The importance of cinema
It's become customary here at WEEKEND that the editor writes the final Last Word column of the semester, and it has been on my mind for a good couple months. All the possible ideas came rushing through my head: a Top 10 list of films people missed in 2006, another rant on why Hollywood should quit remaking films, even a salute to all the greats whom I wrote alongside over the years -- Alec Toombs, John Barnett, C. Warner Sills, Tony Sams and numerous others to whom I raise my glass. For a while I was even debating a column on why the massacre at Virginia Tech had nothing to do with entertainment media, which various news outlets and conservative rabblerousers are surely preparing to declare, like they did when the Columbine shootings occurred. Yet, the more I thought about all these ideas, I just kept coming back to the importance of cinema itself.
