By the time I was buying a ticket for “The Sheep Detectives,” it was already 12:46 p.m. The movie was scheduled to start at 12:45 p.m.
When I entered the cinema, there was a Tagalog movie onscreen. Oh. Thank God, it’s still trailer time. It was only when I was seated that I realized it wasn’t a trailer, it was the movie. Wait, what? I checked my ticket and there it was: “The Sheep Detectives,” Cinema 3. I was in Cinema 3, but obviously watching the wrong movie. So I left the theater to alert the cinema staff, and that’s when I saw a high school friend who told me she had already informed them about the mix-up. Oh. Okay.
Because of that mistake, I was able to catch the movie from the start.
I love watching movies so I have something to write about, since I don’t like the usual column topics anymore: politics and politicians. Especially with the teary drama in the Senate and the shooting that preceded it, plus the missing rock, er, Bato.
“The Sheep Detectives” is a nice movie, by the way. There’s this part where the sheep had to cross a road. After roaming around on grass and pasture since birth, a paved road was somewhat alien to them. They were afraid to cross it. Until a chicken passed by them and proceeded to cross the road. That made me laugh. Haha.
There’s that popular joke: “Why did the chicken cross the road?”
Answer: “To get to the other side.”
I, for one, am also afraid to cross roads, especially the busy ones. I remember in the early ’80s when a cousin crossed a wide road at Divisoria in Manila. She told me that she was shouting “Bi***” while running from one side to the other. “Bi***” as in the Bisaya term for a woman’s private part.
The road that the chicken easily crossed in “The Sheep Detectives” was a narrow one.
What’s amazing in the movie is the sheep’s protocol of counting from three to one to help them forget everything. Each time something bad happened, they’d close their eyes and count, “Three, two, one.” And, voilà, refresh, reset, reboot their memories.
How nice if that were true for humans, too. But how could we learn hard lessons if we always had that choice to forget? We even grieve for loved ones who have Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia. We want to remember beautiful memories and learn from the bad ones.
And the sheep in the movie believed they turn into clouds when they die. How nice. Some people believe humans become angels when they die. Which is better? But no one, aside from Jesus, has come back from the dead. The afterlife remains a mystery. That’s why we grieve when a loved one dies: for our loss, and for the lack of assurance of where they will go. My departed loved ones are sometimes in my dreams, and that somehow assures me they’re okay wherever they are now.
The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” is the movie’s theme song: “But I would walk five hundred miles / And I would walk five hundred more / Just to be the man who walked a thousand miles / To fall down at your door.” How apt for a flock of sheep literally walking around the farm looking for clues and eventually leaving the farm to solve their shepherd’s murder.
