When I went to a screening of The Lost Bus at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, it was in a very big theater with a big screen and a big audience. The story of a bus driver and a schoolteacher getting a bus full of children to safety during California’s devastating 2018 Camp Fire, it stars Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera, and there was quite a bit of curiosity about it. Its presentation of large fires is intense, to say the least. (The book the film is based on, Lizzie Johnson’s Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire , follows a number of stories, but the confined setting of the school bus makes this one an understandable choice to turn into a movie.)

I got on the elevator with a handful of other people to leave the theater, and as some

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