nostalgia | the m0vie blog

New Escapist Column! On the Trump Era Paranoia of “Star Trek: Picard”…

Posted on March 23, 2023 by Darren

I am doing weekly reviews of Star Trek: Picard at The Escapist. They’ll be dropping every Thursday morning while the show is on, looking at the third season as the show progresses. This week, the season’s fifth episode.

The third season of Picard is fascinating, in large part because it’s so narratively and thematically empty. So much of the show is given over to empty nostalgia, that there’s little sense of what this story is supposed to be about, beyond a loose assemblage of familiar clichés into a recognisable pattern. There’s none of the urgency of the immigration and xenophobia metaphors that informed the first two seasons, as clumsy as those were. Instead, Picard falls back on a set of unfortunate science-fiction clichés that speak to the worst impulses of the current moment, a paranoia that feels tied to the worst of the American zeitgeist.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: changelings, Government, great replacement, imposters, infiltration, january 6th, maga, nostalgia, paranoia, qanon, star trek, star trek: picard, trump | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Colonial Fears of “Shazam!”

Posted on March 17, 2023 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. With the release of Shazam! Fury of the Gods this weekend, it seemed as good a time as any to take a look at the superhero sequel.

One of the interesting things about Fury of the Gods is the way in which it seems like it is in conversation with the earlier films in the DCEU, lifting several cues directly from films like Man of Steel, Wonder Woman, Batman v. Superman and Zack Snyder’s Justice League. In particular, it’s a film in which the existential threat is inherently nostalgic, the fear of an imagined past intruding into the modern world and overwriting it.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: batman v. superman, colonisation, fears, invasion, man of steel, nostalgia, shazam!, shazam! fury of the gods, wonder woman, zack snyder's justice league | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Complicated Seventies Nostalgia of “Poker Face”…

Posted on March 15, 2023 by Darren

We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. With the end of the first season of Poker Face last week, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back at the show.

Poker Face is obviously designed as something of a seventies throwback. The show is very obviously a hybrid of classic seventies television like Columbo and Kung-Fu. However, there’s more than simple nostalgia at play within the series. Poker Face is a show about grappling with the memory and legacy of the seventies, of understanding why these stories resonate in the modern world. It has a nuanced and complicated relationship with the era from which it draws, which makes for compelling television.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: 1970s, charlie cale, cynicism, economy, memory, natasha lyonne, nick nolte, nostalgia, out of focus, paranoia, poker face, Rian Johnson, seventies, the escapist, vietnam, war, watergate | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Baseline Competence of “Star Trek: Picard”…

Posted on March 12, 2023 by Darren

No Win Scenario is basically competent, which makes it the best episode of the third season by default. In many ways, No Win Scenario demonstrates the ceiling that this approach places on quality, assembling a variety of familiar elements in such a way that manages to successfully remind the audience of much better films and television shows. It’s disheartening that this is the third season’s best self, that it’s greatest accomplishment is a reminder of things the franchise did better elsewhere.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Star Trek | Tagged: changelings, Encounter at Farpoint, no win scenario, nostalgia, Odo, picard, pot, star trek: picard | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On How “Scream 4” Took the Franchise’s Self-Awareness to Its Logical Endpoint…

Posted on March 8, 2023 by Darren

We’re launching a new column at The Escapist, called Out of Focus. It will publish every Wednesday, and the plan is to use it to look at some film and television that would maybe fall outside the remit of In the Frame, more marginal titles or objects of cult interest. With the upcoming release of Scream VI, it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look back at the criminally underrated Scream 4.

