Feeling Something

Here’s the thing about movies. The good ones are pleasant to watch. The bad ones are a discomfort, and the really, truly, gut wrenching terrible movies make you leave the room. It’s easy to tell when a movie is good or bad; determining a truly superior film, on the other hand, is different. Films as an art form are criticized on a different scale one in which emotion is prioritized over box office success.

Truly excellent films are supposed to make the viewer feel something. Cinematic superiority inflicts reflection, passion, and distraught.

This is precisely why mass-market feel-good films — like the recently released Jem and the Holograms — won’t succeed with critics or box offices.

Movies make people feel nice, or delighted, or relieved inside. They are comedies; they are “chick flicks”; they are horror films and action thrillers. Movies show things not as they are, but as the writers wish they were. The creators of Jem wished that girl-power would rise to prominence in all cultures; it is the Hannah Montana of recent broad demographic films.

It doesn’t make you feel, though. Peppy, yes. Empowered, sure. Imagining a world that should exist? Absolutely. It’s a movie, not a film, and in the hipster culture of america, it lacks the artistic originality for success.

Films illicit emotion. They extract passion and highlight disparities. The situation may be fictional, but the purpose is rooted in real-world issues. Films are box office hits, and award-winning productions, because they show what is happening right this very minute.

Films aren’t girl power, they are gender inequality. Films aren’t utopias, they are corruption.

Movies are giggles. They are hero-always-wins, happily ever after mass media. They are filters and CGI and special effects exploding out of the wazoo of a production studio. They are picnics and roller coasters and haunted houses. People like movies, they do. But they don’t obsess over them.

Films are the knot in the stomach, the lump in the throat, the pounding head and throbbing chest. Films are cult classics. They are too weird to be real, yet too weird not to be. They are art, they are history, they are a rainy day at a museum. They are passion. They are curruption. They are raw emotion and works of art.

I like movies. They’re buckets of fun. And yet, I don’t feel satisfied after a movie. I’m not motivated or moved to action.

I love films. I have a passion for them, and their culture and emotion and artistic beauty. I love the fulfillment and satisfaction and distraught and discomfort and awe that I feel when I watch a film.

Films make people feel something. I, for one, will always choose feeling something over feeling nothing.