{"id":47,"date":"2008-07-03T10:32:49","date_gmt":"2008-07-03T14:32:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.therowboat.com\/?p=47"},"modified":"2022-04-11T23:51:34","modified_gmt":"2022-04-12T03:51:34","slug":"at-the-movies-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/2008\/07\/at-the-movies-2\/","title":{"rendered":"At the Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"\"Wall-E\"Just up on Religion Dispatches <\/em>is my article on The Love Guru<\/em><\/a>, which is one of the most pointless films I’ve ever seen.<\/p>\n

There was wonderful thing about it, though: it was in seeing The Love Guru<\/em> that I saw\u2014witnessed, experienced\u2014the trailer for Wall-E<\/em>, which, after a week of fabulous anticipation, I finally got to see last night. The feelings it left in me are still working themselves through my system, so I have few words. It didn’t hurt, of course, that I am a big sucker for movies with spaceships and robots and imagined futures. But more, from first seeing the preview, was this sense of feelings even greater than the things of them movie themselves: friendship, loneliness, melancholy, gratitude. Platonism has never been much my practice\u2014the belief that transcendent Forms are the truth beyond the things of the world. Yet, though I enjoyed watching the movie, the things that went on in it somehow seemed unable to measure up to the Forms that they simultaneously were making me aware of. They pointed to an abstract perfection, and thus a cause for deep, deep longing amidst a world that can never embody such perfection. What powers has Pixar managed to spin into its marketing schemes? Is this crass manipulation? Or divine truth, or both?<\/p>\n

I woke up this morning in tears\u2014also not my usual practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\"Wall-E\"Just up on Religion Dispatches <\/em>is my article on The Love Guru<\/em><\/a>, which is one of the most pointless films I’ve ever seen.<\/p>\n

There was wonderful thing about it, though: it was in seeing The Love Guru<\/em> that I saw\u2014witnessed, experienced\u2014the trailer for Wall-E<\/em>, which, after a week of fabulous anticipation, I finally got to see last night. The feelings it left in me are still working themselves through my system, so I have few words. It didn’t hurt, of course, that I am a big sucker for movies with spaceships and robots and imagined futures. But more, from first seeing the preview, was this sense of feelings even greater than the things of them movie themselves: friendship, loneliness, melancholy, gratitude. Platonism has never been much my practice\u2014the belief that transcendent Forms are the truth beyond the things of the world. Yet, though I enjoyed watching the movie, the things that went on in it somehow seemed unable to measure up to the Forms that they simultaneously were making me aware of. They pointed to an abstract perfection, and thus a cause for deep, deep longing amidst a world that can never embody such perfection. What powers has Pixar managed to spin into its marketing schemes? Is this crass manipulation? Or divine truth, or both?<\/p>\n

I woke up this morning in tears\u2014also not my usual practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[23,61,60],"class_list":["post-47","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-friendship","tag-platonism","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5814,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47\/revisions\/5814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nathanschneider.info\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}