The Zen of Movie Watching

There is an art to appreciating art, or pseudo-art or even stuff that isn't that artistic at all. Once upon a time in a different century, I sat diligently at my local university and learned how to appreciate modern cinema in a course titled aptly enough "Film Appreciation 101." At the time, I remember being torn as to whether it was a wonderful deal or a giant rip off to be sitting through an entire semester doing not much more than watching movies.

Oh, but have the years piled on the wisdom - I can now see through the prism of hindsight how that class imparted to me a power unrivaled in the universe, the power to critique. The critic is a mighty sorcerer, finding nuggets of wisdom where none exist, turning lead into gold and duds into artistic masterpieces. For the zen of movie watching is of course founded upon the premise that the movie itself is only half of the experience - the other half is yours truly, or in your case your yours truly. Film watching and film interpretation separate the crash test dummies from the poet philosophers, the barbarian from civilization, the reality of the senses from the reality of the mind. Not even Yoda knew that such power existed, if he had perhaps he would have defeated Darth Vader and avoided several episodes of the Star Wars saga - which would have really upset my son, but anyway I digress.

"With great power comes great responsibility," or so they said in that Spiderman movie, which otherwise really sucked. Anyone can become a critic, and everyone is a critic at one time or another in their lifetime - those moments occur when you step outside of the normal role of consumer and ask yourself, "why the heck did I buy this crap." That's where it all starts, as the ability to isolate truly bad film-making is innately endowed upon us at birth. But as we hone and flex those powers our other sensibilities begin to emerge, the ability to understand lighting principles, the appreciation for technical genius with digital creations, the ability to correlate the quality of the script with the overall impact of the film.

Movies are an integrated experience - each separate portion of the whole will produce different reactions in each critic as we all have unique predispositions to bring to bear. Movies are relativistic, whoever in the family has control of the remote determines which movies to critique. And in each movie we see a little bit of ourselves, whether as reflections or whole hearted Walter Mitty-esqe escapes into fantasy. Many a veteran viewer exhibits the 100 yard trance from the sofa as we can see them lost in the pixels, blended into a storyline - reality is only as real as we want it be.

True wisdom emanates not from the rock, but blossoms anew in each petal... Well, I have no idea whatsoever that means but it sounded zen-like and artistic so I threw it in. Remember, the true power of art that imitates life is like the man with his remote clicking at the man with his remote on the other side of the screen and both deciding that this particular movie rated only two stars.


Copyright 2011, Raving Reviews™