The very same day in Austin, Texas, an ex-marine named Charles Whitman, having already killed his wife and mother, climbed up to the top of the clock tower at the University of Texas. With his high powered rife, he shot and killed 16 people including an unborn baby and wounded dozens of others......
And something new entered American society and culture......something that seemed to crawl directly from hell itself........the hidden monsters that walked among us,their minds gone haywire, pretending to be human beings......they now found a way to cast their shadow across the entire country, raining death upon us from a God-like perch.
51 years later, the monsters still abound........some of them surrendering their humanity to evil ideologies, some of them simply surrendering their sanity altogether.....for no reasons we can comprehend.....
The only thing they have in common........the ease with which they acquire vast amounts of deadly weaponry........
The only thing that's changed.........their increased capacity for higher body counts due to the ease with which they acquire automatic guns.......guns designed not for hunting or home protection, but for the mass combat of warfare.
We clearly didn't plan on picking this movie to post about today........but we couldn't stop thinking about it, any more than we couldn't stop thinking about the horrific news of Charles Whitman when it raced across the Temple dorm rooms on that August Monday so long ago......
And now we have a fresh ocean of blood awash in the streets of Las Vegas......
"Tower" is a visually arresting documentary account of Whitman's rampage, rendered through a vivid mixture of archival footage and rotoscoping animation of actors playing the victims and survivors of the atrocity.......
It unfolds as riveting as any modern day thriller and far more horrifying than the worst scary movie could ever hope to be. The monster that stalks this film was real........as real as the current crop of monsters. (To be sure, there are ruefully ironic moments here......the armed Texas bystanders returning Whitman's fire made it even more dangerous for the two cops and a civilian who went up to the tower to take down the madman.......not to mention the sight of people taking cover under a massive statue of Jefferson Davis....)
There's tragedy, grief and ultimately some measure of triumph in the survivors' individual stories......(toward the end of the film, the actual people appear as well their animated counterparts.....including Claire Wilson, whose gunshot wounds killed her unborn child, but who later adopted an African orphan) If ever there was a film that truly celebrated the human spirit (the claim made by so many actors clutching their golden statuettes)......it's this one.
As for today's events, we'll do no liberal bleating here about Congress's failure to stand up to the NRA and demand tougher checks on people who buy automatic weapons. Why bother? It didn't happen when a slew of innocent toddlers had their brains, bellies and chests shredded by a creature with an automatic rifle. Why would anything change now? It's the NRA's world, we just duck and cover in it.......
Today, Baby Orange briefly masqueraded as an actual President in the only way he's capable of......reading off a Teleprompter. But we remember him howling to his redhats that he'd keep Hilary from taking their guns away from them........even encouraging them to take her out.....2nd Amendment-style.......make America blood-soaked again......
The Trumpanzees can rest easy......everyone's guns are safe......especially the ones belonging to psychotic lunatics. I suppose we'll just bury the dead, forget about it.......and maybe start wearing Kevlar vests and helmets to public events and shopping malls....
Getting back to "Tower"......seek it out, by all means......it's a compelling signpost of where random evil, fully equipped to dispense death and agony, became as American as apple pie.....4 stars (****)........and the BQ's thoughts and prayers go out to the Las Vegas victims and their loved ones....
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