Why Cinema Is My Favorite Form of Entertainment

I’ll never read all the books I want to read or play all the games I want to play, but with movies, I may actually get close… ish

Image from ‘Sinners’ / Warner Bros. Pictures

In the world of cinema, it’s not uncommon for movies to end up on my backburner. I’ll encounter their previews, express interest in seeing them, quietly file the films onto mental lists, and proceed to spend the next ten years scrolling past the options each time they surface on my Netflix homepage.

“Oh yeah! I wanted to see that,” I’ll remark as one of the streaming platform’s million other options builds a slightly more seductive case for consuming my evening. “That one looked kind of fun,” I’ll state non-committally before succumbing to the Hollywood-style magnetism of yet another superhero show. “Maybe a leading contender…,” I’ll monotonously murmur, hovering over some half-baked option as my bloodshot eyes lose focus; I’m lulled into incapacity by the infinitude of pixelated promise; and I quietly accept that my fate is to remain forever mired to my seat, vacillating between tepid choices in a state of drifting limbo.

But one of the greatest selling points of cinema for me is that it doesn’t need to be this way. Films are rarely so long that my procrastination period can be drawn out indefinitely. It’s easy to integrate a movie into most days’ schedules if I’m actually mindful about how to spend my time. Eventually, whether after a month, a year, or a decade, I’ll find a couple hours to set aside and absorb it. And I can revel in the satisfaction of knocking off another release from my ever-deepening reservoir of “movies to watch before I die.”

Our viewing sacrifices seem to stem more from our collective sense of overwhelm than scarcity of time. In a 24-hour period, most of us are accustomed to letting at least a couple of those minute hand revolutions fall into some mindless wayside. We scroll, stare, watch reels, and debate how to spend each day’s rapidly dwindling seconds. But if we can keep our indecision at bay, and learn to breathe deep in the face of the paralyzing sprawl of content that our streaming services provide, it’s not so hard to begin checking movies off our backlogs.

Even with TV shows that consume entire weeks of time, they’re sufficiently passive that they can usually worm their way into my schedule if enough friends and fans craft sufficiently compelling pitches.

There’s likely no media form that I’ve neglected over the years as routinely as video games. As with books, they’re so involved and demand so much active participation from consumers that it’s often hard to find the time to fit them into my itinerary. Despite feverishly pressing buttons since I was practically old enough to palm a controller, the list of games that I’ve wanted to play over the years, yet never found the time, is colossal.

I know enough about the history of video games to practically teach a course in it, but have never even made it past the opening screens of some of the medium’s biggest cultural touchstones. I’ve never even started a Fire Emblem or Castlevania title, never played a Pikmin or Metroid game for more than 30 seconds, and only managed to beat a pathetic two of Zelda’s 20+ entries.

As with reading, if we set aside a game for months or years, their control schemes begin to elude us in the same way as a story’s characters. Their various histories and relationships grow fuzzy when we lose that flow. With movies, it’s rarely all that defeating to simply start again from the opening credits when we’re hazy on details, but with books and games alike, the idea of beginning from scratch after a lengthy intermission is so daunting that many will just decide to set the titles aside forever.

Even with those rare cinematic masterpieces that I’ve seen ten times over, it doesn’t demand much persuasion for me to grant them an eleventh and twelfth watch-through. By contrast, even though Ishmael, Fahrenheit 451, The Great Gatsby, and A Thousand Splendid Suns were among the most life-changing books I’ve ever read, I’ve struggled to set aside the time it would require to give them each proper revisits. The billion books I still haven’t read always seem to build slightly more assertive cases.

The Last of Us offered me the single greatest story that I’ve ever found in a video game. The saga is so harrowingly intimate and alive that it will always hold a place in my heart. And yet, each attempt I’ve made to revisit it has met a similar fate. I’ve been forced to accept that the adventure is so ambitious that I’ll likely never find the time to complete it twice — no matter how enthralling my first experience in that forsaken world. The same can be said of Ghost of Tsushima, Horizon Zero Dawn, and the Uncharted series.

When starting a new video game, it often feels as though the stars need to align in order for me to play it through to completion. I’ll get immersed at first, but each day I don’t spend working toward its conclusion makes it less likely that I ever will. As games grow larger and it gets easier for people to sink hundreds — if not thousands — of hours into individual worlds, even reading War and Peace aloud to a class of fourth graders starts to look like a more sensible use of time.

But when the longest films rarely stretch beyond three hours, it’s exciting to think just how much it’s possible to watch. How many separate worlds we can lose ourselves inside of. How many stories we can absorb in the duration of a single month, and how many cultural references we’ll understand forever moving forward as a result. How many plots and characters we’ll be able to converse about meaningfully.

Of course, one of the most lovably daunting things about any field is that the more you know, the more you realize there is to know. As budding film enthusiasts, it’s easy to believe that there’s a finite number of stories that have made their way to the big screen. But the more movies you watch — the more actors and directors you fall in love with — the more you watch those horizons stretch further into the distance. The more those lofty notions we once held about what we could accomplish in our time here start to evaporate.

The more you realize that, even if you watch ten movies per day until you die, you can only make so much of a dent in what’s out there. For every hundred movies you cross off your list, 10,000 more will have been released. And that’s every bit as deflating as it is thrilling.

Each time I stop to think about how many of the “all-time greats” I still haven’t seen, I’m happily humbled by the reminder that the sum of what humans have already created is a mountain too tall to summit in a hundred lifetimes. And that that cloud-shearing precipice shoots higher into the stratosphere with each passing day.

Perhaps it’s naive to think that there’s any form of art where consumers can truly keep up with our species’ ecstatic overflow of ingenuity. But with cinema, the endlessly daunting feels, ever-so-marginally, less so.

It’s fulfilling to feel like we’re covering real ground, however piddly or illusory our progress. No matter if the horizon’s line moves a mile further back with each new foot we wade into the flanking ocean’s shallows. That there’s even a horizon in sight means that the task isn’t as hopelessly formidable as it might appear. With enough pragmatism, with enough clarity about what we enjoy and where to find it, it shouldn’t be so hard to leave the world as satisfied cinéastes.

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