Videos/movies vs. Real Life

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I've found that videos and movies (good ones , well made, with good plots and messages) can be quite satisfying, even educational (though hollywood skews reality and even accurate physics, not by conspiracy, but through artistic license and the laws that govern human entertainment).

Though I find reality, lately, dealing with the randomness and wildness of real life events a little more fulfilling. Maybe it's my age, and the fact that I've exhausted much video content that exists out there.

Made-up story lines become quite predictable and limited after a while. I feel like an alien that's been studying mankind from their video content, for a couple decades.

Reality, though confusing and very random (sometimes downright brutish, and predictable in that own right) has more appeal to mr, lately. Like I need freshness, or new content.
And being stuck inside the story of mankind affords me almost infinite new content. Not to mention real content, lived by real ppl. Not actors.

It's kind of sureal, even reality is.

I find there's a lot more intimacy and soul-searching in movies than real life.
Real life is more like the animatronic stage characters at Chuckie-cheeses, which my mother used to take (the whole family to) when I was young.

Do you find real life mor fulfilling or the romantic representations Hollywood has cooked up for us ?

Which is more real to you ?

(I'm curious to know)

I find real life more fulfilling.
I don't get much from movies.

With my Autism combined with past trauma from a war movie I usually cannot watch many movies without being hypnotized and traumatized by them. Movies that my mind can tell the difference between real life and the movie I can watch like any other normal person. Usually those movies are Scifi or love movies.

I see in movies everything that I could be, my ideal of greatness.

Then I step out of the theater, and reality hits me in the face.

Movies are the opposite of reality there escapism from reality. I enjoy watching movies like most people its forgetting your troubles for a couple of hours harmless fun. The problems arise when you cant tell the difference between Fantasy and Reality

Generally I like European film-making more because it is more focused on exploring common themes of everyday life, love, experience, whereas American movies tend more toward escapism. There is a pronounced cultural difference.

I really notice this when a European film is remade in the USA with American directors and actors, there are stark differences in emphasis and depiction.

A startling example of this was when the Japanese multi-award winning film of 1995 "Shall We Dansu" was remade in America ten years later. The famous American film critic Roger Ebert loved the original. The American version was the same script but what a contrast - all the subtleties of the Japanese original were missing from the remade version, which was somewhat flashy and superficial - a travesty of the original intention. The USA has produced some great blockbusters that's for sure, but cinema verite is an art form that for some reason rarely occurs in American-made films. I'm not sure what Ebert made of the remade version..

I am actually more into reading than movies or videos. I think it is because I sometimes have issues processing auditory information. I also like watching anime because I can usually get it subtitled. I do watch the dubbed versions sometimes if that is what is available.

There is perhaps a slight extrovert bias in the movies vs. real life questions. (Maybe not here but I have seen it other places.) People will accuse you of not having a life if you prefer reading to going to parties. Well maybe this is not common, but it happened to me.

As I reflected more on the two versions of Shall We Dance, the differences became more apparent: in the Japanese original version, the film was primarily a vehicle for the story the film wished to tell, which the actors portrayed with great subtlety and nuance; the American version was primarily a vehicle for the "stars" cast in the movie (Richard Gere and Jennifer Lopez) for them to portray their pre-existing star personas. (Susan Sarandon who was also in it, was the only actor in the American version who managed to portray some of the nuances).

I find that most movies do not approximate real life to any degree at all. Of course maybe I just watch the wrong movies. However, movies have to make money, so they need storylines that are going to be entertaining, inspiring, comical, etc. Real life usually isn't those things to the same degree as you see in the movies.

For example, a couple of weeks ago I was reading a synopsis of "The Big Chill." I have seen bits and pieces of it, but never the whole thing. Anyways, one of my friends from graduate school just died, and there is going to be a reunion of many of my classmates at his memorial service, pretty much like the plot of "The Big Chill." I was mentioning this to my boss, and then I said how it just won't have all of the drama of the movie-the people sleeping with each other, etc. The fact is, if someone were to film the reunion we have, it would bore the heck out of almost everyone. It wouldn't sell any movie tickets. So obviously "The Big Chill" needed much more drama that anyone's get-to-gethers really have.

The problem is when you start to believe that TV and Movies are an accurate portrayal of real life, and you try to measure you life based on those things. I have never really watched reality TV, but from what I hear, it is not real reality for most people-or at least for most sane people.