Why I Love Films (the short version)

As you can probably guess, I watch a lot of films. And I mean A LOT.
Shockingly so.

I love stories. We all do. We as intelligent humans tell them to each other all the time every day, often without even being aware of it. They come in many shapes and forms, as an anecdote, a piece of advice offered, a journal entry, song lyrics, an excuse – stories are all around us – we ARE stories in ourselves.

But anyway, lets keep this light-hearted as I can ramble on way too long about such topics and the aim in this blog is to keep things short and deliciously sweet.

The reason I love films is, firstly, they have the ability to draw on huge canvases with world-class talent in every aspect involved (direction, acting, writing, cinematography, music) etc… in order to tell their story. Now obviously we are talking in generalities here as not all films are well-made, cohesive and polished products but the point I am getting at is that they have the potential.

This is because there is so much money involved in the movie business these days that the boundaries are constantly being pushed, both technically and artistically. Sure, people can argue at the sheer amount of dross being produced out there, but that's because more films are being made in general and for a wider audience. It's the law of averages.

The second main reason why I love films is to do with their length. Generally ranging from 90mins to 150mins, for me that gives adequate time to be long enough to tell a satisfying story and yet not too long so that you start to lose focus and interest. Long enough to get emotionally invested in the characters but not short enough so you don't feel like you are wasting your time in what is essentially a passive pastime.

I could spend more time comparing the merits of the film format against that of TV or books but really that would be starting to go off topic. Really, this was meant to be an introduction to my film roundup that is coming up to the next article.

So yeah – that was (very briefly) why I love films.


11 Aug 2011