An Escape from Reality

There is nothing better than sitting down and reading a good book or watching an awesome movie. The environment slips away and no longer are you in your bed room or at a movie theatre, instead you are at Hogwarts with Harry and the gang or on Pandora with Jake Sully and the Navi. Movies provide (in my opinion) the strongest out of body experience you can have without the help of illegal drugs or a near death experience. Books give you a similar out of body experience but it isn’t as strong. I use the phrase out of body because while your body may be reading a book or sitting in a theatre, your mind is off in an adventure; providing an escape from the harshness of reality. You simply drive down to the local cinema, pay your ticket fee, and for the next two hours all your problems are forgotten as you watch whatever ‘cinematic adventure’ (to quote Dane Cook) you've chosen.

The Power of Choice: or the Pleasure of the Least Resistance

No one wants to hear someone talk about “the good old days” because there never was any such thing: all our memories are pure personal nostalgia, so I won’t bore you with recollections. I do, however, want you to consider a profound change in movie viewing over the last thirty years. Because this change has happened over time, its impact is particularly perceptible by someone who has seen it “over time.” For those of you born after 1990, the way movie viewing is now is relatively close to the way it has been since you were aware of movies, but trust me when I say there has been a profound change in “movie delivery systems.” (I just made that up.)

So this will not be a retrospective of movies in general or their content specifically, but rather a contemplation of viewer access to movies and movie making itself. The choice that viewers now have in movie viewing has had an impact on our sense of self, on the market, and our movie-viewing habits.

YouTube: New Canvas

©NITVShorts - "New Boy"

Standing in line for a movie ticket is a lot like standing in line for a Big Mac. Do you want the action movie with a side of comedy or the thriller with extra gore? It’s not a secret nor a surprise that Hollywood regurgitates its story lines. With over 600 movies released each year you can’t expect each one to be a flourishing garden of artistic creativity. I don’t expect it, and neither does the rest of America. Thoughtful poignant movies bite it at the box office. In 2009, Robin Williams starred in the movie “World’s Greatest Dad” which was a hit at Sundance, had a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 88%, and was rated three out of four stars by Roger Ebert, but it grossed less than $250,000. Compare that to M. Night Shyamalan’s “Last Airbender” which received a 6% rating from Rotten Tomatoes and was described by Ebert as “an agonizing experience in every category”, but grossed over $319,000,000, and you can see the difference that I’m trying to point out.