[This is getting 'WAY OT. My last comment on the thread.]
On Aug 16, 2004, at 12:27 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I'd say that it's misleading to imagine Hollywood cinema
prior to Star Wars as having put substance over style;
it had been pretty schlocky since its inception, IMHO.
The proportion of films coming out of Hollywood which are
particularly insightful or thought-provoking seems pretty
much the same now as it was in, say, the late 1960s. To
think otherwise ("films were much better in the past") is,
I'd suggest, another way in which nostalgia can override
one's critical faculties.
Whoa, cowboy. Is it nostalgia, or simply fact?
I must be watching the wrong Hollywood flicks - what I see
these days (speaking as someone that's gone to movies for,
oh, 35 years or so, and whose movie-watching has gone up
dramatically the last 2 1/2 years due to NetFlix and, oh,
a very yummy movie-spooning partner ;) ) is a lot of
retreads (remaking old movies == creative bankruptcy, IMHO),
milking the cow dry (how many more comic book-derived movies
do we need?), and, in general - for me anyway - I don't see
much of anything that doesn't rehash old and already-done
plotlines. For the occasional original gem like "Magnolia"
there's a thousand identikit been-there, done-that movies
I've seen. Plz 2 tell me your "particularly insightful"
and "thought-provoking" Hollywood movies of the present day,
Brendan.
Ob313: It's kinda like Techno to me - 10 years ago, the expanse of
the sonic palette to fill in with new Techno was utterly vast.
I was so happy to be around back then and hearing all this
amazing music which truly sounded like "The Music Of The Future".
Nowadays I hardly hear anything that sounds "new" to me anymore -
so much music has come out in those 10 years that the sonic space
has been filled up. Is it nostalgia on my part, or just the simple
fact that, as time goes on, motifs get used up, styles get
invented, used and over-saturated, and pretty soon there's
hardly anywhere new to go (then the "revivals" happen ... lol).
Anyway ...
Re: Hating on "Star Wars". Context is everything. Maybe you'd
think differently about the movies (the original 3, anyway) if
you were 19 years old in 1977 when the first one came out ... it
hit the geek set like an atomic blast. No amount of revisionist
history will ever take away what it was like to see "A New Hope"
at Graumann's Chinese in 1977 for me.
Re: "Blade Runner". There's a lot of reasons to hate living in
Los Angeles, but there's the occasional side benefit - I got to
see the Premiere of the Director's Cut of "Blade Runner", and
managed to get into the screening where Rutger Hauer attended and
gave a talk afterwards. When the movie ended and Rutger came out,
we gave him a 5-minute standing ovation. Now THAT ruled. :-)
- Greg
