The Boycott

Or why you shouldn’t go to see Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker.

And maybe all sequels, remakes, reboots, prequels too.

What? An other prohibition?

After the meat, the plastic, the gas, or the Black Friday, now I can’t go to see Star Wars?

Right!

The other day,

As many of you, I guess, I have seen the last new trailer of “Star Wars — Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker”, and as usual, it was huge, epic, beautiful, and it made me want to see this shivering new opus!

But do you remember the episode VIII? With the same kind of trailer, and the same impressions? And the episode VII before that too? And do you remember coming out of the cinema telling yourself it was such a mess and a disappointment?

Ok, yes I’m unmasked, I didn’t like the two previous Star Wars, but it’s not really the point.

Here it’s interesting to take this mainstream and worldwide example to see the soup pop-culture and entertainment deserved to us, playing casually with our nostalgia… and our wallet.

Disney’s Lost In Space

Buying everything related to entertainment, Disney became bigger and bigger, to become just fat. And with a huge pop-culture monster like Star Wars, they don’t seem to know how to deal with it. The word “deal” seems proper. The goal is always to make some money, a lot of money, here with a worshipped licence, and make pleasure to the fans is… well, just a micro-data.

But George Lucas has sold the baby, so we have to deal with it too.

Now, we have to admit something: George Lucas knew what he did, and what he built.

Ok, for the pre-logy, he made some mistakes like:

• Too much special effects, anywhere, anytime
• Anakin & Padme playing leapfrogs over ridiculous shapeless beasts
• Jar Jar Binks

We are all agree on these examples I think, and that G. Lucas wasn’t really good to manage his actors too. BUT, if we look at all the 6 episodes, they work.

The global story makes sense, because G. Lucas had a vision of characters evolving in a global universe, which has grown by itself afterward (especially with many great authors and stories we could read, now called “Star Wars Legends” books, while we were younger), of course with the movies he didn’t directed but still produced: “The Return Of The Jedi”, and mostly “The Empire Strikes Back”, directed by Irvin Kershner, which is still today considered as the greatest episode of all the saga.

But Disney is wading. When we look at the last episodes, it’s pretty clear they don’t get it. They may think you just have to shake some spaceships into space, to put some people playing with lightsabers (without knowing anything about the Force by the way), some good guys, some bad guys, and here we are: it’s Star Wars. Don’t forget to systematically push old original actors to maintain a sort of continuity even if they’re lagging and cutting all the freedom directors could get from new stories WITHOUT these old characters, meanwhile new actors are overplaying, losing all credibility.

And I will not debate on the copy/paste of the Episode IV vs Episode VII…

No, it’s not that simple M. Disney.

The (not) subtle art of cash-cow movies

The problem is, nowadays it works like this for many licences and original movies, most of them created in the 80’s and 90’s of course.

In one decade we received some sequels, remakes, spin-offs, or reboots for:

Terminator / Ghostbusters / Rambo / Jurassic Park / Jumanji / Independence Day / Rocky — Creed / Men In Black / Indiana Jones / Blade Runner / Die Hard / Total Recall / Robocop / Ben Hur / The Seven Mercenaries / Men in Black / Footloose / Papillon / Dumb&Dumber / Alien / Point Break / Bad Boys / Predator / …

A new Ghostbusters and Top Gun will come pretty soon, and other sequels are planned for the next few years like: Matrix 4 / Goonies 2 / Gremlins 3 / … A reboot for “Home Alone” too, etc.

Well, here are the most famous, but the list is endless.

