What you sow is what you reap

MY FAVORITE MOVIE By Terence Eyre Belangoy (The Philippine Star) Updated February 11, 2006 12:00 AM


The 27-year-old author has a Business Economics degree from the University of the Philippines-Diliman. He is a huge Ben Affleck fan and hails from Dipolog City, Zamboanga del Norte.

The first time I saw Ben Affleck was in the Matt Damon-Robin Williams starrer, Good Will Hunting. Even then, I had some sort of premonition that he will be a huge star. He has that mesmerizing screen persona and definitely the looks. It was the same reaction I had when I first saw Keanu Reeves in the Pointbreak, before he became The Keanu Reeves that he is today.
True enough, Affleck and buddy Matt Damon went on to snag the Oscar for Best Screenplay. For a while, Affleck became the other half of Hollywood’s newest "Golden Boys."
For an actor who got his biggest break by winning the Academy Award for Best Screenplay, you would expect Affleck to go on and make well-made, intelligent and ground-breaking films.

Alas, his succeeding films were a string of no-brainers: Armageddon, Daredevil, Forces of Nature, Gigli, Jersey Girl, to name some. Despite these, I still remain a huge Ben Affleck fan (martyr?).
An exception among Ben Affleck’s so-so films is Changing Lanes. Yes, it is an action movie (where Affleck co-starred with Samuel Jackson).
But it is an action movie with much, much more. That’s what made the movie surprisingly delightful. Nothing delights a moviegoer (and a huge fan at that!) more than seeing his expectations met, and even surpassed.
Underneath the action sequences (not really hard-action since the "action" only involves, at most, car crashes and verbal tussles) are lessons on integrity and doing the right thing. Watching Changing Lanes is like reading Stephen Covey between the book jacket of a Tom Clancy best-seller.
The movie has an inauspicious and simple plot. Two men (Affleck, as a hotshot lawyer and Jackson as a marginalized and struggling New Yorker) are driving in the crazy streets of New York. Affleck is hurrying on his way to work. To overtake the gridlock and the mass of cars ahead of him, Affleck leaves his lane and swerves to the other lane, forcefully hitting Jackson’s car and smashing it to a side rail. The car is a total wreck. The pompous lawyer, to avoid further delay, merely promises that an insurance guy will look into the accident. He quickly dispatches himself, inadvertently leaving behind an attache case of vital documents for his boss. The documents get into Jackson’s hands. It is at this point when the tale of hatred, revenge, of putting one over the other (lamangan) starts. Jackson wants to be compensated for the wrecked car. He also seeks recompense for arriving late (for the nth time!) at a very crucial family case which the judge has now decided against him, consequently alienating him from his beloved wife and children. Affleck, upon the other hand, just wants the extremely important documents back.
All these troubles were prompted by a very simple and innocuous act of swerving to a lane and trying to overtake other motorists. (A very ubiquitous occurrence in our thoroughfares.)
The movie’s action scenes merely serve as a backdrop to the moral it is driving at: no matter who you are, what you have, or whatever your status in life, integrity and doing the right thing are of utmost importance. Even a very simple act of staying at your intended lane in the street tells a lot about you.
The movie’s catchphrase says it all: "One wrong turn deserves another." Basically, this is just a permutation of the maxims "What you sow is what you reap" and "Do not do unto others what you do not want others to do unto you." It is the sum total of all the tips found in most self-help books integrity diagrams.
It is quite amusing to find all these morals in an action movie. It seems like a primer for good driving or a courtesy-on-the-road campaign. Yet the movie is for me the smartest Affleck has starred in for years. Now, if only all those kamikaze drivers in our major thoroughfares could watch this movie and learn a thing or two from it!

 

Changing Lanes

justifiedmaster.blogspot.com/What you sow is what you reap

Seventy-two units or Seventy-two million

(This essay appeared in my column JUSTIFIED)

Forbes Asia magazine has released its list of Philippines’ richest people which includes the likes of Henry Sy, Lucio Tan, the Gokongweis, and the Zobel de Ayalas. More or less on the same month, the Nobel Prize committee also released its 2008 Nobel Prize winners which include one economist whose works I had read, New York Times-columnist Paul Krugman.

Which would you rather be: super rich or super smart?

The apparent inconsistency between academically inclined people and financially endowed ones is quite well-documented. There is even a book by financial guru Robert Kiyosaki titled “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” supporting this discrepancy. In that book, he posited that academically successful people do not necessarily become rich while most rich people were not academically successful. Apparently, Kiyosaki’s research revealed that there are skills rich people have which academically-inclined or “intelligent” folks haven’t learned. In one issue of Forbes magazine, it was reported that non-college graduates who are on its billionaires’ list have an aggregate net worth several times heftier than the Ivy-Leaguers. Grades then are not an indicator of financial success.

Would well-schooled people have a hard time becoming rich? Are our schools or educational system to blame for not teaching us the financial skills needed to succeed in life (at least financially)?

This would-you-rather-be-rich-or-smart question is deceptively hard to answer. It’s not as easy as answering, “Coke or Pepsi?” where one has an immediate preference. It’s more like the chicken-or-egg question. It’s actually like choosing between becoming Bill Gates or becoming Albert Einstein. (Incidentally, Time magazine chose Einstein as their Person of the 20th Century over all other contenders which include Bill Gates.)

One may be tempted to choose becoming rich over being intelligent. That would not be an easy choice for one can be the target of jokes or tirades or one can become very, very insecure if in the company of intelligent people who have also become moderately successful financially. The other side of the dilemma is to choose being intelligent over becoming rich. One would rather be an Einstein than be a Gates. If you’re intelligent –really, really intelligent—you can be of help to society; you might be able to discover things or espouse ideas which could change the world and make the world a better place than you have experienced it, one may be tempted to say. But then, how would you answer the rejoinder: “What is the point of being intelligent and what’s the point of having all those degrees if you can’t be rich?”

So would you rather be intelligent than rich? Or should you strive to become rich and forget about getting too schooled and too educated? No ready answers. One thing I know for sure though: Make the best of what you have, be the best of who you are. It’s a choice anybody can easily make.

(SHOUTOUTS: Hi! to Atty. Richelle Alistado, Atty. Aileen Zorilla (Febiar), Mark Henry Borromeo, Carmelchristee Woo, Me-ann Macute, Gerbert Maglangit)