There are good movies and bad movies. I watched part of a bad one called Derailed last night.

The acting was great, the director was really good, so that’s not what what made it bad. What made it bad was the harsh reality of the movie: the premise is that a guy has a life that sucks: wife who doesn’t love him, daughter with Type 1 diabetes, job where he just lost his biggest client. He meets a really good looking woman who’s got a husband she never sees and a job that’s just a job. They go to have sex in a motel and instead of having sex, they get robbed and the girl gets raped. Then the dude gets blackmailed: give the rapist money or he’ll tell the unloving wife you were cheating. Oh, and I forgot that the movie starts with our Male Lead in prison telling the story. So I already know how this depressing reality of a movie ends: with more depressing reality.

I gave up shortly after the blackmail part because I realized there was absolutely no art in this movie. It’s just kind of a, “life sucks, and just when you maybe get a reprieve, you get raped and blackmailed; then, because we don’t have justice in real life, we know you don’t want justice in your entertainment, let’s just make sure the good guy really loses at the end,” movie.

Those last two paragraphs contained spoilers, so watch out.

Derailed got good reviews and was somehow generally well received, which I can’t seem to make any sense of. To me, movies should be art. Movies should be based in at least some sort of fantasy or general unreality. Take for instance the Harry Potter movies. They’re about people with problems and conflicts, but they remove the viewer from the harsh realities of life, which include unloving spouses, diabetes, rape, and blackmail.

Take also the typical Zombie movie. There’s always plenty of gore, amputations, lumpy exit-wounds, and general disgustingness, but since they’re about zombies, there’s that bizarre fantasy element going on, which makes the disgustingness less disgusting. It also means that the filmmakers can focus on making an entertaining movie with all the things that zombie fans want: exploding heads, gushing bites, and there’s always one jerk in the movie who goes off the handle, gets turned into a zombie, and shot by a character we like.

And that started me thinking about other, “good,” movies: Schindler’s List, which is an unflinching, brutal, and very real look at the worst monstrosities that humans have to offer. On the one hand, yeah, we do need to be reminded of it because I’d hate to see Nazism repeated. On the other hand, Speilberg used this great artistic medium but took all of the art out of it and simply painted a picture of insane harsh reality. What ever happened to escapism? What ever happened to entertainment for entertainment’s sake? Why do we spend tons of money and pour thousands of man-hours into an art that isn’t art, but a history of brutality that requires zero imagination?

I’d rather watch zombies shamble around. I’d rather watch kids fly around on brooms.

I think that imagination is one of the three main ingredients to a good movie (along with decent acting and direction). To simply tell a story about life is not to make a great movie. To have a great story that transports a viewer, that’s the making of a great movie.