There were a lot of folks out there crediting Joseph Kosinski and Tom Cruise‘s “Top Gun: Maverick” for getting audiences back into empty theaters as the COVID-19 pandemic had a huge impact on the industry, and the wide appeal helped lead the movie to be one of the biggest success stories of 2022 after it ended up earning $1.5 billion (the biggest earner of Cruise’s lengthy career) at the box office alongside a glowing reception from both critics and audiences alike (something that doesn’t often happen). However, director Luca Guadagnino of “Challengers” and “Queer” isn’t a fan and thinks it’s a “bad movie,” after singing the film’s praise back in 2022.
When Steven Spielberg‘s upcoming “Disclosure Day” was brought up alongside “Top Gun: Maverick,” Guadagnino, during an Il Foglio Quotidiano Q&A hosted by Michele Masneri (via YouTube auto-dubbing), mentioned the idea of the “economy of nostalgia” being a huge driving force within the moviemaking commodity and why those movies even exist.
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“[‘Disclosure Day’] is part of the economy of nostalgia, which is one of the fundamental themes of the last 20 years, right? The whole imagination is built, even politics, is built on nolstagia and therefore how to move inside ourselves what we think we’ve lost and find it again. And remember when I was making ‘Challengers, ‘ I went to see ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ in a packed theater, it was huge…really BAD movie, but at the same time it was a movie that reproduced, let’s say, with today’s ideology but with the forms of the time…people were screaming throwing popcorn at the screen, they weren’t very happy because the economy of nostalgia seems to be the only commodity that can be dominated by all types of market, easy politics, right? It’s what I think right now….it’s a problem of raw material.”
Quite the interesting take, given that the Italian filmmaker remade Dario Argento‘s classic supernatural Giallo “Suspiria” and is gearing up to do his own version of “American Psycho” at Lionsgate. One could make the argument that the “economy of nostalgia” was a factor with those well-liked horror movies getting new iterations, even if Guadagnino’s take on Argento’s film very much felt like a new original vision on that material, morphing into something of its own.
Guadagnino’s next feature offering is the OpenAI biopic drama, “Artificial,” with Andrew Garfield playing founder/CEO Sam Altman (one the biggest tech-bros behind the AI bubble and environment destorying AI data centers) and “The Studio” actor Ike Barinholtz inhabiting the role of white supremacist billionaire Elon Musk (notably throwing out a Nazi salute twice on camera and amplifying Neo-Nazi conspiracies as facts), who is behind a large amount of suffering around the globe after helping to shutter life-saving USAID programs that is getting thousands of children killed already (projected in 2025 to contribute to the deaths of 14 million people by 2030 if cuts are kept in place).
I think we’re all very curious to see how “Artificial” ultimately portrays the tech industry and if it’s a send-up parody, which we imagine could happen given Luca’s dark sense of humor, or something more in a grey area, allowing audiences to craft their own opinions of these tech-bros on their own.
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
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- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
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