 I
Come From the Movie Planet, How About You?
by Jesse S. Somer
When people ask me where I am from I often reply jokingly, “I’m
from the Movie Planet.’ That’s what I reckon people
from other planets would call us here on Earth. How many movies
have I watched in my life? How many hours have I sat in front
of a small or big screen watching a story unfold, acted out
by my fellow species? The answer is almost inconceivable. We
worship film as an arena to learn, dream, escape, and even vicariously
live our lives from. We pay actors millions of dollars, more
than doctors as well as nearly all the rest of us, and a lot
of us see them as superhuman beings that are a step above the
rest in our perceived realm of mundane normality that we have
constructed our lives in. A lot of the time the result of this
belief structure causes a lot of pain for these ‘famous’
souls who would rather just live a normal life outside their
work. The hounding paparazzi definitely don’t make the
actors feel superhuman!
Look, I like watching movies a lot, maybe even more than the
‘average person’, I just wonder about the relationship
we have with this imagined reality we so often connect with.
We choose to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on some movies
like ‘Independence Day’ that end up being bombs in
the box office, while there are billions of people in true reality
on Earth who have nothing to eat. It seems like madness if you
look at it from that angle. Do we watch these visions of ‘ourselves’
doing things so that we don’t have to think about what
hard work we have to do in our real lives?
Even as I sit here on a Friday afternoon I am wondering if I
should grab a DVD tonight to watch as an attempt to relax at
home after a pretty hard working week. The funny thing is if
I grab the ‘wrong’ type of movie, I may end up more
stressed out than I am right now! So, am I addicted to these
things? Are we all? I’ll let you think about it. To focus
on the positive side of things, we must realize that we can
learn so much from our experiences with the movies. We wouldn’t
have become obsessed over nothing, now would we? I myself learn
a lot and get to experience many emotions during the engrossing
visual experience. I mean, I do have a big enough range of feelings
in my real life, but it’s kind of cool being able to be
in ‘The Matrix’ (maybe we already are?), or to be
‘Spiderman’ for a day, or maybe live in a weird world
like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ for a few
hours.
If you do love movies, these days there is one place to go that
you can find out just about nearly anything and everything about
a film, and even watch trailers of the shows. It’s called
the Internet Movie Database or IMDB. Google it, or look for
it on your other search engine. I believe this website started
up very small from someone who just wanted to talk about movies.
Now, it receives over 25 million ‘visits’ a month.
It literally has everything you ever need to know about films.
It gives biographies on movies, the actors and directors involved,
as well as comments and ratings from people who have wanted
to express their feelings about the films in question. For some
of the movies, especially new ones that haven’t opened
in theatres yet, there are previews and trailers you can watch
right at your computer to tell you if you really think you should
go and see it or not.
There’s also cool lists made up by visitors to the site
like ‘Top 250 films’, and ‘100 worst films of
all time’. There are articles related to the movie industry
as well as many other interesting categories to look at like
‘Independent films’ and ‘Award winners’.
Really, you’ve got to check it out yourself to see what
I mean.
Whether you think movies are a great achievement by humanity
to learn and be entertained with, or an obsession that has gone
way too far, it looks as though they are here to stay. The questions
remain: Is your life as good as the movies you watch? If you
spend as much time in virtual reality as reality itself, what
planet do you really come from?
About the Author
Jesse S. Somer
M6.Net
http://www.m6.net
Jesse S. Somer could be a character in the best script ever
written. |
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