Reminds me very much of Roger Scruton's diagnosis that our popular culture is defined by kitsch (which in turn is defined by sentimentality), echoing Wilde that the big problem of the latter is that it wants to have an emotion without paying for it, gratification on the cheap.
And I think animation is particularly ripe for nostalgia, just like gaming because effectively it never ages. The Scrubs reboot is an interesting case because just watching the first episode I think you can actually see Scruton's point, there's something immediately off about seeing the same jokes and characters played out by people well into their 50s in a painfully way too HD recreated set.
I always thought the reason Toy Story works for adults and children is that the toys are the 'parents': caring for their child, but with the awareness that their job is to render themselves unnecessary.
Not having watched the reboot yet, what are your thoughts?
I'm not sure I understood this criticism since it will be filmed in HD this time... is it that the sets mimic, but imperfectly and look wrong now?
I've also definitely wondered how it works with the actors. When I saw the trailer, my first thought was that Zach Braff looked old -- not in the age sense, but his haircut and clothes were simply... ones that didn't suit him.
That does make me wonder if anyone has started shooting in SD again to make things look "nostalgic". The only ones I'm aware of are some art films that used super 8 for that effect.
Today's Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox (blegh) will be tomorrow's nostalgia. I just don't know if there will be cheap hardware available for future adults to experience it though. Plus it seems that pop culture is so much more fragmented now thanks to social media, so it's harder to capitalize on a single IP to milk later on.
I suppose that will change for the games if truly high fidelity head mounted displays ever take off. For the hardware I'm less certain because aside from pointlessly bloated web frontends nothing that I do on a day to day basis actually consumes more resources than it did in 2015. Perhaps local AI on low power devices will be the critical point for me there?
I read somewhere that nostalgia is just bitterness towards the present. It's an emotional trap and best not to linger in nostalgia too long. Change is inevitable, we can't go backwards.
Discussion at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36465528
Mark Fisher/K-punk on hauntology.
I guess that's normal? I dunno, I dont have any further conclusions. Maybe we should be concerned about it?
For me it is kind of hard to like the things I produce, because of the obvious egocentrism bias. Do I like it, because I like it, or do I like it, because I made it and had to sacrifice something for it?
When I'm judging other people's work and I like it, I consider that feeling to be more genuine, even if the creator outright panders to my preferences.
But a couple times they actually optioned something he wrote. What followed was a rewrite process involving no less than six other authors that were tasked with adding things the studio wanted into his script. No love story? Well, we'll just have to shoe-horn that in, because otherwise the women might not see it. Anything offensive to a major market, particularly China? That gets ripped out. Does it have merchandising? If not, we'll add characters, or robots, or whatever so we can sell toys and video games.
Etc, etc. The script that actually gets made bears no resemblance to his original work, and more importantly, they turned his original scripts into Generic Hollywood Movies that were virtually indistinguishable from the others.
The real problem here is for a couple decades nearly every well financed movie made money. So the studios analyzed just what a successful movie needs to have and created an assembly line to produce them. After awhile audiences were bound to look elsewhere for something new.
Sometimes due to peer pressure of the group I’m with, sometimes due to the fact that they’re guaranteed to be an okay time.
The most recent non remake I watched was hamnet, and basically the whole thing went over my head.
Well I hoped with each one there would be a different plot.
The only thing essentially different is the Reylo plot which is kinda spread between the three movies. It makes for like half of an original movie.