Such Love

If you were to ask one of my friends or family members to describe me, a likely adjective to come up is "passionate."  I'm a passionate person about many things, and when I am, I make it known.  This summer alone, I have gone through fits of passion for many different things, generally entertainment-related.  Many times these stages apply to the movies I'm buying.  For instance, a few months ago I started focusing my attention on getting as many Disney animated movies as I could, going after those which I treasure in childhood memories (The Jungle Book, Aladdin, A Goofy Movie) and those that have eluded me for most of my life (Oliver and Company, The Great Mouse Detective).  I added quite a few to my collection, but my particular interest in them waned as summer came to a start and I found myself with a considerable amount of free time on my hands.  Thus started a parade of passions including:

-Avatar: The Last Airbender
-The Scott Pilgrim series by Brian Lee O'Malley
-The Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson
-The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins
-Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is still my main obsession at the moment.  Season 4 is taking its sweet old time getting here.

Books and TV shows, yes, but I also have spent a good deal of time at the movies.  I might as well add Toy Story 3 to the list of passions, as I saw it in theaters 6 times, a new personal record.  You see, I fall in love with many, many things - sometimes it's a popular fad, other times it's something I sniff out on my own - but nothing compares to my love for film.  I don't want to risk sounding corny or crazy, but there really is something magical about a really good movie.  It transports you, yes, but it goes beyond that.  It goes somewhere deeper, more in the realm of what art is all about.  The way it reveals something about the people involved in creating the film, as well as revealing something about the viewer through the way he or she responds to it.

Of course, this can be said about any sort of art: music, TV shows, books.  But film, to me, seems like the most binding kind of art, because it's produced on such a massive scale and seen by so many people. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of TV shows to pick from every week, but the release of films is slower, so there's a better chance of there being a common film that everyone is seeing and talking about, such as Avatar last year or, on a smaller scale, Inception this summer.

Inception is an important film here because it serves as support against the possible argument that the films that most people see are more entertainment than art.  Certainly, that's true for something like Twilight or something from Will Ferrell's oeuvre.  But Inception and Toy Story 3 (along with just about every film that comes out of Pixar) are films that combine the best of both worlds.  These are films that are entertaining art, something that other films often fail to achieve as they list too prominently to one extreme or the other.  This tendency is why, when I review movies, I have to place them in a context first.  Obviously, The Other Guys isn't going to be as artistically satisfying as Inception or A Prophet, but it isn't pretending to.  It's entertainment that channels most of its artistic strength into hilarious dialogue and its status as parody.  Every film deserves the chance to be appreciated for what it is.

It seems I digress, but once I start talking (or typing, I suppose) about movies, it's hard for me to stop.  So why stop?  This blog is the place where I can come to keep going on and on about something I love so dearly, something I hope to create myself some day.  I'll sometimes post reviews (pulled from my Rotten Tomatoes page), or suggestions, or news and hype and all that sort of good stuff.  There's so much good stuff.  That's the beauty of movies.