I think V is looking for something a little deeper. I'm just not sure what that is.

Probably, maybe if this was a sit down with a case of beer and a few friends situation I could be a bit more profound. :p

Beer always makes us smarter.

It made Bud wiser. ;)

Except that poor guy being water boarded in your sig.

That's no way to water board a guy, you have to pour the beer around his face but not let him drink it, the guy in newb's sig is having a blast!

V, is it reality that we are trying to escape? That sounds like a rare scenerio to me, though I'm sure it is the case sometimes. I'm on my third whiskie drink, mixed for effect not flavor, so I'm getting good and deep, hang on.

Movies contain "magic', the same stuff NE was talking about. And that magic can make crazy things happen, things that you may have never considered possible, or still consider impossible. But one thing we can not forget about reality, about realism, is that truth is stranger than fiction (you may have heard that one before). At the movies however, we are safe and dry and fed, and can enjoy watching things happen to others, because we know an editor somewhere won't make us wait too long till it finally happens(in some cases). So yes, we all escape our own realities, our day to days (which may be boring compared to others) and enjoy a good story with adamant motion for our eyes to see. (Before movies and stage and puppets, people just repeated good stories. Stories that touch and teach and help us to escape when we need to, just like a Catholic Priest-Hay-yo!)

Shit I'm losing track. So I think we experience just as much reality at the movies as we do outside the theater, it just happens alot faster inside.

"Aren't we, as the willing and paying public, consciously promoting escapist entertainment for a couple hours in the films we watch? Or does a part of us, unknowingly or unwillingly, look for realism in the silver screen?" (V)

I guess I'm saying the latter

Hooray for booze!

It doesn't.

As a filmmaker I can tell you that people are often shooting for "realism" but shooting in locaions or using non-actors, but there is nothing realistic about filmmaking. Everything is fake, including the rain.

Actual rain almost never shows up on film, so even if it is really raining outside, you need to augment it with a rain machine in order for it to play on film.

I keep rereading your question V, it seems like your asking if it's one or the other. Like your asking if cinema can be narrowed down into a finite catagory. 'Cinematography', The art or technique of movie photography, including both the shooting and development of the film(dictionary). So why we go to see it isn't as important as it's there. However, I still can't shake the fact that people don't like stories that they can not connect to in a realistic sence. Even if the only way to get something to show up on film is fake, it represents, and apears very real on film (when Roderick wants it to of course). And that's what's important, not what's left when you take the magic away.

It's not one or the other and it's both at the same time and nothing at all.

sometimes escapism and sometimes realism because for humans we are trying so hard to find the missing pieces and right now: it's not raising children we are not sure we are raising right and it's not the job 99% of people hate getting up in the morning for so we can buy things that break in two weeks and didn't need in the first place and it's not the people that surround us filling our lives with more nonsense and unwanted drama....

when you walk into a movie about war, we walk out with knowledge... on so many levels. same is true on any real subject a movie tackles, I found out more from Schindlers List than any information about the holocaust taught to me in school-with the added benefit of the emotional aspect...of finding tremendous EMPATHY lacking by reading about it in a textbook.

We watch fantasy and horror and comedy to escape and sometimes find a little piece of that adventure our hearts desire. The way life SHOULD be...life should be funny and slapstick and romantic and FUN!
Fantasy especially...I want my fucking life to be a fucking adventure, I do not want to toil all fucking day and fall asleep exhausted and then get up and the first thing that hits me is DREAD.
I want love and desire that lights my hair on fire and flying fucking horses to starbucks for some magic coffee beans that grows all sorts of wonderful shit and taking my kid to the park and finding a nest of fucking faeries and walk into my fucking closet and OMG there's a fucking DOOR into another world!





I forget what my point was...

Haha- that was fucking brilliant, Nova.