Magic of Movies

My father has always loved movies and I have very fond memories of going to see movies with him.

Before the quick and easy access to films that we know nowadays through DVDs- Blockbuster, Netflix etc... One had to "go to the movies" to see a new film. You could catch older films on TV, but, newer films were always seen at the movies.

Going to see a movie in the movie theater is still a mystical experience when you really dissect it... First of all, watching a film is likely the closest human experience we have to dreaming. Reading fiction in particular transports us from our reality, but not in the way film does... Movies speak to the eyes, the ears, the heart and mind (music and words) in a way that reading can't.

Secondly there are the "nocturnal" and "communal" aspects of film viewing. You enter a dark room- a cocoon or womb of sorts and witness/experience a story. You typically share that room with a person or two or three that you know and many strangers.

When we are swept away into the alternate reality of a movie we can at times experience what Walker Percy called a transcendence that can result in a "reentry" problem...

Interviewer: Science, as you so often point out, has failed man. But so, too, has God. How is art the solution for man as he aimlessly roams the cosmos?

Percy: Explain how God has failed. Does this mean that God exists but that he might have done a better job? Or that man has screwed up and supposed, therefore, that God has failed? I didn't say art was the solution. I would agree that with a failure of religion for many people, art is often promoted as a quasi-religious vocation. I'm not sure how successfully this works, even for the most talented and committed artists and art lovers. I dealt with this interesting art-as-religion phenomenon in Lost in the Cosmos: for example, comparing the transcending God-likeness of Faulkner while writing The Sound and the Fury with the crash afterward‹drunk for a week. Or think of the exaltation of the moviegoer after seeing a fine movie‹say, Wild Strawberries‹and then what? One hour, two hours later, what? I called this the "reentry" problem.

Here's to watching films in a more attentive and reflective way in this new decade.. to better discerning-divining what my reactions to the film are telling me about: me, G-d, mankind, and reality. Here's to watching more DVDs at home in the dark with the phone turned off.

Roeper's best films of the decade

http://www.suntimes.com/news/roeper/1967980,roepers-best-films-of-the-year-010110.article

January 1, 2010

The 100 best movies I saw in the 2000s:
1. "The Departed" (2006)
2. "In America" (2003)
3. "Traffic" (2000)
4. "Memento" (2001)
5. "House of Flying Daggers" (2004)
6. "Mystic River" (2003)
7. "Slumdog Millionaire" (2008)
8. "25th Hour" (2002)
9. "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000)
10. "Hotel Rwanda" (2004)
11. "Minority Report" (2002)
12. "Gangs of New York" (2002)
13. "Syriana" (2005)
14. "Michael Clayton" (2007)
15. "Zodiac" (2007)
16. "No Country for Old Men" (2007)
17. "The Dark Knight" (2008)
18. "Brothers" (2009)
19. "Million Dollar Baby" (2004)
20. "Gone Baby Gone" (2007)
21. "21 Grams" (2003)
22. "Up in the Air" (2009)
23. "The Lookout" (2007)
24. "Eternal Sunshine" (2004)
25. "Munich" (2005)