What Are Movies?

A group of people get together and make them. Another group of people pay money to see them. Why?

What is the difference betwen a random collection of incidents . . . and a story?

"The difference between real life and movies is that movies have to make sense. In real life people often do things we don't understand - they may have a motive, but we'll never find out what it is. On film we must be able to clearly identify a character's motives." - William Martel

Movies are like life with the dull parts cut out

"Life is not a movie. It doesn’t have a story arc. Character development, such as it is, is not particularly overt. And more often than not, the lighting sucks. Movies, even the most putatively realistic of them, are not life, either, as we all know, or should know. So what are they? “God” is a concept by which we measure our pain,” John Lennon said. In the same vein, we could say that cinema is a concept by which we measure the distance between our actual lives and our idealized one."
Premier Magazine, Oct 2002

What dreams are to the individual person, movies are to society.

Myths - a set of beliefs that act as a glue which holds a society together, and holds a psyche together.

Usually, in a story, at least one of the caharacters has what I call an "emotional frear, limitation, block, or wound."
Star Wars: Luke had to learn who he was (a Jedi knight); Han Solo had to learn to become a group member (instead of operating "solo"), and also had to learn responsibility; Princess Leia had to learn to be vunerable in love, Obi-Wan had to learn he could still make a difference, and C-3PO had to learn courage. Each of these characters was forced to their different FLBW's.
Ufually the character doesn't know he or she has a FLBW. If you pointed it out, they'd probably disagree. In short, they're usually oblivious. It's unlikely, for instance, that Han would agree if, at the start of the film, you accused him of being unable to function as part of a team. It's unlikely Luke would agree if, at the start of the film, you accused him of having no idea who he was.
A characters' path of growth through their FLBW is a rocky one; quiet often the character will resist growing.
- David Freeman

"Here we have our present age . . . bent on the extermination of myth. Man today, stripped of myth, stands famished among all his pasts and must dig frantically for roots, be it among the most remote antiquities."
- Friedrich Nietzsche

"It may perhaps seem to you as though our theories are a kind of mythology . . . But does not every science come in the end to a kind of mythology like this? Cannot the same be said today of your own Physics?"
- Freud, in his correspondence with Einstein

“We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of life. Narrative is reassuring. There are days when life is so absurd, it’s crippling – nothing makes sense, but stories bring order to the absurdity. Relief is provided by the narrative’s beginning, middle and end.”
- Norman Mailer

"A hit film explores a subconscious fear or desire currently held by the audience" - William Martel

"...humans are forced to live their entire lives lacking full knowledge about almost everything. Yet they must make decisions and take action every day. The constant effort to act despite incomplete information is, at the least, very tiring and sometimes profoundly disturbing. Consequently, one of the strongest desires people having is to take a vacation from the gnawing sense of uncertainty. They long to spend time in a world where issues will be resolved and questions will be answered.
That's why stories that convey the promise of completion and order are the most satisfying, because these are exactly the sensations that people can't usually find in real life."
- Dona Cooper, The American Film Institute