I meant to write about this chilling film of Keanu Reeves I recently saw and the very effective Al Pacino about the devil-in-disguise persona and this budding, ambitious lawyer that became an easy prey to fall in sin as the lure for fame and wealth were presented to him in an attractive job offer in a New York law firm.

I watched it in HBO last weekend, and it affected me so in a way that it frightened me to the bones than any horror flick I’ve seen. And yet, this was not a horror flick. How I wish I can describe how explosive the ending occurred to me, when the last words uttered by Satan Al made me think long after the movie was done with.

“Vanity. It sure is my favorite sin.”

What scared me most here was that the movie was one of contemporary setting, a workaday, mundane lifestyle and not in some fantastic land ‘down under’, that when left unchecked, the values and traits and attitudes that lie within the fa?ade of our well-dressed bodies and made-up faces, reveal a startling realization of how wicked our hearts can turn out to be when we get ahead of ourselves, and desire for things that is too much for us to have but we’d be willing to do anything to achieve it that it’s consuming. The promise of good name and wealth of fame… is it like what it really seemed in the end?

Vanity. Self. Money. Recognition. Demise. Hell.

Choose.