Films are an interesting beast within society.  If you want to get a job in the industry people mock you and say you’ll fail.   But when they get home, all they do is switch off and consume moving images on their television all evening.  And this applies to all the arts:  whether they sit at home and play video games; go out to the theater to watch a show; sit and read a book; or simply go out for meal and enjoy the visuals that the restaurant provides.

But film and television provides more than just entertainment, they’re educational too.  Take Pokemon for example; a kids cartoon that sees a young boy and his friends travel round the world in search of rare species of Pokemon.  But I realised recently that I knew water and metal conduct electricity, whilst rock doesn’t, because of this show.

This is something I covered in a blog a few months back too.

But it extends to how we should act as humans too.  The morals of each story showing you what the world could and should be like.

Obviously a film wouldn’t be entertaining if everything were hunky-dory so what a film does is show you the mistakes that a fictional character makes so that – if you were presented with similar options – you don’t have to.  Whether your drawing influence from Caesar’s hate filled journey of revenge instead of caring for his family, or not helping your friends when they need you to survive a killer clown.

(For the record, I don’t wish either of these fates upon anyone).

But you get the idea, whilst it’s a parent’s responsibility to raise a child right and bring a decent human being into the world, the addition of a few extra lessons from your favorite action hero can’t be that bad of an idea either?

I know it’s a basic principle and one that’s been around since people could tell stories for children (think Goldilocks breaking and entering, Hansel and Gretel going into a strangers house or the boy who lied about a wolf), but it’s nice to know that good stories don’t really change.

They’re also informative and emotionally charged in regards to real-world issues.  As someone who’s been lucky enough to have kind and caring parents, Betty’s relationship with her father in IT is a very alien one to me, but thanks to movies that I’d seen prior, it was quick to establish what was going on.

Whilst life doesn’t work exactly like a movie, I’d like to think that I could recognise the signs of someone in a similar situation, and – having seen the extent of what it leads to –  take action.

I can only imagine, that any director, producer, camera operator etc. who creates something that makes someones life better, or even saves it (metaphorically or literally) then they’d be overjoyed that they made more than just something to switch off to.