Tuesday, November 18, 2008

I don't think the MIT Center for Future Storytelling would like medieval romance

by J J Cohen

Seems more twentieth century nostalgic than future directed to me.

4 comments:

Jeffrey Cohen said...

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.

Karl Steel said...

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.'

Steve Muhlberger said...

I am glad in this period of economic constraint that these selfless people have money to spend on saving "meaning."

Steve Muhlberger said...

Postscript: If nothing else works they can do another movie based on Lost in Space. That'll work.