Ndlr: For “Terminator”, we don’t know if the new movies are sequels, remakes or reboots, we’re a little bit lost, but maybe less than the creators…

If you have a look at most of these “new” movies, (or “null” movies as I like to call them), the plan is often the same:

• Keep the original story
• Rumple it!
• Add some variants and elements which allow you to say: “you see that? It’s new!”
• Add pretty special effects, as many as you can
• Bring it to our age
• Keep an original actor from the 80/90’s (like Harrison Ford, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Will Smith, Bruce Willis, …) it’s crucial to get some legitimacy
• Bring young new actors because, don’t forget, it’s a “new” movie
• Add some jokes, even if it breaks the atmosphere or the narration of the movie, people must laugh and must have a great time
• Special effects again
• The bad guy must be nastier/bigger/uglier/ridiculous? than before
• If the story takes place in the U.S, it’s better
• Put some clear references of the previous movies, it’s important to give people some marks, and again, it gives some legitimacy
• Spread hidden references for the geeks
• The good guy always wins
• Once again, special effects please

Pretty easy right?!

You know, for the studios, to continue a licence or else, it’s an easy way to create a money…movey…oups, a movie, that’s it! The main story is done, the characters are already “living”, well, we can go on like this for years, hourra! And people seem to like this because they’re happy to re-discover the heroes of the past. Great!

…And they lived together happily ever after.

Actually, it’s clearly a good solution to invest with no risks for the studios. But, as a consequence, we lose originality. Because, these famous movies don’t bring anything new, worse, it stains our love for the original movies.

The Wheel Of Entertainment

The problem is (again), many people go to watch these movies, by curiosity, by nostalgia, to put their brain “off” (as it was not enough in front of the TV… NDLR : we’ll talk about it in a future article), whatever, but just like this, it makes some great results in cinema theaters. Even if the critic reception is bad, and even if many other people are bored with all this. And so just like this, we encourage Disney, Hollywood & co to continue this routine by ourselves.

Well it’s understandable I guess: I would like to believe Star Wars or Terminator will be great again. But too many recent examples served as a lesson. Thank you, I’m done.

It’s a worrying finding and, moreover, Hollywood looks for directors that fit to their poor vision, dictated by the business and investors, meanwhile creative people are struggling to make their path.

And it’s too bad, because in the 80/90’s, there was a huge effervescence of new movies, with brand new ideas, new techniques, new styles, etc, and this was what we loved and what created the cinema’s magic of that time!

But even if we ignored all this, it would not work either.

Because, old movies were made at their time, in a specific context of our society, with actors also being part of it too, despite of them. And you can’t really recreate that. Our time is different. Even if the original creators are involved in the project, they can’t restore how people saw things at that time. So it doesn’t work.

Let’s try an example:

If you look at the role of women in the movies

In the 80/90’s movies, we don’t pay too much attention now cause nostalgia is here, but most of the time they were just there to follow and kiss the hero, the great man who solved and saved the world (you can rewatch the big cliché’s end of “Independance Day” if you want), or to be a good housewife. It’s a basic view I know, and it still exists, but during the last 10 years, the number of strong women characters have risen in movies, and the position of people has changed too because of the (good and legitimate) fight of women today. You can still put a stupid girl or something, but it depends on what kind of movie and what kind of population you’re targeting.

You see, this kind of consideration wasn’t there in the past years, so people didn’t really care, now it’s widespread in our society, so it is reflected in our movies. It’s quite simple. And this is how you must be bored to see stupid girls in movies now. Right? RIGHT?

Ok but, as usual, the deviances are not very far, and many firms like Disney took these kind of examples literally. Now the hero has to be a woman!

And in order to be corporate as well, don’t forget to put some “minorities” everywhere in your movies.

By the way, most of the time new actors playing in such movies play with more recent codes, but in an old story (coming from the 80’s) that doesn’t seem to connect with them. And so we don’t pay attention to the characters, we don’t believe in them, we don’t love them, because we just can’t.

In addition, there’s the constant difficult balance between staying too much in the codes of the original movie, taking no risks, or going too far, losing people.

Our expectations are also different and had evolved, cause the generation who was a child in the 80/90’s is older now. Our tastes are changing, obviously, and you’ve got to imagine something new to impress us, cause it’s clear that our current exigency is not the same as the one we’ve got in our childhood.

