Saratoga Irish

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Why can't life be more like the movies?



Based on a true story. How many times have we read those words in the ads for movies? Off the top of my head I can name five, Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind, Erin Brockovitch, All The Presidents Men, and The Wizard of Oz. OK so the Wizard of Oz wasn't based on a true story but a great many films are, the only thing is, when you say "based" it means you can change things a little. In real life you can't. Yes I know, you can make changes in your life, what I'm talking about is omitting things that the audience might be bored with. Like your life, for example. If you were God and could write out the script for your life what parts would you omit? Again, this is for the sake of argument, if you were God you wouldn't omit anything, so let's put it this way, if God handed you the script for your life how much would you ad lib? So what is my point here, does life imitate art or does art imitate life? I'm going with art imitating life, but only the good parts. If it was the other way around life would be easy. Or would it? What movies would you base your life on? It's not fair to take different movies and cut them up to make a wonderful life for yourself. You can only choose one, and that would be your life, based on a fictional story. Now that's what I would like to see on an ad for a movie, Star Wars, based on a fictional story. Our lives are very different but it seems that we like to think that we can see ourselves playing the part that we saw in a movie. If you fall in love with a woman and mess it up somehow how do you handle it, stand in her front yard holding up a boom box blaring music? Stand in front of her house and yell her name (works best if her name is Stella)? Stand in the middle of the Hover Dam in the pouring rain stop traffic? So as you can see, none of those things will help you in your love life so try not to imitate art in matters of romance. Really, "you had me at hello" is pretty cheesy in real life. Some other lines that worked well in film but will do nothing in real life, "Here's looking at you kid", "You're why cavemen chiseled on walls", "I know what I want because I have it in my hands right now, you". This doesn't mean not to quote movies, it just means that they may not work as well as you would like them. I know for a fact that if a beautiful women said to me, "I'm just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her" it would work, but then again I'm a guy, "To call you stupid is an insult to stupid people" would work from the same woman.
So write your own script, a little divine inspiration wouldn't hurt "we're on a mission from God", and live you own life, don't just act out what you see on the big screen.






a quiz on today's posting. Ten movies were cited in the post , name them. Bonus, what song was playing on the boom box?