I was working with a filmmaker once, acting as a scriptdoctor on his new short. To make a point about his own project, I made a comparison with another short I knew he’d seen. Oops. He didn’t consider the one I brought up to be of relevance because it didn’t approach its subject matter, drug trafficking, with the socio-economic reality that this director felt it deserved. Hmm. Meanwhile, he never once stopped to consider the equivalent level of social reality in his psychological drama, which seemed to inhabit a dreamworld.

Interesting, the things we consider relevant when we compare films to reality. I’ve just looked at a short film script about burglars that’s quite playful. I pointed out in my notes to the filmmaker that he essentially has a choice to make. In one corner, the socially realistic burglary film, in which most burglaries are committed by drug addicts looking to sell your DVD player so they can get a fix. Alternatively, create a world of your own, where crime has its own context: Bugsy Malone and Ocean’s Eleven are two very different examples. Either route can produce a good film: make your choice and stick to it.

What I presume people mean by ‘realism’ is ‘presenting a similar worldview to my own (objectively correct) one’. Only, the term has been hijacked by people of a maudlin disposition, many of them academics and reviewers, who believe that some forms of reality are more real than others. Not for them the giddy delights of Amelie: no, life is best expressed in this worldview by the angsty Nordic cinema of Bergman, or in the socio-political paradigm of Ken Loach. Oh, the sacrifices such thinkers have made to whitter about film when their true calling was in social change or psychiatry.

The above is of course a generalisation. There are other commentators on film who care less about the tone of a movie than when it was made. I’m thinking here of those who still bemoan the collapse of seventies American cinema, which brought us Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, and Coppola among others. Only, the clue’s in the title: it’s not the seventies, so how about waking up to contemporary and even world cinema? Asia is producing some of the finest horror films you’ll see, and Korea in particular has become a hotbed for inventive thrillers.

For other people, how a film is made assumes significance above all other things. That’s clearly a concern for George Lucas, who didn’t even go near the second Star Wars trilogy until digital filmmaking had advanced to the point where it could tackle the effects he knew he’d need. And having done so, he went back and tinkered with the original trilogy to give the effects there an extra je ne sais quoi.

The Golden Age is whenever our favourite films were made. And that may well dovetail with other things going on in your life at that time anyway, outside the context of cinema. Which might explain Jonathan Ross’s enthusiasm for Stardust: hell, I’d be happy if my wife wrote an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman book with Robert de Niro in it, too.