Cultivating fantasy to the danger of living

So I hated the film 'One Day' or at least swore not to watch it again unless I had a bottle of B&B's or Bailey's (I'm not fussy) but at least it avoided regular pitfalls of Hollywood's addictive sex-love-excitement setup. See http://www.seattlecat.com/joyofmovies/columns/000429.html (A cut from Steve Lansingh's article: "The cinematic medium mirrors our life, but the world of movies is more exciting and visceral than our own. When we begin to confuse the worlds or expect them to operate the same, we run the risk of creating unrealistic — and perhaps harmful — expectations for ourselves. For all the danger that sex, violence, and profanity bring to moviegoers, at least viewers are aware of it. When watching a sexual scene, we can guard our minds against it. If there's a lot of violence, we can recognize it for its shock value without assuming that violence is acceptable. As humans with free will, we can choose not to mimic the profane language. But the fantasy world is a danger that we rarely talk about, something we rarely consider. It may, in fact, be more dangerous because we have not built any defenses against it. A "clean" G-rated film can have just as many negative effects as a violent R-rated one — perhaps even more, since we are unaware of how we are being manipulated. A steady diet of films that reinforce romanticized love, materialism, or stereotyping — negative attitudes already within American culture that are reinforced subconsciously — can change the way we think, the way we act toward others, and even how we perceive God. They are the hidden dangers of the cinema. The cinema's greatest danger lies not in the content of the films but in the medium itself. Film creates a fantasy world, a world that sucks us in and entices us. We want to see stories about the unusual or extraordinary, not three hours of some guy watching TV in his underpants, which happens in reality. (Andy Warhol's "Sleep" is an eight-hour long film of a man sleeping, which perhaps most closely reflects real life, but is still set apart from reality because the director has chosen who the actor is and where to point the camera and direct our attention.) Film usually gets rid of the small, quiet moments of life and concentrates on the crisis and drama. It creates a world that is visceral — it must because it communicates with only two of the five senses. Film intensifies its images and sound in order to overwhelm the whole viewer. This fantasy world of the cinema moves faster, looks prettier, sounds better, and is more exciting than ours. But what is the danger of a fantasy world? If we ask the average person on the street whether movies are like real life, chances are he or she will say "Of course not." From a rational standpoint, moviegoers are likely to distinguish between reality and fiction. But the fantasy becomes dangerous when we start to wish that our world were more like the movies, or when the movie reinforces a harmful value that is held in the real world as well."