by Alexey Ledwith

Created on: March 07, 2007   Last Updated: May 09, 2007

There are no new ideas left for the average moviegoer due to the fact that no one wants to spend their hard earned money to sit in a sticky, dark, damp theater for two hours with a film exploring new concepts and philosophies about the inner workings of man. Cinema no longer exist in the Multiplex age we live and breathe in. Audiences crave escapism of course, most people don't want to sit through hours of soul crushing redemption when they can either look at their own financial woes. This is nothing new of course, movies are considered first and foremost entertainment.

The most interesting aspect of movie audiences Ive noticed over the past decade deals with the dual realities of the movie going audience and the reality of the characters within these films. There seems to be a huge dichotomy between art imitating life, and life imitating art. I was watching police footage on COPS the other day which presented perfect example of the state of mind we as a whole society seem to get stuck in. A bank robber comes in, everyone in the bank doesn't quite know what to do, they even question the reality of the situation. The situation has been played out in countless films, television shows, and so forth, it just didn't look real to them. The poor people in the bank looked at each other like, "Are we supposed to get on the ground...right?" It used to be that films imitated real life, now with the saturation of technology, we look to our films to guide us though the problems arising in our real lives. Our realities have become far less believable than the fiction we all use to form our values and beliefs. We are now so dependent on films and the media to portray our realities through actors that we now have problems understanding and accepting the realities of our own lives. In life things just don't look the same as what we grow up watching on screens. We turn to the actions that our favorite actors use in the dilemmas that are presented to them, only they don't seem to look and feel as real as what we have come to expect. So if the audience itself does not know how to asses what is real and what is not, how will they comprehend a "new" idea delivered by our filmmakers. As in most cases, the filmmakers vision is misunderstood and these films collect dust until enough time has passed where the film then seems dated, and acceptable by mass consumption.
The problem with developing new ideas in cinema lies in the acceptance of the audience. Most groundbreaking films we consider

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