Comments on: Film festival

By: tuckova

tuckova — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 12:27:15 +0000

I used to go to the movies at least once a week, and during the European film festival here I took the week off work and would watch as many as six movies in a day. I’ve stopped going to movies since they closed down the little theaters. I was particularly fond of the one that served drinks before the film and while they changed the reels, and still everybody sat in complete silence, smoking and drinking and being so awesomely European about it. Now even people here act like they’re in their living rooms, talking on their cell phones and stinking up the air with their farts. So yeah, I don’t go to movies, and DVDs, although great, are too small and private, and feel more like willful distraction than active observance of art.

By: Meagan

Meagan — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 00:35:49 +0000

I’m agreeing with your father there, Jann.

But the truth is that I don’t watch movies anyway. In fact, I barely watch television… I watch “House, M.D.” and that’s it. I’m sooo far away from regarding films as an art form. Working in an elementary school, I observed that many of our kids no longer know how to think, and I hypothesize that this is because they’ve grown up with TV/movies just handing them information on a platter and not really sparking their thought processes. In fact, one of the things fifth graders are worst at is making inferences… if something is not explicitly stated in the text, they can’t figure it out. This has led to many afternoons of me and my coworkers banging our heads against the wall and asking each other, “How do you teach a kid to think?! Isn’t that supposed to be kind of instinctive? That thing that separates us from the animals?”

Argh. Yeah, movies and TV are kind of touchy subjects for me and I like to rant about it. I try to keep my kid as far away from them as possible and so far it seems to be working. He spends his days writing songs, reading books, building with legos and playing outside like 6 year olds used to do before they had pretty picture boxes to stare at for hours on end.

But if you gotta watch a movie, it might as well be happy one! :)

By: Jann

Jann — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 19:49:34 +0000

I remember my father, when he was in his mid to late forties, in a discussion about films, saying somethimg like, “When I go to the movies I want to be entertained; I want a happy ending, even if it’s not realistic. I want to feel good when I leave the theater. I have enough problems I can’t solve; I don’t want to see a movie about other people’s problems that can’t be solved.”
I did not understand that when I was twenty-two; I do now.