Celebrating Cinema!

It feels only like yesterday watching movies on a black and white screen where the hero and the heroine are doing a romantic song with the hero driving a car with traffic and lights moving in the background and artificial movement being created on a static car set in the studio (and of course,notice the hero swinging the steering of the car from left to right as if he were steering a submarine... how in the world could the heroine actually sit in a car being driven in such a way without throwing up is a big question mark! ;) Engaging the audience with closest-to-reality 'incidents' that left an "I can associate with it" feeling was important and the audience lapped it up gleefully then.

Cut to today-

Avatar is a perfect example of cinema not because it is the costliest ever movie nor because it is loaded with high-funda technology but simply because it still has not lost track of the fact that the audience need to be told a story and through the medium of cinema (reminds me of the technology is an enabler and not a replacement example!!) The movie, for all its complexities, has a fairly straightforward undertone that man is the root of all evil to the environment. No one will want to watch a movie that doesnt dramatize this message because movie is all about drama - a drama that people want to go and watch for 2 hours and forget everything else around.

The scene where Jake actually gets to try out his 'bird' for the first time is a perfect example of how much power cinema is capable of in conveying depth of emotion. His initial unsuccessful attempts at climbing atop the bird, his subsequent success at taming the bird, then his first little sky diving session atop the bird and then his absolute joy at having tamed the bird and flying blissfully across the skies, joined subsequently by his 'girlfriend on her bird' accompanied by beautifully rhythmic drums as background score and of course the ultimate thrill of almost feeling him fly in 3D kind of sums up the "I was here when it happened experience" and actually takes the "I could associate with it" to the next level with an "I would love to be a part of this"!

For that matter, some of the more intense battle sequences are also very well 'described'. If you were to put down this part of the movie on paper, it would just be "battle begins, bad guy ultimately gets killed, good guy survives, and they lived happily ever after". This is not an attempt at comparing literature and cinema but just a layman's joy at watching a one line plot pan out into a 20 min audio-visual delight!

Perhaps, what hasn't changed about cinema since its beginning is its ability to enthrall the audience with 'let-loose' imagination and the 'even I can do it' mentality (remember the famous bell-bottoms or the XXL size plastic framed goggles!) It remains the average human being's closest medium of fulfilment of make-believe aspirations (I wanna be like Tom Cruise)and basking in the glory of fulfilled aspirations (I have finally achieved the Tom Cruise look!) A toast to Cinema!