Films make you think.
Sometimes they make you think about issues you've never considered, issues you might disagree, issues you might find yourself opening up too and sometimes they make you think that nothing is happening beyond you being entertained.
Funny thing about that latter point; people assume that simply being entertained means that they're turning off their brain and relaxing as in "I've worked hard all week. I just want to come home, plunk myself down of the couch, turn on a movie and not think." ,
No doubt there are movies satisfied in finding the easiest common denominator to play out every single expectation and clichè but you won't find those movies on SNAM. And if you're reading this blog it's unlikely that those are the films you enjoy anyway.
It's hard to relax. It takes work and effort. And you never really get to turn off your brain, it keeps going no matter what. A film needs to stimulate you in a way that takes you away from stress, worry and (sometimes) idle thought in order to allow you to relax. Anything less would likely only feed your frustrations, your concerns, and end up exhausting you even more than when you sat down. (consider how mind-numbing channel surfing can be as you try to find something, anything, to engage your mind.)
Consider your guilty pleasures, or the movies where you turn-off-your-brain, be it an action, horror, comedy, romance or musical, I bet there's something going on that engages your mind, stimulates your creativity and snaps you out of the daily grind.
Francis Ford Coppola's frugally made genre film, Dementia 13 (1963) is about an ax-murderer and works very well as a entertaining past-time, but still has elements of the structure, camera work and cinematic sensibility that would later show up in The Conversation (1974), The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979). Take Mel Brook's The Producers (1968) and you have a cutting play of fast-talking corruption and scam artistry as well as a searing critique of the American success myth. Go back to the films of Douglas Sirk, mello-dramatic soap-operas wrought with superfluous angst and you will find a series of movies so riveting in style and dramatic arch that it becomes easy to understand why someone as contemporary as director Todd Haynes would use Sirk as his cue to discuss the hypocrisy of racism and homophobia in Far From Heaven (2002).
None of these films (and there as still so many to choose from) seem like work. The could easily be mistaken as time-wasters. Why? Because they're enjoyable. And their enjoyable because in one way or another, they have engaged us, they have interacted with us, and they have stimulated us.
