Posts written by Hey U Guys

We are Jon and Dave from HeyUGuys.co.uk, and some of you may know this as Sloth’s triumphant call in the 1985 film The Goonies. Our website was, in part, born from our love and nostalgia for a film that we enjoyed before we knew each other. There is an inherent nostalgic force in cinema; it is heroes and villains, epic battles and painful intimacy, furious pursuits and haunting beauty 24 frames a second, and its power comes in the uniqueness of our response. Cinema is everywhere in our culture and our favourite films are interwoven in every part of our lives, and we can connect through our love for films.

There is a huge culture of nostalgia at the moment, and the list of films being remade, re-imagined and rebooted is growing day by day.  Cynically we may imagine a cash-hungry studio seeking to make a killing. But there is more to it than that.

We remake our icons and we re-tell our stories; not just for a new generation but for ourselves. We do this so we know that the myths we absorbed have resonance beyond our lives.

And the best of us take inspiration from all around us, from our past and present. As Oscar Wilde said, you take one idea, put it with another and you get, not a third idea but a star. Our imagination fires, and we have something new. A new idea, a new face, a new voice.

The world is not getting smaller, this is a dangerous misnomer. What is happening though, is that the voices and visions of the wider world that we know are being seen and heard.

New cinema, new stories and new ideas are being bought, through technology and the outward urge, to the internet, so that we may all experience something new. The cost of a camera is falling, they are being miniaturised and attached to phones. The internet is spreading its fingers across the world, giving an uploaded film the widest audience imaginable.

Right now we have an audience a thousand times greater then Orson Welles had. The notion that one of us, with nothing but a £100 camera and a computer, could be creating the most remarkable cinematic achievement of our age is a powerful one.

That is the power of now – to hold up all histories and walk with them into a future with an ever expanding cinematic horizon.

We are sons and daughters of Rambow.

tagged Orson Welles Sloth The Goonies this is now

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