>>>>You probably would have grown up not much caring about it. At least you would have been less likely to harangue everyone else just because they enjoy things that you feel may be less worthy than other things. Maybe I missed some good movies in languages I can't understand, but since I thoroughly enjoyed the movies I grew up watching on late night TV, as I said, I don't feel deprived. What is life about if not finding ways to enjoy ones self. You enjoy what you enjoy, and I enjoy what I enjoy, and the fact that you feel I've been deprived doesn't make it necessarily a cosmic truth.
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>>>Are you really so eager to prove my point?
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>>>If it's all about enjoying oneself, I'd probably had all the fun I ever wanted by now, and would then have nothing left but to arrange acute lead poisoning to escape boredom.
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>>Sorry Dragan, but that is one of the silliest things I've ever read. Mind boggling, in fact. I marvel at the fact that you feel you've experienced everything there is to experience in the U.S. If that is, in fact, true, then yes, I'd say you're about ready for the scrap heap.
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>My point was that there are different kinds of joys. I find very little nowadays in what is sold as entertainment, but then that I don't regret that. I find joy in other things - and, among movies, I enjoy diversity, surprise, movies which show me what I didn't see or which make me think. And, yes there are things to experience here, but they aren't in the movies. It's a rare gem to find something that I haven't already seen, and I have pretty much given up hope that I'll find a lot of that here. But then there's the long tail of Netfilix, and I find things to watch.
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>>>But what if more joy comes from getting to know things you didn't know? Seeing the whole Earth and all its different people, and at that not necessarily limit myself to those who speak my language, what then? I guess I'd better get into traveling if I was born here, for there's much more outside this tower that you'll never see on the pewter screen.
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>>What on earth does travel have to do with watching movies while growing up? Is that what you do when you travel? Go to Spain so you can spend your time in movie theatres watching Spanish movies? Travel to Malaysia to watch Malaysian movies? Most people who travel spend very little, if any, time going to movies.
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>On Earth, so far :), yes it does. Movies were showing us (and I grew up watching Hollywood stuff, if you can believe that, but then also a lot of European, Mexican and Japanese as well; I also saw a bunch of Soviet flicks but mostly watched them with about dozen other people - they weren't popular at all) life in other countries long before we were able to go there and see them (in my case, about six years, I think - our first trip abroad was in '67). Travel and moving images were both ways of getting to know the world beyond what we knew.
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>I guess you'd never see it that way, as in your choice of movies there isn't much of the rest of the world, and even when there is, it's never made in the country it was about. But then, I should have guessed you'd never think of movies as a source of knowledge about other countries, if you think of them as solely entertainment - but my predictions are suboptimal most of the time anyway.
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>I actually went into a movie abroad, once, no - twice. One was a movie bar, watching Billy Wilder "Front page" over a [unspellable], i.e. a half-liter mug of dark German beer with friends who translated most of the German dub back into English :). The other was the unforgettable experience of Fellini's "Satiricon" in Amsterdam, in Italian with Dutch subtitles, with a friend translating bits of it. Simply because this movie was shown once on FEST in Belgrade, but wasn't distributed and I was itching with curiosity to understand what was it about.

What an unforgettable movie moment. Mine, in a less exotic locale, was seeing "Casablanca" for the first time in a club, or whatever it was, in Madison. I had just transferred to UW-Madison and didn't know a soul. I went out walking and stumbled (probably literally) into a littlle plate glass window place that was showing "Casablanca" for free and trying to sell meal subscriptions. That was the first time I saw it, the first of many.

This place being what it is, I am sure someone is going to jump in and say "Casablanca" is romantically indulgent or overrated. To them I say, Phooey <g>. The backstory alone is a movie -- lead actors and actresses dropping out (Bogart was a substitution), script being rewritten practically on the set, on and on. But they nailed it. I have thought of it several times since while working on a project that seemed to be falling apart.

If I have inspired one person to watch "Casablanca" for the first time, my work is done today <g>. Watch it with someone you like.