AI chatbot asks a lot of nice questions.

A recent question was: what’s a great day like for you?

Today was a great day. Any day free from diseases, pain or people shouting around me is a great day.

This year is soon coming to an end. Other than the pandemic and lockdown: which created fever and aches, I had bronchitis and toothache to trouble me. Construction noises and the usual shouting around as family members quarrel also kept disturbing. Other than this: the year went by as smoothly as the last year.

This note also seems to be like the last one with only a few changes.

Another question which is put often is about my hobbies.

Other than meditation it’s movies. A significant amount of time has been spent in watching movies. I feel it easier to watch movies than to read books. I consider movies to be the best form of art. In my opinion art is imitation of life. Movies are the best imitation of life. They’re made of audio-visual media which is presented with narratives. Since they’re mostly adapted from novels or short stories: they tell the stories similar to those you read. Even if reading allows you more exercise of imagination compared to movies and listening takes you on a different type of fanciful journey: movies do it quite well with various artforms like dancing, martial arts, cinematography, painting, romance, dialogues and others mixed harmoniously.

Each of the artistic elements used in cinematic expression can be developed and explored for infinite profundity on its own but some of it can be tasted in combination with others as you watch and listen to a movie.

Recently watching classics from black and white and then from the Technicolor era: I was wondering about the changes in the quality of cinema and life. Technicolor movies certainly had colors which were more vivid than real life colors are. Some of the wide screen movies which were colored by technicolor stand out as marvelous expressions. In this regard: movies are not merely the artform which imitates life but also a way to escape it.

Some people are of impression that all great movies were made in the remote past. You find similar opinion about all things including morality. A general theory is that with the passage of time degradation of quality takes place.

Such opinions are mostly sentiments of nostalgic people who have sweeping arguments about everything without any careful investigation.

Technology has advanced decade-after-decade and it has affected different areas of living in different ways. There are tonnes of low quality movies from classic era and many good quality films from the present era. As obvious: we are aware of more data from our own era than that of eras bygone. Only outstanding cases from the previous eras stay popular: creating common impression and misconception that everything was great back then.

Other than the obvious example of Technicolor, better dialogues and narratives : I never generalize for greatness of cinema in the early twentieth century. It’s like half-baked conclusions about everything.

For example: if everything was great back then: weapons must also have been the most powerful. It’s a fallacy: before Hiroshima and Nagasaki: there were no weapons of mass destruction as powerful as we have now. It is enough to prove that not everything has degraded in quality. The argument can be extended to include cures for epidemics and pandemics i. e. advancements in the field of medicine.