Movies

Dear Son,

There'll be a lot of movie reviews in this thing. Maybe review isn't the best word for it - I guess they're more like reflections.

I love movies. They're such an American art form. They tell and re-tell us our stories, our myths, and our legends. They are not modern plays - a play is an entirely different experience that I hope you will participate in once or twice.

Movies help define our culture. (Note that I call them movies, and not films. Films are what pretentious people call movies, including, sadly, a lot of the people who make otherwise pretty good movies.) They give us frameworks around which to tell jokes, to make analogies, to inspure and tell our own stories. Most guys I know can carry on an entire conversation in movie quotes.

Like anything, there are good movies and bad ones. Sometimes the officially good ones are boring as hell, and sometimes the bad ones are SO bad that they're just plain awesome. And the arguments about what makes the good ones good and the bad ones bad and why people see them differently are some of the most fun conversations to have.

But lately I've been thinking a lot about what is it that makes a good movie good. Why do the ones that inspire us inspire us? What is it about the boring ones that make them so dull? Why do some characters speak to us, and some we just plain don't care? Why are there movies that came out when I was an infant (or long before) that I can watch over and over again, and others that make me regret that I'll never again have those two hours of my life back?

A lot of it has to do with the classical elements of all literary forms. There must be a plot with a begining, a middle, and an end. There must be characters with an arc - they must experience conflict and evolve in some way based on their travails. And their world and their reactions to it must be coherent and believable.

But to be great - to truly become a classic - movies must inspire us. That's why movies that have simple themes of good v. evil that are so snickered at in the art houses do so well. We WANT the characters to overcome adversity, because we want to see ourselves in the hero. It doesn't matter how old the story is. Take the Bible stories. Thousands of years old, those tales still inspire millions of people, and when put on screen either directly or in parallel, they speak to people.

I'm looking forward to having conversations like this with you about movies. Even if right now it's just with myself.

I collect a lot of movies, in part because I want to pass them on to you. I can't wait to see you experience Star Wars for the first time, or the Lord of the Rings movies. And who knows what other classics yet unmade that will be there for us to share?

I just hope the DVD sticks around for a while...

Love, Dad