The cinema activist: a statement of purpose

As long as I can remember and even before that, I and most likely you and most all of us have been immersed in film, television, and now online video.

The long promised convergence is old news to many, and increasingly most of us share our mental landscape with a mosaic of real life experiences and real people interlaid with the images, words, sounds, ideas and characters we have experienced only through audio-visual storytelling in it's ever more myriad forms.

 Not long ago it seemed we were forever starved for entertainment and media, with only three national tv networks and a handful of local stations to choose from, with physical trips to the video store an absolute necessity, where we would pick amongst what now seems like a miserably small selection of movies, trying to find something make us laugh, cry, scream, think, learn or wonder and marvel.   Something even to make us question.

And how often did we make our choice knowing that we could do better but unable to access the wide world of media from our tiny local video outlets.

Today we can choose from a seemingly infinite buffet of films and shows from any time or place in the world, although when searching for more obscure titles and subjects on the web, one realizes that with all it's pandora's box of treasures the internet is still relatively so young and incomplete that it would be a foolish oversight to assume that the great electric oracle of our age is all knowing.  Many the out of print VHS only films that I treasure did not make it to DVD and with the transition to blue ray seem unlikely candidates for release any time soon.

But how to know, with all these dizzying choices, the best and most entertaining ways to spend our limited lifetimes, and fulfill our evolutionarily mandated need for visual stories as told and acted out so long ago by flickering firelight.

Which films and shows will change our lives, enrich and provoke us, allow us an escape from our mental routine and in doing so deliver us right into the center of life and it's realities both joyous and agonizing, and which ones will burn a searing hole into our brains, leaving a smoking hole in our precious short lifetimes, leaving us feeling empty, betrayed and infected by mediocrity or worse?

This blog was created to house a series of cinema essays, both critical and uncritical, examining some of my favorite and least favorite films, television shows, and audio visual media of all kinds.

I hope to draw your attention to some you may have overlooked, some which may be hard to find, and give a different perspective on some we all know, or should know.

I hope to occasionally provide amusing warnings of cinematic potholes in the road, helping the reader to avoid the soul scarring that can result from films made without care or love, save the love of lucre.

If at all possible I hope to inspire you to treat yourself to the luxury of truly well made work, and especially to reflect upon it's impact and relevance to ourselves and the larger world.

My writing comes from the perspective of an engaged artist.   As a filmmaker and musician myself, I am on thin ice allowing my inner critic to run rampant over the works of others, but I hope to bring to my cinema essays the empathy of a fellow hack,  the knowledge such as it is gained in a life overloaded with viewing and excessive study of the art and craft, as well as some personal experience.

Most importantly I want to engage you in a discussion of how cinema engages with the issues of real life, and how it can move us to become more engaged in our world.

I am not someone who believes in the old Hollywood adage attributed to Sam Goldwyn that "if you want to send a message, use western union".   I think that all art sends a message, intentionally or not, the art we create expresses directly or holographically our perspective on our subject matter, and in subtext our perspective about whatever we were dealing with when we made it.   Sometimes well crafted art can send a message within a message, as in satire and classical tragedy, where the message is implied as the opposite of the one overtly presented by the characters involved, other times it's right out front.

The quality of a piece is not dependent on whether or not it seeks to send a message.   Message movies can be well done or poorly done, like any genre, but we are fools if we think that we can make or watch a movie without teaching something or learning something.    

Often, however, the best teachers leave us with more questions than answers, and I'll be taking a special interest in the films that do this,   To paraphrase Deadwood's brilliant creator David Milch, life's problems are not solved by the end of the movie or the episode, and especially not by simply finding a bad guy and killing him, literally or metaphorically, as is all to often the lazily oversimplified way that films and shows resolve the complexity implied by their stories.

What we bring to a viewing experience so greatly determines what we get from it, that we may find completely different reactions inside ourselves to the same films when seen on different occasions, so if you disagree with my opinions, great!  But watch it again later and you might feel differently, as may I.

So enjoy, watch TCM whenever you can, and engage with me.  Tell me when you agree or disagree with what I've written, as each person brings a different world of perspective to what they watch, and each person's differing opinions are valid from their point of view.