15 January 2015

Props for "Birdman"

Like those who bestow the Golden Globes, the nominators for Academy Awards like Boyhood (on which I most recently commented here) and Birdman (an earlier post here). Also in the running for best picture is The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I also liked (see here). I haven't seen any of the other multiple nominees although several children have reported positively on The Imitation Game.

Film, although a legitimate form of artistic expression, still pales in comparison with literature when it comes to plumbing depths of the implications of what it means to be human. Go here to read a short post on the unique virtues of literature. Far more than writing, movie making has become a means of "creative entrepreneurship" instead of art. Nothing wrong with marrying art and money, it's been done for thousands of years, yet something of the artistic side of the marriage is lost. Punches must be pulled when the production of a form of art runs into the tens of millions of dollars.

None of which is to say that I'll be giving up on movies. They have a place, and a fine one at that, in contemporary society. It's only that we should balance even our leisure with something that has the prospect of effecting us to the core of our being.

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