Fantasy

I saw John Carter last week. It was good. I wanted it to be great, which made it worse. Some people saw that movie and didn't like it at all. Some people saw it and it filled them with awe, which is what a movie like that partially aims to do. Take 700 people and $350 million dollars, 500 shots, 70,000 special effects, 12 script drafts, and combine them just the right way and it pierces something deep inside us. The ads for the Christopher Reeves Superman movie said, "You'll believe a man can fly!" And that's what we want. Childlike awe. We want to believe in Santa Claus and King Arthur and the Green Lantern. What Star Wars and Indiana Jones did to us when we were children, that's what we want from John Carter.

Some people did feel that. I didn't. I took a bus home and went to sleep. A couple days later, I started watching the 6th series of Doctor Who on Netflix. And what I saw on my laptop did for me what I had wanted from John Carter 3-D. I believed a man could travel through time and space in a box that's bigger on the inside. I believed two time travelers in love could travel in opposite directions and reach one perfect moment in the middle of their relationship, but every other one would always mean more to one than the other. I believed in anti-matter prisons and the most deadly foe in the history of Earth, who everyone has seen but no one can remember. I also believed that these things were fucking awesome.

What's cool about it is that one strip of cinema hit someone's brain in a movie theater this week and did the same thing to them that a compressed digital streaming tv show did for me in my apartment. What's cool is that there is no formula for awe. It hits you right and you're there and it does something for you unlike any other experience I know. A rarer sensation than some of the best ones out there. It's better that it's different for everyone. Your favorite lover usually isn't your neighbor's favorite and blue moon ice cream does for him what only mint chocolate chip can do for you.

Fantasy is delicate and it's intimate. In a balanced world, Spielberg and Lucas would get hundreds of kisses everyday instead of millions of dollars