We love to bring down oppressive regimes — at least in our films. What does this say about our ability to recognize our own situation regarding our desire for greater freedoms? Are we tapping our desire for change with the stories we tell? Are our artists as free to explore this desire for change as we think? Do they have to take the quiet road when walking that talk? If they are somehow oppressed, how and where is the oppression manifest? What can we learn by examining the work we made, distributed, and consumed this year?
In other words, if art is partially about showing us all that we can aspire to as individuals, communities, and a planet, what are our films telling us about where we should be headed this coming year?
Strategy is a great personal passion, but something I find few people have an adequate grasp of. While the basic assumption seems to be that advice of all kinds is inherently strategic and of value, it is often anything but. Any given suggestion or piece of advice is only worthwhile inasmuch as it allows the attaining of a goal — without knowing that goal and measuring the success of attempts to attain it, you are not operating strategically: you are merely using tactics of unknown value. 
There’s a certain watercooler betting-pool mentality that accompanies the box office results of movies, as though their success were completely encapsulated in a single opening weekend’s results. This despite the fact that everybody knows Hollywood accounting is particularly slippery, that budgets never reveal the accompanying marketing costs of films, that foreign market revenue is increasingly important to the success of many films, and that ancillarly sales can be a primary rather than secondary revenue stream. Nonetheless, we seem to equate box office numbers with whether a film worked, whether it’s worth anyone’s time, and whether it’s going to ruin somebody’s career or save it. 