"very surreal. I did not care for the gore, like that blond guys' face after Edward beat the crud out of him, our when Ed shoots himself. Ug. But truly, I don't know what all the hype and attention is about. It IS just a movie after all"

Last night I went and saw Romance, a French film. I figured something obscure and French would take my mind off of work; No such luck.

Roger Ebert says that Romance isn't porn. You remember when Jesse Helms said "I know porn when I see it." Well I seen it.

Romance isn't romantic or very titillating. Perhaps that's what Roger was thinking.

You remember when you were a teenager and you would think of just what act
constituted sex and what could be considered "fooling around?" Well,,,
Romance had every one of those acts right up there on the big screen. If I
had had every one of those acts done to me,,, well I would consider myself
royally f****d!

I wouldn't say that I enjoyed the film, but it made me think. Almost
everybody in the film was sexually hung up, except for the Italian porn star
who's d**k was almost the star of the film. But he only had a "small" role.
Sic!

The only way I could tell that the Italian porn star and the girl weren't
having sex on screen was that there was no way she could have taken him and
lay there like a dead fish that the scene required.

Other than that, there were d**ks in her mouth, d**ks in her hands, fingers
up her p***y, toungs up her p***y, a medical exam scene that went on forever
and a live birth on screen. And at least once there was a d**k up somebody's
p***y. I think it was a stunt p***y.

Guess what? No one was enjoying them selves.

So, was it a good film? No, I think not. But it raises an interesting question. When is film real and when is it just a movie? Movies have the ability to affect us emotionally and that is probably the most real that it can get.

The actress in Romance was doing real things in the portrayal of a role. This was not a documentary. A documentary is real, but it is also a film.

So what's real?

All my life, I've always felt that the point of movies was to completely surrender yourself to what you are watching, and in doing so, you are no longer watching, but experiencing. Where else in life can you do this? For two hours you are given the opportunity to throw the real world in the trash and become the protagonist. Most films are made well enough that you can easily do this; others aren't and you feel that you've just wasted two hours of your life.

These days, it seems like people are less willing to surrender their emotions to a movie, which makes the movie-makers' jobs harder. Special effects have to be more realistic, emotions have to stem from modern day problems, and writers have to come up with absolutely original ideas, which rarely happens.

So, back to Ian's question ... when is a movie real and when is it just a movie? Well, to me, a movie is real when it affects me in a very real way. It doesn't matter if what I'm watching is real, like the sex that Ian described in the French film. If I walk back into the real world from the movie theatre carrying the experience of the movie with me, the film was a success in my book. Whether that experience was happy, sad, frightening, vomit enducing, disturbing - it's only the films that inspire absolutely NO reaction in me that I consider bad films. The point of movies is to create a reaction. It seemed to me that Ian had a VERY real reaction. Whether the sex was faked or real, he walked out of that theatre feeling f**ked, which seemed to be the film's purpose.