IDK, I was in high school when the Matrix came out and I loved it, but I’ve found that a lot of excellent movies were products of their time and don’t hit quite as hard if you watch them for the first time a decade or two later.
Definitely true. I watched The Shawshank Redemption earlier this year and, while it was still a good movie, it didn’t have anywhere near the greatness that it did when I first watched it in the 90s.
IMDb lists it as a 9.3. But, currently, I wouldn’t put it above an 8.
It, like many movies that were also firsts and created many tropes and sub-tropes derived from them, often don’t hold up. That being said, sometimes, some do, for various reasons.
I remember one time, post 2020, I was really getting fed up with maga politics and the fucked up stuff going on, and I was diving into younger-people political protest music and cultural music, both to see and also because a lot of it is really good. I was compiling a playlist to be a product of its era, kind of. But then I remembered that there was a lot of 1960s civil rights movement punk, both pop and the real underground stuff, so I went and gave a bunch of that a listen.
And boyyyyy that stuff was DIFFERENT. A lot of it was really subtle and almost topical in comparison. You know, a lot of talk about “the man” and “they”. Compared to modern music talking about not wanting to get murdered in school by guns, it was wild to see the 1960s and 1970s music, which was obviously in extremely heated times, feel so…Tame.
Combined with differences in levels of subtext being popular or not in culture, it was a fascinating experience. Music has always been a way to express emotions, with coded tones and beats and stories and themes, etc… and seeing basically the same issues still here, but unfortunately progressed… Ugh. It really makes you wonder how and if we’re gonna make it, and maybe even what humanity will become.
I’m not without hope, but I’m also not without concern. We either repeat the lessons ourselves, or learn from books and culture and those that came before us, and learn faster with less error… Because the human lifespan is only currently so long. Fuck.
IDK, I was in high school when the Matrix came out and I loved it, but I’ve found that a lot of excellent movies were products of their time and don’t hit quite as hard if you watch them for the first time a decade or two later.
Definitely true. I watched The Shawshank Redemption earlier this year and, while it was still a good movie, it didn’t have anywhere near the greatness that it did when I first watched it in the 90s.
IMDb lists it as a 9.3. But, currently, I wouldn’t put it above an 8.
It, like many movies that were also firsts and created many tropes and sub-tropes derived from them, often don’t hold up. That being said, sometimes, some do, for various reasons.
I remember one time, post 2020, I was really getting fed up with maga politics and the fucked up stuff going on, and I was diving into younger-people political protest music and cultural music, both to see and also because a lot of it is really good. I was compiling a playlist to be a product of its era, kind of. But then I remembered that there was a lot of 1960s civil rights movement punk, both pop and the real underground stuff, so I went and gave a bunch of that a listen.
And boyyyyy that stuff was DIFFERENT. A lot of it was really subtle and almost topical in comparison. You know, a lot of talk about “the man” and “they”. Compared to modern music talking about not wanting to get murdered in school by guns, it was wild to see the 1960s and 1970s music, which was obviously in extremely heated times, feel so…Tame.
Combined with differences in levels of subtext being popular or not in culture, it was a fascinating experience. Music has always been a way to express emotions, with coded tones and beats and stories and themes, etc… and seeing basically the same issues still here, but unfortunately progressed… Ugh. It really makes you wonder how and if we’re gonna make it, and maybe even what humanity will become.
I’m not without hope, but I’m also not without concern. We either repeat the lessons ourselves, or learn from books and culture and those that came before us, and learn faster with less error… Because the human lifespan is only currently so long. Fuck.