Last Friday, I went to the screening of The Central Park Five, and I have to admit that I did not experience the kind of visceral response to the film that I had imagined I would have experienced. I know from the get-go that I am a God-awful cynic, and that tendency might have gotten in the way of my ability to recognize the film's higher purpose. I did not need to see the film in order to recognize the gross injustice it chronicled, but I am certain that there were others in the audience, especially the young people in attendance, who might need to see it for exactly that purpose. I needed the film to accomplish more than just exposing racism, and I am not certain that it did.
Since the screening, I have had a blank screen open on my desktop where I had hoped to write first a review and then later on an open letter to the Central Park Five and its directors, but I have not found the words to accomplish either. Often a flurry of ideas come to my mind about the film, but those ideas, I surmised, would be received as the work of cynic that few would have any interest in absorbing, let alone engaging. So I am left here with this blank page on my desktop, with the only evidence of movement on the page is the arbitrary motion of a still blinking cursor indicating where the content of my response to the film will be placed whenever I get around to entering it.
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