Jeremy wrote:
] I don't think the money (the cash, that is) has much of
] anything to do with it. It still would be hard to get people
] to see "21 Grams" and other films, even if they were giving
] away the tickets, handing out the DVDs, and posting it online.

Merely a spin of phrase...

] 1) What's so wrong with the real world that makes everyone
] want to get away from it?

Freedom is the ability to spend your time for your own purposes rather then those of others. We have too little.

You see, rather then doing the work that I want do to, or that I see as being in my interest, I have to do the work that other people need done... That is in the interests of others. And I have to expend most of my energy on it. And when I'm not doing that, I have the complexities of family. I take care of people that I love, but I also have to endure their imperfections. What time is left over I probably have to spend cleaning or running errands. If you are so at peace with your life that you need to escape you can consider yourself rather lucky, I think.

] 2) If everyone is so eager to "escape", who will ever fix the
] problems?

No one knows how. Most think that they can't figure out how. I know how. How is to export jobs to Asia, and to educate more people, until the available capacity for work vastly exceeds demand, and the work week is scaled back to 30 hours. As personally fearsome as the coming economic cataclysm is, I think it holds within it our greatest hope for real freedom.

] Halfway through the first film, the Matrix trilogy
] could have been in the mind-expanding category, but it
] turned out to be just another escapist blur.

They certainly could wake up and join the revolution, but that would require the revolutionaries to have a better idea about how to run things.

RE: How to Spread the Word When the Word Is 'Grim'