Movies (and occasionally face slaps) (Part 1)

No that’s ToTok. Sneaky Emiratis!

Tiktok is the spyware from China.

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They were always in the top 1% of that era. You might be forgetting or weren’t subjected to all the New Romantic shit and its various derivations.

Same. 80s music sucked unless you were a teen listening to 80’s metal. And metal is honestly kind of a garbagey genre.

Video games are definitely at a point where we need to start thinking about them as a legitimate form of art imo.

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Come on, video games are closer to slot machines than Abbey Road.

Video games as an art form are at where movies were in the 1920s-30s. Give it another 40 years and see if there isn’t an Abbey Road.

Also, Pac Man is definitely high art in my book.

You have the visuals, the music/sound and story telling. That’s three genres of art right there. They (/Many) are definitely closer to Abbey Road (or a movie) than they are to a slot machine.

There’s a great grumpy book from a German critic who thought that sound was the death of cinema as art, so considered 20s films as good as it got. I’d look him up but should be out enjoying Christmas with the family. I remember finding it convincing until I remembered it’s obviously mad.

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For the user, yes, but maybe not for the creators?

There’s also the case of esteemed high brow critics like Chesterton (lol) who opined something along the lines that he could hear the death of classical music in Sibelius and that Modernism was a terrible mistake. lol again

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Mind you if my memory serves me well he was also so shocked to find on his wedding night that his bride had pubic hair that their marriage was never consummated. lol again

Then again maybe he was 100 years ahead of his time.

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There was a category like that in the walrus and I think I answered Shout Shout Let It All Out, but I got mixed up on my own nostalgia song and it was supposed to be

(Not that I’m taking Winger seriously)

Are you thinking of particular mediums?

I don’t want to get too much into this given that I largely agree with you and see how much ground is left to cover before representation has been transformed across entertainment industries in the way that is needed, but I would like to use this to offer a brief counter and a few examples people might enjoy.

What’s revolutionary isn’t necessarily what’s added to the medium. It’s also what’s removed. All kinds of bigotry, racism, and sexism are increasingly verboten across entertainment mediums and industries. As I mentioned above, this is not to say that the problems there aren’t still significant.

In addition, what’s revolutionary to earlier generations also shows up in the kind of representation and the platforms now available to those groups. Groups who only a few years ago would have laughed if you said wait a generation and this will happen.

Could Crazy Rich Asians have been made ten years ago? Even five years ago? No. Maybe it could have been made, but on a far smaller budget, and it certainly wouldn’t have been given a major theatrical release. The director said in an interview that Netflix made him an insane money offer, but he turned it down because it mattered to him for this movie to have a shot in theaters. If it succeeded, it could be the first tiny step in convincing studios to take more chances on movies like this, increasing diversity in casting and production in a way that would have seemed impossible a short time ago.

What about outside of movies? What about in books? A previous generation would have never believed the success of JK Rowling. She’s a middle grade author, for christ’s sake. Those books win awards and maybe get taught in classrooms. They don’t give birth to billion dollar inter-media franchises.

But hers did, and she transformed the publishing industry. She was publishing’s version of Stephen Spielberg releasing Jaws and creating the summer blockbuster. More than that, she showed that something other than adult books written by old white guys could be blockbuster releases treated like a global event.

One final example. There have always been issue books, but The Hate You Give by Angie Thomas showed not only that books by people of color about people of color experiencing brutal racism could be published, but that they could succeed on a commercial level authors of previous generations would think almost impossible.

I’m not a huge Cure fan, but this song always gets me.

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I figure we have a bunch of readers here, so I will just add to this a recent article that gives a bunch of book recommendations on top of this for queer representation examples.

If you’re looking for trends and landmarks, as I always do, you might notice the continued rise of queer (and especially Sapphic) YA fantasy, or the record-setting number of trans guy protags, or the first traditionally published bigender and demiboy MCs in YA.

I mean slot machines have those three things too. The point is that the story, sound, visuals are junk food tier.

Ok boomer.

Go play The Last of Us and get back to me

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I’m not sure it’s an art form if it’s only a game.

I mean, you can watch the whole story on YouTube without participating, if that’s the criteria.

I would argue that art, by its very nature, is participatory, and what better way to experience art than as part of the story?

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