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?
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