Le Week-End/LOST Week-End?

I watched a movie again last night on a DVD that I own that shook me to the core the week I first saw it at the cinema back in March, 2014.

The movie is called, 'Le Week-End' and the plot of the movie is, "Nick (Jim Broadbent) and Meg Burrows (Lindsay Duncan) are a married academic couple from Birmingham advancing in age and tension.

To mark their 30th wedding anniversary, the two embark on a trip to the place they honeymooned three decades before: Paris.

Hoping to rejuvenate their marriage, the couple arrives in Paris only for things not to go as planned [but through synchronicity it all works out].

Eventually, the two bump into Morgan (Jeff Goldblum), with whom Nick went to university and who is now a successful writer, and attend a dinner party of his that ultimately opens up a new view of life and love for the aging couple."

I'd just been to a live screening of the 2014 Academy Awards at a Brisbane cinema by myself and decided to catch a screening of 'Le Week-End' straight afterwards, as the cinema had played the trailer before the live screening of the Oscars, since I was in a very similar situation to the couple in the trailer (although not that old) I thought it might be worth a watch ... and it was, not that it saved my marriage, but because the speech Nick Burrows gives in that film described my life at the time to a tee, especially when he said, "... I'm broke ... I'm s#itting myself with fear and anxiety every moment of the day ... so think of me as falling out of a window forever, for I am truly f#cked."

'Transcend Blue III' by Joel Rea

I couldn't believe Nick's speech, as that's exactly how I felt, in free-fall, hoping that I wasn't going to bottom out.

And I meant that I literally felt like I was in free-fall.

It's a sickening feeling. 

Ironically, I didn't realize at the time that the movie 'Gravity' had scooped the pool that Oscar night while I was in free-fall mode, too:-)

I only just realized that now while I was reading what movies had won awards that year.
I was cheering for '12 Years a Slave' that day (which actually won 'Best Picture' that year), because I had felt like I was 24 years a slave before a certain Swedish furniture store made me and a few other full-time staff members redundant, so they could fill our former jobs with part-timers.

I came out of that movie thinking life is short, I'm about to lose my wife who I felt had betrayed me by calling it quits after I had lost a 24 year job, which I slaved at to try and pay off the house we were living in and remaining faithful while a lot of women had hit on me throughout those 24 years including some of her own cousins, I might add.
I could only try and put it down to bad karma carried over from a past life, because I didn't know what I had done to deserve that kind of treatment in this one.
Can you tell that I'm still pissed over ever getting married?-)
Let that be a lesson to you kiddies reading this blog ... don't get married whether you are straight or Gay (that's if the "YES" vote goes through in Australia) ... because it's a 50/50 chance that it will end in bitter failure.
Google those odds if you don't believe me.
Which is why I'm kinda glad my voting slip for Gay marriage got lost in the house move, because even though I would have voted "YES" I don't know if I believe in marriage any more after being thrown under the marriage bus.

OK rant over from the bitter divorcee and ex-Swedish furniture store worker ... for now anyway;-)
What really scared me at the time of seeing 'Le Week- End' was by the next weekend flight 370 had gone missing and on that flight was a pair of Australians named  Burrows, as in Nick and Meg Burrows from the movie 'Le Week- End'.
I was going to write a post about this at the time, but I held off until the plane was found.

Fast forward to 2017 and the plane (unbelievably) still hasn't been found.

And that newspaper clip is from the same October 4th newspaper as this post -

Tom Petty - Shadow People?

Which is ironic considering how I was feeling throughout most of 2014.
That real feeling of falling was why I came to like Tom Petty's song 'Free Fallin'' so much, although I was never a big Tom Petty fan, to be honest.

In that October 4th newspaper article about Tom's passing it explains that Tom hadn't been out to Australia since 1986 and that Tom wasn't a big fan of flying and had kept most of his touring to North America.
So, I guess he never really did learn to fly ironically.

Gravity?/Free Fallin'?
To be honest, after flight 370 disappearing from the map like the plane in the TV show 'Lost' and with another plane from the same airline getting shot down over Russia not long after, put an end to my desire to travel by plane.
Queensland family struck twice by air tragedies

"A Queensland family who lost their son and daughter-in-law in the disappearance of Malaysian flight MH370 have been hit by tragedy again with a family member on board MH17.
George and Irene Burrows' son Rodney and wife Mary were on board MH370 when it disappeared in March.

Maree Rizk, from Sunbury, north-west of Melbourne, who was one of 28 Australians killed on board MH17, was the Burrows' step-granddaughter, ABC reported."

And I have just heard this podcast this week, as well -

10.09.17 Episode 288: Brian Shipman

Brisbane paper from March 9th, 2014.
Monkey?!

Where Brian talks about following the monkey.

The March 9th, 2014 headlines telling of a
missing Brisbane couple named Burrows 

MH370: Father of Rodney Burrows says 'there's no hope' after debris confirmed to be from missing Malaysia Airlines flight

"Rodney and Mary Burrows, who were two of the six Australians on board the aircraft, were on a long-planned holiday to celebrate their retirement when the plane went missing on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014."

Life is truly bizarre, but not always a pleasant journey, I think.

I have no plans to spend a weekend outside of Australia just for the fun of it, while the Burrows photo haunts my thoughts of flying overseas.
And I have no plans of ever getting married and going on a honeymoon again, either.

If wishes were fishes? Wish you were here?

That scene above from 'Le Week-End' also reminds me of a song from one of my favourite bands that I would play throughout my divorce that summed things up pretty well at the time.

I guess I'll just have to learn to fly?

"When the call isn’t answered, you experience a kind of drying up and a sense of life LOST." -- Joseph Campbell

UPDATE: October 16th, 2017

OK, now I'm starting to think that the universe is reading my blog posts and just f#cking with me.
After writing this post yesterday I now see a news story about a Chinese space station, which was based on the same one from the movie 'Gravity' that Sandra Bullock made her way to, is actually falling from the skies now in real life.

Tiangong-1: An out-of-control Chinese space lab is hurtling towards Earth