look there are way bigger fish to fry. but i think it's worth saying that it is bizarre and weird to see something like the wizard of oz put up at the sphere, but not really, not the real wizard of oz, but a version of it that sort of selectively takes out clips of it and swamps them in modern animations, and yet is marketed as the real wizard of oz, as an expansion on an existing film and not a wholesale replacement of most of it. it's weird to me to see how modern film so often treats historical antecedents as not works in their own right but as solo elements to be cannibalized out of the source, away from all context, but framed as explicitly the same as the original source material. i am thinking specifically here of how peter cushing's voice and face—and later carrie fisher's voice and face—were stolen and used by the star wars movies, to very little outcry except some casual mentions of how much the tech has advanced. why are we comfortable watching a movie that uses an actor's face without knowing what choices he would have made in his performance? how can anyone frame this as the same movie when they've smoothed out judy garland's face, replaced every framing choice made by the original directors, redone the choices of the production designer cedric gibbons, and entirely removed the amazing special effects created by buddy gillespie? a movie is the sum of its parts. a performance is the sum of an actor. when did we get comfortable saying a movie or a character could be half those things or a third of those things as long as the rest has something digital covering the cracks we ourselves made
