"ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN, ANYTHING HAPPENS ALL THE TIME"

I don't know what it is lately, but I have been picking up on poignant lines from television movies. There is something about them that stimulates a thinking exercise for me and I like that.

Take the Hollywood comedy, "This Is Where I Leave You," starring Jason Bateman and Tina Fey, for instance. Documenting the dysfunctional family of a man who lost it all, the film — based on the novel by Jonathan Tropper — follows members of a Jewish family who come together for a period of mourning after a father’s death. Along the way, they’ll probably find love interests and a new sense of respect and pride for their truly God-awful family.

One of the lines in the recently aired TV trailer for this production was, "Anything can happen. Anything happens all the time." What was is it about this prominent line, spoken by a couple as they lay on the ice of an abandoned arena, that haunts me since hearing it?

Well, there is a strong message here...Life is short. Anything could happen, and it usually does, so there is no point in sitting around thinking about all the ifs, ands and buts. Give anything a chance to happen in due course; if it is meant to happen it will. Believe it or not, the late singer Amie Winehouse expressed similar sentiments in one of her more sober moments.

But there were other lines in the trailer that also stood out for me, like:

"It would be a terrible mistake to go through life thinking people are the sum total of what you see."

"Today has other plans for both of us."

"Secrets are cancer to a family."

"Your father loved YOU, not what you did."

"It's hard to see people from your past when your present is so cataclysmically screwed up."

"I'm way too old to have this much nothing."

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around those exceptional utterances.

So much brain exercise for me stimulated by means of one well-written trailer script by the talented Jonathon Trooper. Hopefully the This Is Where I Leave You series is not cancelled by the network before I get a chance to see its debut in September. I'll be ready for more poignancy by then.