Post #17: Great Movies

I actually did a project my senior year of high school where I watched the Academy Award-winning film from years 2000-2012, and so I got to see a lot of what makes a movie award-worthy and what is lacking from every great movie, and what I saw kind of surprised me.

Some of my favorite movies I saw were Million Dollar Baby, The Departed, Slumdog Millionaire, and Argo, and all of those movies were dramas, not comedies or horror movies.  In fact, none of the movies I saw were comedies or horror movies; they were all dramas (with the exception of Chicago, a musical, but that was still about a drama).  In order for a movie to be successful and for people to really enjoy it, it has to be relatable--not just the events, but the emotions, too.  No one wants to watch a movie about aliens taking over some far-off universe, because no one can actually relate to what is going on.  Sure, there have been successful movies about aliens taking over this universe, but because it has human characters who feel emotions like fear for their lives, love for others in danger, and even anger to overthrow those opposing them, people can connect to the film.  

Argo is about an outrageous yet completely triumphant mission in history, but because it had war, kidnapping, and a whole lot of suspense, people could relate aspects of their own lives, or at least the lives around them to it.  Slumdog Millionaire is about the poverty, religious prejudice, prostitution, and mistreatment that goes on halfway around the world, and yet people in America could still feel sympathy and empathy for the characters because their emotions were real, and they know that to at least some extent, those events do happen in actuality.  The Departed isn't quite so relatable, as it was about the Irish mafia, but it depicted the lives of two men, similar in natural being and yet raised to (unknowingly) be opposing forces and double agents for the opposite teams--a game of life and death that creates a suspense all of its own.  And, Million Dollar Baby is about an extremely relatable, not-so-bright southern girl who just wants to do what she loves, a lonely, grumpy old man, owner of a gym and who longs for his daughter to speak to him again, and how the two, in their own way, create a father-daughter bond and become a family.

So basically, as we have seen here, a movie doesn't have to be completely original to be great; it just has to be able to connect to people's emotions, either with edge-of-your-seat tension or with relatable characters and circumstances.