To the movies!

I will admit that as a product of my generation, I consume a lot more movies than my parents did at my age. This means that I have less time for reading, but I justify it (why I feel the need to justify this is an entirely different topic) by telling myself that a good movie can be as good as any novel. This is complete bullshit. Truth is, I love going to the cinema, sitting down and spending two whole hours sitting completely still watching a story unfold. And I don't mean that I like watching movies (which I do), I mean I like going to the cinema. I like sitting in a quiet room with the lights dimmed and seeing someone else's life playing on the screen. I love it. I like the silence, I like sitting still, I like the screen. All of it. I would go to the cinema at least three or four times a week if I could afford it. This is why it pisses me off when people ask me why do I go to the movies alone. It's not that I don't like going to the movies with my friends (depends  on the movie though, there are films which I refuse to watch in a big group), but I honestly feel like going to the movies is a mostly lonely activity. If you do it right, you should be sittin in a room for two hours without talking to anyone, without noticing anything that isn't on the screen. As someone who enjoys talking, going to the movies with people directly affects the goal of silence and concentration. I like going to the movies on my own, sitting down and enjoying the whole film in silence. I am trying to stop eating in the cinema, because it annoys me when other people do it, and I always turn my phone off (again, it annoys me when someone checks their phone during a movie, it might not be making any noise but I can still see the bright screen).
Some of my best movie experiences have happened on my own in the movies. I watched "Frozen River" on my own (even though that was slightly scary, due to the guy sitting a few rows in front of me trying to make casual conversation about the time when he left the mental hospital), and I watched "Brave" on my own, which I enjoyed enormously. I have sat through loads of movies alone, and I've loved it. But it leads to a huge problem: who to discuss the movie with after? I might enjoy the experience of the cinema on my own, but I like to have someone to compare notes at the end with. I like being able to say: "That blew my mind", or "I thought that was shit", or "I'm not sure about that movie, I feel like I could have liked it if people hadn't made such a big deal out of it". This is impossible when you go on your own. A good movie is something I want to tell people about, I want to talk about for a while, analyze, enjoy even after it's done. A movie which I dislike, but which people can love is even better: it gives me material to argue about for hours. And yes, there is such a thing as a bad movie. I distrust people who say that "if it entertains them, then it's good". This is setting a very high standard for your entertainment or a very low standard for what you consider to be good. I am entertained by rom-coms. In fact, I love them and I watch as many of them as I can. They are emotional porn, and they make me tremendously happy (and sad, I cry like a baby when I watch them and I refuse to watch them with anyone else in the room, generally). I think they are the one genre I would take with me to a desert island (because it's the one I watch most). But I don't think they're good movies. I can't bring myself to class "The Ugly Truth" and "District 9" in the same category. Not to mention "Reservoir Dogs", or "It's Wonderful Life", or "High Fidelity", or "Manhattan", or "Saving Private Ryan", or "Apocalypse Now", or "Spellbound", or "Munich". These films are something else. They are not just entertainment, they tell a great story, and they tell it well.
And that's it. Movies are stories. Movies are yet another way to tell a story, and there's nothing I like better than a story. There is ritual in story telling, whether it be lying in bed listening to my dad telling me a bedtime story, or sitting in the cinema watching a film. There must be silence. There must be attention. There must be magic.