crying that she feels emotional pangs because she still loves him but feels the hurt of what he did to her in his egocentric behavior and wants it to stop.
At this point of the movie, a depressed Bruce walks onto the highway and is hit by a truck. He talks to God in heaven, who asks him "what he really wants." After Bruce asks for Grace to find a man to make her truly happy, God brings Bruce back to life and Grace returns to him at the hospital. In the end, Bruce has changed his outlook on life - he is happy with the "cutesy" stories he covers instead of being "Mister Exclusive" during the time when he used his powers to make miraculous occurrences happen, donates blood, and marries Grace.
The ending scene features a slow close-up of the homeless man. As the camera gets closer the man turns into God, revealing that the homeless man was God all along.
No comments:
Post a Comment