Hello out there,
And welcome to my shiny brand new blog about movies. What's my goal here? To impart some wisdom to the general internet public about films I have seen. All too often I have seen wonderful pieces of film come and go without a nod from the general public or worse...disdain. There are several problems with the general public when it comes to movies. At its core, film is an escapist art form. People don't want hard hitting close to home drama, they want something big and flashy that makes them feel good. This is how things like Transformers 2 get the budgets they do, because the studio executives recognize money making patterns. This leads to the next problem, film making is a business. If something gets horrible reviews but makes buckets of money, you can bet its going to have a sequel with just as many bad reviews. Third, for those who have studied art history this will make a lot of sense, almost nothing is original. Everything has its influences and to fully appreciate some movies you have to understand its source material. This raises the issue of a film standing on its own as opposed to being a tribute but that is a debate for a different time. My point is, sometimes when you sit watching a movie you scratch your head and wonder, "why did they do that?" or more often you don't even notice the question should be asked. My main goal is to ask why and educate you about the strange ways of film...
But what is the importance of movies you ask. Its just useless escapism. What is the importance of a multi-billion dollar industry? What is the importance of art? To quote Oscar Wilde "all art is quite useless", but however lacking function art may be it is representative of the culture and society that creates and accepts it. Film just happens to be the major art form of our era. Not only that it markets to the general public. For all the faults in films, many of them can be attributed to the answer, "people like it." Film is a constantly evolving art form that not only represents a story and characters in a specific time and place, it also represents the viewing public at the time of its creation. If you couldn't tell already this blog will mainly consist of whatever random thoughts I have on whatever the movie of the week is. Not terribly interesting, but I'm not actually talking about any movies right now am I? So what will I start out this little adventure with?
Rango...
