The Shadow Dancer

The story started where the great writer Weldon Parish stop writing since his wife’s death, and Jeremy was sent by a book publisher to convince him to write again, after 20 years.


At a nice and beautiful village in Italy, where life seems perfect and beautiful in every sense. The dirty stone house, the perfect mountain village, the crystal clear oasis and the breathtaking scenery of the valley. Life seems to be alive there, start to makes me wonder why would we want to deteorate our lifestyle in the city. Why can’t we leave everything we have behind, and move to our perfect place and live our perfect life? What are we reluctant to leave behind?

Weldon stop writing due to heartache in the beginning, but later he was afraid. He is a talented and creative writer, and every creative person is supposed to behave slightly out of norm, lunatic so to say. He likes writing, and is he afraid of writing? He is afraid of failing, not being as great as he used to be. Because of fear for failure, he has to stop something which he likes so much, where is heart yearning to do it. Is the result all that important, that we actually stop doing the things that we like? He had much fear in him, and he is tearing his life apart. He needs an unsuspecting life savior, Jeremy.

There is the beautiful Isabella (daughter of Weldon, Jeremy's love interest), which eyes look like someone who had fallen in love at the first sight. I remember her eye and facial expression, but I just can’t recall from which movie. Yes (after some googling), Joe Black. The ever so demure and soft girl which would capture the heart of every guys she crosses path with. Dancing is still a fantastic thing to do. After dancing for so long, it makes me wonder did I dance with my heart, or with my brain and counting the steps. Perhaps there are differences in learning and the actual dancing, but I don’t do much actual dancing, do I?


What else if life about, besides fear and love? Sometimes in order to build something good, we need to break something old down which we already put in much time and effort into it. To rewrite a novel perhaps, after writing a pretty good 100 pages? Move to someplace we want to but don’t dare to do it, after building our career and life in another place for the past 20 years. Why can’t we do it, is the questions we have to ask ourselves if we have a good reason for it.

The Shadow Dancer is a nice movie, with good casts, amazing background, mind intriguing dialogue and a comforting feeling. It makes we wonder what is stopping me from moving closer to nature, and start a grapevine (or plantation), while writing a book (or developing a software). Why do we buy another brick block in the congested city, and try to make more money to secure our future against the ever rising cost of living? I guess we are all the rats trapped in the rat rice, where we can’t see beyond our race track.

To a better tomorrow, with less fear and more life.

"why do you want to be a writer?"
"because I can't think of anything else I would want to do."