I have been a big fat slug about posting about movies. I haven't seen all that many but I always feel as if I owe the GP at least a mention of the ones I get to.

So I'll start with 127 Hours with James Franco. In fact, the whole movie is only James FRanco playing Aron R as he gets caught in a cave-like space and cuts his own arm off to survive. You already know this story.

But what makes this film so good is that Aron is not really a hero on any level. He's very savvy about the "great outdoors" and super savvy about how to manage the curves that come his way. I loved the opening scene with him riding his bike through the desert with reckless abandon--all that energy and delight in pushing the landscape envelope. I also loved his encounter with two young women and the adventures he talked them into taking. And I loved the way, when his arm got stuck in a crevice by a rock he had himself dislodged as he did his "I can do anything" moves, that he was brilliant about accessing his danger and figuring out a number of different ways to extricate himself.

But the guy is also a totally selfish SOB who takes such chances without letting his family and friends where he is going or what he plans to do. It's like being told again and again not to swim alone but he takes off into the desert with disregard for those who really need to know where he. This, of course, could have proved deadly.

That said, the film is predictable because the viewer knows he will cut his arm off to survive. Yet Danny Boyle makes it a cliff-hanging suspense thriller because you never know when that's going to happen. And when it does, you know that Aron is dehydrated, starving, hallucinating, and in a mental state that one cannot even imagine. However, the gore of the arm-cutting still knocks one out--it's literally only a couple of minutes of screen time, but oh my, it's almsot impossible to watch. I was alternately on the edge of my seat with suspense, and cringing in it with horror.

This film is not for the faint of heart, but having read the literature of trauma for 15 years, and watched more films about catastrophe than I can count, the film is a useful addition to thinking about how one survives trauma. Or at least survives enough to deal with what it entails.

Franco will probably get an Oscar nod, but I don't think a lot of folks will actually see this film.