A love letter to cinema.

I love the smell, I love the sound,
I love the moment lights go down,
When strangers gather in the dark,
To watch somebody else's art.

I love the trailers, love the screen,
The greatest things I've ever seen,
The awful films, the masterpieces,
The stupid jokes, the tragic pieces.

I love the films that make me cry,
The ones where absolutely nobody dies,
The ones with plots that make no sense,
The ones that cost about fifty cents.

I love the actors, love the writing,
Love the tension, love the fighting,
Love the director's strange obsession,
With making sadness look like heaven.

Give me a comedy that's wonderfully stupid,
A romance written by a broken Cupid,
A horror film that ruins my sleep,
A tragedy whose wounds run deep.

Give me the films that critics hated,
The masterpieces overrated,
The box office bombs, the cult sensations,
The films that split entire nations.

I don't need every film to be profound,
To shake the earth or break new ground,
Sometimes I just want to sit and laugh,
At Adam Sandler falling on his arse.

And speaking of Sandler, I must confess,
There's one particular film I must address,
Grown Ups, a cinematic gift from above,
A film to which I'd happily make love.

I'd buy it flowers, take it to dinner,
Tell it that every scene's a winner,
Get down on one knee beneath the stars,
And whisper, "Darling, those jokes are ours."

But back to cinema, my greatest pleasure,
A love no critic's score can measure,
For sometimes I want to watch a man,
Lose everything he ever had.

And sit there when the credits roll,
With something aching in my soul,
Or laugh so hard my stomach hurts,
At someone falling face-first into dirt.

Because cinema is simply magic,
It's ridiculous, beautiful, stupid, tragic,
A hundred years of human dreams,
Projected onto giant screens.

A million stories, countless faces,
Different worlds and different places,
A thousand lives I'll never know,
But somehow feel before I go.

And God, I love the cinema itself,
The faded posters on the shelf,
The ticket scanned, the carpet floor,
That beautiful old theatre door.

The overpriced popcorn? I'll survive.
The twenty minutes of ads? All right.
The fellow who talks throughout the show?
May both his speakers cease to go.

But then the darkness, then the light,
The opening scene, the world outside,
Disappears without a sound,
And for two hours, I'm not around.

I'm somewhere else, I'm someone new,
I'm seeing life from another view,
A murderer, a king, a clown,
A lonely man in a dying town.

I've watched films that changed my thinking,
Films so bad I started drinking
My Pepsi twice as fast,
And prayed the ending wouldn't last.

But even then, I wouldn't trade,
The memories that cinema made,
The first time that a story landed,
The times I left completely stranded.

Because films are more than moving pictures,
More than dialogue and scriptures,
More than budgets, stars and fame,
More than some executive's name.

They're memories of who we were,
Of people lost and summers blurred,
Of sitting beside the ones we knew,
Before we all got older too.

And one day I'll be old and grey,
And all these years will fade away,
The actors gone, the theatres changed,
The world outside completely strange.

But somewhere in a darkened room,
A projector will illuminate the gloom,
A stranger laughs, a stranger cries,
And someone's favourite film comes alive.

And when my final credits play,
When all my scenes have had their day,
Don't give me some heroic line,
Don't tell the world that I was fine.

Just dim the lights and let them know,
I dearly loved the picture show.

Not every movie changed my life.
Not every film was worth the price.
Some were dreadful. Some divine.

But God, I'm glad I gave them time.

Because film is love.
And film is life.
And if there's a cinema in the afterlife,

I'll see you opening night.