In some ways, life is always like the movies. You get those ups and downs and there is always the suspense of not knowing what will happen next.

After having to work at home due to my pregnancy, I have found that at night I have more time to watch movies. Whether on the television, DVD or VHS, I have had time to catch up on a lot of so-called life stories that I have missed since I have been working.

After watching them, I decided that in a lot of ways movies don’t portray anything we don’t already do in real life. Of course there are always the explosives and those special effects that producers have to throw in to make the movie interesting. Without any of that there just wouldn’t be a reason to watch a movie. Or would there? If you knew that a movie was just going to show you something that happens every day in your neighborhood, would you actually take the time to watch it? In most cases people wouldn’t; they would just look back at their own lives and watch the things they have already been through. But there are some things people go through across the world that some people never get to witness, and that is where the truth behind the selling and making of movies comes into play.

If you live in a place where it snows all the time and you never get to enjoy the robust life of living on a beach and watching people surf, then you will most likely buy or go out and see a movie that shows that kind of life. The thing I wonder about is why we work so hard to watch and learn about the lives that we don’t have to live in. If we live in a safe, small hometown, we seem to fall in love with movies that happen in a big city where everything is unsafe and people die daily. What kind of people does that make us? We actually enjoy watching the things that we don’t want to happen. We go and see movies that we are scared of just to make sure that when we get home they don’t come true.

We are living the lives that we choose to live and that is something that is more entertaining than a movie. Since there are no scripts, you can’t do retakes and things can’t be perfect. Our lives are special too, and it is within our own power to sit back and watch our movies. Unlike the DVDs we buy, we don’t have rewind buttons that we can push and magically re-watch something cute that our kids do or that one time the dog does something funny.

–Ashley McCartney is a news writer for The Clanton Advertiser. Her column appears each Thursday. She can be reached at ashley.mccartney@clantonadvertiser.com.