Lights, Camera...

The thing about movies, is that they're awesome. I'm no film critic (if only I was cuttingly intelligent enough....), and honestly, in spite of my private dreams of reaching the star spangled land of Keira Knightley-dom, I'm no actress. Thus, my fixation with movies doesn't make much sense beyond the fiction being a balm for my incompatibility with my time and space, and even then it doesn't always hit the spot. (Though remarkably, disadvantaged as I am when it comes to the Space-Time continuum, I thoroughly enjoyed Inception. It gives me little shivers every time I think that means I might be approaching the aura of the whole other spectrum that just is Christopher Nolan.)

Nor can I, much to my shame, enumerate the director, vice director, producer, sub producer a, b, c, d, the star, the co-star, the little galaxy of extra people and the bloke behind the camera who got all those really head spinning shots of the bat mobile crashing over Gotham. I know neither their names in alphabetical order, their involvement in other works or their individual dates of birth. I consider myself lucky if I remember that 'oooh, that bloke was in Inception too!' and even then, only after a heated debate with my brother discussing whether said 'bloke' also played a villain called the Penguin. I can't place films on a timeline, I lack the encyclopaedic knowledge to group them by genre, sub genre, and that other artsy level which is just showing off. So, to be frank, I'm not interested in film because I want to hang out with 'film people' either, because a fresh clownfish with a broken fin would last longer against a great white shark. I hold these people in sincere awe, but I doubt I would ever be able to override my instinct for the preservation of my intellectual pride and actually approach them.

I'm not even interested in movies because they're some sort of wish fulfillment, (although lets face it, I would make a fantastically swashbuckling, Orlando ridden Elizabeth Swan.) I like fantasy, and sci-fi, drama and rom-com, horror when I can stick it out without screaming and stand the subsequent nightmares, action, thrillers and pretty much everything else on the market. Like a lot of, (definitely not stereotyping) teenage to young to middle aged to probably too old for this women, I will happily settle down for a cheeky little session with a certain insomniac Seattleite.  If it has an interesting plot, and the violence is neither too pornographic nor gratuitous, I'll drag a suitably strapping man to a horror film. I will be the loudest, most annoying gasper in the fantasy film when they go for a whizz on the old dragon, and I will spend hours staring at my mother trying to send her a telepathic illusion of myself as the wife of a certain Professor....X. However, in spite of my daydreams, which are both wild and detailed (again, I'm definitely compensating for the low performance when it come to the spacio-temporal vortex in which we exist) I cannot make myself avoid the fact that I will never look as good as Agent Romanov-Johannson in a skin tight black leather suit. Or, for that matter, a certain kitty Kyle-Hathaway. I have resigned myself to the fact that I will never find a beau with either Andrew Garfield's  sweet sense of humour, brooding chocolate gaze, or shapely rear end...

However, I do like movies for a reason, and not because they happen to be my paradisal oases away from work. Of any kind. I was writing something other than my blog (it happens people, let it go) and all at once, I had one of those annoying, niggly, epiphanous thoughts that you should probably listen to but really don't want to. (Mostly because it means taking a hacksaw to what you've done and revamping it, with neither fangs, yellow eyes, nor Bambi.) I asked myself what the point was. And I couldn't find the answer, so out came the verbal hacksaw.

Because here's the thing. Not too long ago, a lot of people, some who knew things, some who didn't, and some who said they did and thought they did but knew less than the rest, started ranting and raving about a gladiatorial sci-fi involving teenagers and archery. "If we're not supposed to watch children killing children, then why are we watching children killing children?" The answer, from my perspective at least, as I found myself repeating to various acquaintances, was simple: "You don't watch it for the murder, or the violence, or the horror. People watch it because she gives hope. They want to see the fight. They want to see the victory of something good, specifically our something good - the triumph of all the good little fragments of human spirit over the great chasms lurking in every one of us." Which is why it is singularly fantastic that people went to see a certain Man of Bats, even after the Aurora Shooting (may the victims rest in peace, and their friends and families learn to heal.) Because the fact people continued to see the film about the hero proves that that shooter has won nothing.

That's why I watch films. Not because of maniacs and psychopaths, not to prove a point. Not to take tips in seduction, or to drive myself mad over whichever chippendale-esque and totally non objectified hunk is in fashion. I watch films because, science fiction or fantasy, romantic comedy or thriller, action or horror, there is always a human truth to be found. No, it's not likely I'll ever develop the mutant powers of my dreams and run away with James McAvoy. But prejudice against minorities happens every day. It is unlikely that a superhero will ever turn up and then dispose of a nuclear bomb in a suitably heroic fashion, but sacrifice, great and small, is omnipresent. No, the characters are not real people. But the stories are eternal, and human, manifold and true. They are necessary mirrors, of our struggles and our victories, our flaws and our saving graces.

And yes, honestly, they're also the only places where I'll see that many good looking men in one place, and not avoiding eye contact.