Bainespal says:

Though often epic in scope, film (whether movies or TV) strikes me as the antithesis of poetry; or maybe lazy man’s poetry. The action all rolls out before you, requiring no participation by the viewer except to keep his eyes open. Poetry is more interactive; the reader or listener must be more engaged.

Hmm… I agree, to an extent.  Poetry is wonderfully interactive, more so than novels are (even though all text-based fiction involves interactivity to the extent that the reader constructs the author’s world in his or her mind).  In fact, as interactive fiction theorist Nick Montfort argues in the book Twisty Little Passages, the poetic riddle was the original interactive text “game.”  Personally, I highly value reader involvement and the mental discourse between the author and the audience.
 
However, I don’t like calling film media “lazy man’s poetry.”  I hate citing a source that I can’t point to, but I read one of C.S. Lewis’s essays in an anthology, where Lewis compares speculative fiction novels (I think he was calling them “romances” in the essay) to poetry.  Lewis noted that “romances” opened the “common man” to the same wonders and mysteries that poetry did for the educated and the intellectual elite.  Now, it’s no secret that poetry can be obscure, and a lot of people don’t have the right temperment to mine its riches.  I don’t think its fair even to implicitly imply that these people are lazy.  It’s even worse to imply that people who have no use for poetry are dumb rednecks, while poetry-lovers are inherently intellectually superior.  (No one here has made that implication.)
 
If the form of the “common man’s” epic has passed from pulp novels to movies and television shows (or more likely, has broadened to include film), then I think we have to accept film as fully legitimate, fully literary.  A painting is not very interactive, not in the same way that a novel or a poem is.  However, a painting is not “lazy,” at least, not a good one. 😉  Now, I think videogames are also coming into the fold of artforms that “common” people enjoy.  Interestingly, videogames re-incorporate some of the interactivity that was lost in film.
 
Nobody here would question the legitimacy of the novel as a form of telling epic stories, right?  But the novel was new once.  I don’t think we should consider the prose narrative to be the “default” form of storytelling.  There is nothing inherently superior about the format of the novel.  Poetry has many qualities that no other form can emulate.  Film can do things that novels and poetry can’t do, and even videogames can do some things that none of the other forms can do.  We should not look down on any form of storytelling.