I May Just Be Jealous I’m not a Mutant
by Ruth Arnell
The thing is– the thing with ‘inspiring’ movies is– that they don’t ‘inspire’ you to go out and do the things the folks in ’em did. At most they prompt you to feel for the folks that lost their limbs, the widows that raised their 18 children all alone, the drunks who lifted themselves from the gutter to pursue careers as hospice care workers for aging Job’s Daughters financial consultants. But you’re not going to go out and DO any of those things because of those movies. Follow?
I just want to see one movie that makes me go, “Yeah! I want that! I want to do that thing! To be that person! To live that life of self-sacrifice/ adventure/ creative abandon/ peace/ vengeance!”
I mean, you catch a flick like Braveheart and it makes you feel things – but how many people watched it and went out and died fighting some injustice as a direct result of the encouragement the movie provided in that direction?
And there’s nothing wrong, I suppose, with creating awesome movies that don’t do anything to get people off their butts and into a world they change drastically for the better. We can’t all be Charlie Buckets. We can’t all be crouching tigers. And I know it’s not cinema’s responsibility to kick us into gear. And at least the movies induced emoting. At least they were beautiful. At least they existed as a testament to the gumption some production team somewhere managed to muster in an industry saturated with utterly uninspiring waste and ugliness of character.
I just wish the inconsistent awesomeness inspired something more than post-movie glad-handing of cinematic criticism terms people pretend to understand. I wish it inspired action. Reaction. Proper use of terminology. Or at least more consistent awesomeness.
