It’s getting so that I can’t go on the Internet anymore.
I am a movie lover. One of the great joys of my youth was to go to a movie theater and see a movie, any movie, typically something I had not even heard of. I’d go in, sit down, and when the lights dimmed and the curtains opened (yes, I am old), I’d have a chance to see something entirely new.
I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark this way. Back to the Future. Alien. And it was awesome.
But today, if I’m not very careful, I not only know every movie that’s coming out in the next eighteen months, but I am deluged with reviews and speculations about these movies long before principal filming is finished. Complaining. Whining. Moaning.
As much as I love movies, I hate, in particular, fans shouting, “They’ve ruined MY movie.”
It’s not your movie (unless you’re the director and the producers have taken over the project). You may have loved the book or comic book or whatever source the movie came from. And you, like me, have a movie theater of the mind, where we cast and direct and keep the craft services table nicely stocked. Our cerebral special effects budget is unlimited and unbound by technology. We have a lifetime to refine these movies into something that we love. And we alone can see.
That’s your movie. And the move that someone else makes, especially the ones that get shown in the theater down the way, are not your movie. If the only pleasure you receive from going to movies is to complain bitterly about them and pick them apart piece-by-piece, then you are prepared for and expecting to hate everything. How sad for you.
I treasure the movie theater of my imagination. But I can set that aside and say, “Let’s go see YOUR movie!”
You will never, ever see the movie that you’ve imagined that someone else has made. Your Spider-man is not their Spider-man. That doesn’t make them wrong or bad. Their movie is theirs. And for the most part, their movies are terrific (except for Spider-Man III—we can all agree that movie never happened and we will not speak of it again).
Love the source. Treasure your imagination. Then relax and enjoy, if you can, what someone else has done with it all.
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Randy MurrayMovies, Books, The Imagination, And Enjoying Them All by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
