AI Cinema We'd Like to See

Restoration vs Reinterpretation

So my best friend and I are sitting down to breakfast and we’re talking about movies. I tell him that my daughter and I watched King of New York and New Jack City over the weekend. He raves over King of New York, which I had actually never seen. We say you know what would be a great movie.. and so it goes.

My Dinner with Norm
Starring Christopher Walken and Norm McDonald. Two old friends reminisce about crazy situations they got themselves into over the years.

12 Angry Men
Starring Caitlyn Jenner, Tyler Perry, Dylan Mulvaney, Whoopi Goldberg, Andrew Tate, Ivanka Trump & Jordan Peterson.
Tempers flare during jury deliberations in a rape case, as the foreman for the trial makes a stunning revelation. A cascade of recriminations unleashes hilarious, cringey, dramatic and unpredictable results.

Parasite 2
Directed by James Wan (Saw, Insidious).
Three grungy mountain bikers travel off the beaten path in the Santa Monica Mountains and discover a back road that leads to Barbara Streisand’s mansion. It seems mysteriously empty until they find a secret tunnel. Is that party music?

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I’ve been watching renovation videos. These span the range of some guy power washing a random suburban driveway, to some guy cleaning a black rectangle that turns out to be a beautiful Persian rug. In the same category are the coloration videos of NYC, San Francisco and Paris of the early 20th century. My new favorites are from Quantum Tech. There are more than enough crappy structures and processes that we can restore to better standards. They needn’t be, although they could be, fake reworkings and recasting of movies that already existed.

The hinge is on whether or not the spirit of the original intent remains coherent. There are quite simply a finite number of fundamentals that are consistently good for humans, endless reinterpretation is not one of them. But I wonder if some aspect of the postmodern is inherent to the nature of large and/or modern societies.

I expect that what I once wanted from electronic music will continue its vector of novelty. Youth will always be drawn to what is new to them. The old gurus always die and are rarely replaced. So what we treasure of the facts of history may not be preserved, until someone new with respect for the past finds power and acclaim. When that person finds a reason to restore and preserve, we get the feeling of significant value. Like, of course that’s a great idea; it always was. There is a deep fundamental reason this video has been viewed nearly 3 million times.

What I really want new digital tech to do is allow us to recreate multiperspective re-enactments of great historical events with verisimilitude. I want to know what the hanging gardens of Babylon conceivably looked like. I want to walk through it in a photorealistic videogame. I hope our technology gets into the hands of the proper people.

Did I tell you the story of the first time I tried Spotify? I asked for Jazz music and it gave me Adele. I asked for bebop jazz and it gave me Adele. I asked for Miles Davis and it gave me Adele. Thank God for Qobuz.