Star Wars, Zootopia, and Other Teabags

Alright, so my Kindle was left in my bed but under some laundry- I found it getting into bed, a few minutes after finishing my post yesterday. I could've edited the post to tell you I found it, but I didn't!

 I mentioned watching Zootopia yesterday, but another film I also watched yesterday (that I didn't tell you about) was the original Star Wars movie. I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes a movie "good," "great" actually, and between all that thinking, and rewatching those two movies, I think I'm close to cracking it.

People want to watch movies that are strange and unfamiliar! Movies that challenge them, instead of keeping them comfortable. All the most popular films seem to point to this. The two movies that I rewatched yesterday, they're famed for pulling us into an entirely new, unfamiliar world, right?

The undying popularity of sequels, also, contrary to intuition, seems to point to this, that we crave strangeness over familiarity; loved and familiar characters act as guides, I think, flatteners of learning curves, maybe not audience surrogates as such but still people we love to spend time with too, to be sure. I'm not discounting the importance of a really good, awesome character, or group of characters who interact in an awesome way-- they make the movie worth *watching* again, but, it's the strangeness/immersiveness of the cinematic world that makes the movie worth *living in* again. (Sequels can service a tiny part of that, and so we go gaga over 'em.)

There's a lot more to it than that, of course, but I'll put it in a way that makes it seem self-evident, how the "flattest" films or works of art of any medium, the ones that seem cliche-or-whatever, are flat because they don't allow anything to exist by itself, beyond the frame of the canvas. It's, not just important but crucial. Even exceptionally well crafted filmmaking like Jack Reacher 2 (which is still a stinking awesome movie of course, I mean, it is Tom Cruise) doesn't really seem to build up its own world-or-anything, so at best it's going to get a bag full of mixed reviews.

It has to be a teabag. It has to be able to seep into you.