There is little as entertaining as having your emotions relentlessly pushed, pulled and tugged for a couple of hours, and no medium creates those effects as deftly as film. In ways both subtle and overt, movies teach audiences about life, love, religion, relationships, etc. In the absence of critical viewing, movies have the power to persuade the viewer, over time, to embrace a substantially different way of thinking and living. Part of my struggle as a Christian has been to resist the subtle influence on my thinking while at the same time maintaining an open pursuit of culture. In his classic The God Who is There, Francis Schaeffer says, The Christian has paid a very heavy price, both in the defense and communication of the Gospel, for his failure to think and act as an educated man at grips with the uniformity of our modern culture.
Film is one of the means of paying the very heavy price.
Cinema plays an ever growing role in culture not merely as entertainment, but as an indicator of what the culture believes. The great film theorist Christian Metz says that because film is so life-like, so entrancing, so seemingly real, it can truly create, even if just for a moment, an alternate reality for the viewer. In that moment, the film is as real as anything outside of the theater. A close friend of mine, Brandon, adores the movie Swingers. Having watched it together a couple of times, his appreciation of it reminds me of my own fondness for The Breakfast Club.