Favorite line: "Ultimately, he blames the audience." Personally, I blame the medieval audience for all those Arthurian narratives that proliferated (Harry Potter-like) without a tight narrative arc and satisfying closure. Dumb audience, always ruining things with their nonsatisfying demands.
Seems the best thing we can say about the article is that it reads like a press release.
Honestly, we can trapdoor the nostalgia with 20th-century filmmaking itself; as fun as it is, we don't even have to go back to the grail romances. It's pretty rich for Peter Guber, responsible for tripe like the Keaton/Nicholson Batman, to complain about the cultural disease represented by The Transformers. Then they cite* Bobby Farrelly, longing for the old bittersweet stories of yesteryear, who is working on a Three Stooges movie.
Uh, what? The fact that the Press Release cites only American movies, and only a handful at that, that it ignores pre-Television serials (which were certainly open-ended!), that it ignores, hell, Television (generally speaking, open-ended, and has been since the 50s), just makes me wish that the funders of this institute had invested in an education for themselves....
* This is how much of an academic I am: no one is 'quoted' or 'interviewed': they are 'cited.'
Favorite line: "Ultimately, he blames the audience." Personally, I blame the medieval audience for all those Arthurian narratives that proliferated (Harry Potter-like) without a tight narrative arc and satisfying closure. Dumb audience, always ruining things with their nonsatisfying demands.
ReplyDeleteSeems the best thing we can say about the article is that it reads like a press release.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, we can trapdoor the nostalgia with 20th-century filmmaking itself; as fun as it is, we don't even have to go back to the grail romances. It's pretty rich for Peter Guber, responsible for tripe like the Keaton/Nicholson Batman, to complain about the cultural disease represented by The Transformers. Then they cite* Bobby Farrelly, longing for the old bittersweet stories of yesteryear, who is working on a Three Stooges movie.
Uh, what? The fact that the Press Release cites only American movies, and only a handful at that, that it ignores pre-Television serials (which were certainly open-ended!), that it ignores, hell, Television (generally speaking, open-ended, and has been since the 50s), just makes me wish that the funders of this institute had invested in an education for themselves....
* This is how much of an academic I am: no one is 'quoted' or 'interviewed': they are 'cited.'
I am glad in this period of economic constraint that these selfless people have money to spend on saving "meaning."
ReplyDeletePostscript: If nothing else works they can do another movie based on Lost in Space. That'll work.
ReplyDelete