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:

  1. 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.

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  2. 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.'

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

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

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