Let’s draw it simple:

• 80/90’s context + less exigence + original story = GREAT
• 10/20’s context + more exigence + modified original story = BAD

Hopefully, there are many good movies which came out too. But it’s clear that the vintage solution has a big place on our screens today. And maybe if we wanted to minimize it, we could avoid to see these kind of retro-movies. It’s up to us to break the wheel… as in many situations. But when we see Disney pushing all its live-action remakes now, it’s the cherry on the cake folks! Behind the speech of a “brand new experience”, or to “re-discover the magic of the movie”… NO! It’s just some bullshit, and you know it.

NDLR: Warning, I don’t blame or even thought blaming all the talented people who worked, certainly hard, on all these movies, bad or good. What is questioning here is the system in which one we are embedded since almost 20 years now.

The Retromania

To go further, a few years ago I read the perfect book of Simon Reynolds “Retromania”, released at the beginning of the decade. A must have about the subject of “retro”, analysing our era and our past, and how they are melting together.

It is said that we always been inspired by the past, especially concerning pop-culture, but movements like Punk in the 80’s or Raves in the 90’s got something new to highlight whereas the 2000’s seem to settling in a curious “Re” mode with remakes, reboots, retrospections, remixes, …

Our generation is bogged down in nostalgia, and the Marketing is taking the benefits. The system enjoys the fact that we’re a child generation who seem to be having trouble to grow up, and who stays in this field of innocence and loopholes, watching and listening more and more content. Maybe to avoid reality, cause our future seems unclear.

But you know, Disney & co don’t care, as long as they can make some money…

Anyway, it’s difficult to know how the millenials are absorbing all this, because for most of them, they’ve got no step back yet. After all, the less demanding/educated/curious people among the young generation could easily believe that these null movies are the reference without knowing that the original was better?

“He looks back at the last ten years and sees almost nothing but unimaginative retro, causing him to worry that the next generation will have nothing other than shoddy detritus to build upon.”

Simon Reynolds — Retromania

The Music Strikes Back?

To finish, we talked a lot about movies, but the music has got it’s own retro movement too.

To make a transition, you can already think about all the biopics that came out in cinemas the past few years: Walk The Line, Ray, The Runaways, Get On Up, Jersey Boys, Love & Mercy, Control, Bohemian Rhapsody, or Rocketman.

Such a good way to discover the amazing lives of prestigious artists like Johnny Cash or Elton John, often following the same direction (the start, the success, the drugs/alcohol problems, the recovery, the prestige, the end/death) but the context and personal history of each man/woman or band gives a great picture.

But another trend has emerged recently, even if I guess some artists did the same kind of thing in the past. Indeed, beyond the countless reformations band from the 60’s to the 90’s, since a few years we can also see lots of band touring for anniversary albums:

• U2 performing The Joshua Tree
• Bruce Springsteen performing The River
• Peter Hook performing Unknown Pleasures

Ok, why not, it’s pretty cool.

What is more unusual is to see recent bands doing it, like:

• Massive Attack performing “Mezzanine”
• Interpol performing “Turn On The Bright Lights”
• Bloc Party performing “Silent Alarm”
• Why? performing “Alopecia”
• Texas performing “Southside”

Here, there are 2 things:

It’s cool, but it’s obvious that the money that gathers this kind of tour is quite seductive, and, once again, easy, because the bands know they’ve got a fanbase from their classic(s) album(s).

But it’s a little disturbing, because new bands are already surfing on nostalgia, perhaps assuming their best records are behind them.

Obviously, vinyl album reissues bloom everywhere, playing with our heartstring. Daddy who sees a beautiful vinyl of David Bowie just in front of him, his glorious youth in mind. What a beauty! You understood that nostalgia has become a business, very lucrative.

Oh, maybe I should buy one to my dad for Christmas :p