The last film in the franchise to be written by Kevin Williamson or directed by Wes Craven, Scream 4 exists in a weird space. It is separated from the two film either side of it by more than a decade, the only point in time where the franchise wasn’t coming out on a regular basis. However, it’s a movie that feels very firmly ahead of its time. It was released years before Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens and David Gordon Green’s Halloween, but it feels in conversation with a wider culture caught in a feedback loop of Gen X nostalgia.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Movies | Tagged: 1990s, Emma Roberts, franchise, gen x, horror, Kevin Williamson, meta, nineties, nostalgia, out of focus, Scream, self-awareness, slasher, wes craven | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On The Third Season of “Star Trek: Picard” as a Choice Between Tired Clichés and Poor Writing…

Posted on February 23, 2023 by Darren

Writing about the third season of Picard is difficult, largely because it’s a show that doesn’t really offer anything new on a week-to-week basis. Indeed, the season’s interesting episode is an interesting study on its limitations. The primary plot thread is just a collection of reheated familiar elements, references to pre-existing Star Trek stories thrown into a blender and served a room temperature. The subplot involving the show’s last surviving original character, Raffi, is a bit more interesting, but is ultimately undone by the show’s lack of interest in it.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: disengage, nostalgia, raffi, star trek, star trek: picard | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On The Third Season of “Star Trek: Picard” as an Exercise in Justifying Nostalgia…

Posted on February 18, 2023 by Darren

The third season of Picard is a staggering work of fan service nostalgia, a collection of imagery and iconography that the audience recognises, with little to tie it together beyond assumed familiarity. Part of what is so interesting about the series is that it seems to understand this. Picard is largely built around justifying that nostalgia, to itself and its audience, as if trying to desperately reassure viewers that it’s fine to give up the future and retreat into the comforts of an illusory past.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: continuity, fan service, nostalgia, picard, retro, star trek: picard, the escapist | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On The Third Season of “Star Trek: Picard” as Fan Service Methadone…

Posted on February 11, 2023 by Darren

The end of the second season of Picard effectively wrote out the bulk of the show’s new cast members, explicitly to make room for a nostalgic revival of Star Trek: The Next Generation, featuring cast members thirty years removed from that series. The result is as pandering and condescending as one might expect, suffering from many of the same fundamental issues of the first two seasons, stripping out anything distinctive or unique and replacing it with a shallow petina of nostalgia. It’s cynical, it’s hollow and it speaks to a fundamental emptiness with so much modern pop culture.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: continuity, emptiness, fan service, hollowness, meaning, nostalgia, picard, shallowness, star trek: picard, star trek: the next generation | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On the Recursive Nostalgia of “That ’90s Show”…

Posted on January 22, 2023 by Darren

I published a new piece at The Escapist yesterday. With the recent release of That ’90s Show on streaming, it seemed like a good opportunity to delve into the show’s very interesting nostalgia.

Part of what is so fascinating about That ’90s Show is that layers of nostalgia that permeate it. It is not simply a show nostalgic for the nineties. It is a show that is itself nostalgic for the nostalgia of the nineties. It’s a conscious effort to resurrect the multi-camera sitcom, a classic institution of American television that has become something of a cultural artifact. It’s also a show that is less interested in its own nineties setting than it is in indirectly channelling the nostalgia that that show felt for the seventies. It’s a hall of mirrors.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: Television | Tagged: netflix, nineties, nostalgia, resurrection, revival, Sitcom, that '90s show | Leave a comment »

315. Tomorrowland: A World Beyond – Bird Watching 2022 (#—)

Posted on December 3, 2022 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn and Darren Mooney, and this week with special guests Deirdre Molumby and Graham Day, The 250 is a weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released Saturdays at 6pm GMT.

This week, we’re finishing up a season focusing on the work of one particular director: Brad Bird’s Tomorrowland: A World Beyond.

As a young boy, Frank Walker discovered a secret society of geniuses who lived apart from the rest of the world in the hopes of creating a better tomorrow. However, Frank was soon cast out, and found himself increasingly disillusioned with the future. At the same time, a young woman named Casey Newton finds herself drawn back into this web of secrets and possibilities. Can Frank and Casey save the world? And Tomorrowland?

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.