What are movies for, anyway?

Rating: 8/10 (26 January 2005)

When I was younger, I had a fairly intellectual approach to the movies. French new wave, the human condition reflected through the auteur, total rejection of virtually all Hollywood films, etc. Now...well, if the two hours goes by without my attention slipping back to whatever dumb problem my life is centered on at the moment, I have to call it a good movie. This is now the bottom line, whether it's something deep or something trivial: if the writer and director can convince my brain to focus on his entirely artificial space/time for the length of the film, he's done me a HUGE favor.
By that standard, "Collateral" is a 10/10 movie.
Now...if my younger self were to see this, he'd probably point out a LOT of problems. Some reviewers actually called this "realistic" - clearly these are people whose concept of "reality" comes from seeing too many movies. The only "realism" in this comes from Michael Mann's obsessive interest in firearms; he is the only director I know of that always gets guns and gunplay absolutely dead on perfect, and I say this as someone who taught cops to shoot for a living.
But the people and circumstances that lead to all those rounds being expended live in a total movie fantasy world, where logic is absent and lethal pressure turns ordinary guys into heroes, instead of crushing them into dust, as most often happens in the real world. This is pure escapism, stylish and gritty but in no way connected to anything that might actually happen anywhere at any time.
But really - isn't that the whole point?