Nostalgia to the ancient Greeks meant a painful homecoming, but to Hollywood it means money.  Nostalgia is the lure into cinemas these days. Woody Allen’s latest and greatest, Midnight in Paris, just opened, bringing us back to a time when Allen’s jokes were still funny. Just as Paris is best in twilight, so is Allen. After 75 years and 40 films, Allen is comfortable with self-referencing. Midnight in Paris, with its city moniker, immediately calls Manhattan to mind, but the similarities extend to gratuitous opening sequences of both metropolis’ at their best. To make it even more meta, the protagonist of Midnight is Gil, a man expecting to find the same moveable feast in contemporary Paris that Hemingway did in the 1920s. Instead he gets stuck in stuffy museums, until he literally walks into the Jazz Age complete with a drunken Zelda Fitzgerald. It’s a whimsical romp for anyone who ever wanted to imagine themselves in The Sun Also Rises.

With more sequels than the running time of most films these days, Hollywood is evidently out of ideas. The clever way to twist this as original is by assembling so many references to past films in one film that the viewer gets lost in the milieu and believes they are actually watching something unique. It’s the postmodern bait-and-switch of pastiche or an artistic work that imitates that of another artistic work, period, or artist. The latest incarnation of Ryan Gosling to hit cinemas is Drive, which executes this concept even better than the protagonist executes his enemies. With its hot pink opening title sequence, 1980s-style synth ballads, gangsters even seedier than Tony Soprano’s henchmen, and strong silent type hero- it’s as seemingly familiar as your favourite childhood candy. Yet just like when you revisit that candy only to find it tastes like cardboard, when asked to specifically place a finger on the references in Drive, you draw a blank. Every reviewer has their own take on just what films director Nicolas Winding Refn had in mind when he clothed Gosling in a Scorpio jacket, yet none of them come to a consensus. What we’re left with is a cold-blooded thriller as memorable as the grade B, action movies it reminds us of.

Not all nostalgia is as sinister as Refn’s take on it, some of it is just a throwback of pure love to the days when popcorn flicks were still fun and you could actually afford the popcorn. Take J.J. Abrams fanboy tribute to some of Steven Spielberg’s best, Super 8. Besides putting a group of Boy Scout rejects together as a group of friends similar to the gang in The Goonies and adding some aliens à la E.T., Abrams goes as far to shoot the whole adventure on super 8 cameras. It’s as non-threatening as Reeses Pieces, but a statement against Hollywood’s seemingly impenetrable industry of over-inflated action films with budgets somehow bigger than Tom Cruise’s ego. At its heart, Super 8 is a film about film-making and how it can truly capture and change someone’s world.

Nostalgia can also be used as a way to let us down gently that the film industry is changing. Nazis and Soviet spies are no longer the central villains of the film industry, CGI is. Instead of plots, now we have blue rip offs of Pocahontas making up our entertainment. Therefore nostalgia can be the spoonful of sugar to make the bitter pill of technology superseding story go down better. Last summer’s Captain America exploited this perfectly as it gave us 1940s kitsch to make up for the central conflict of the film being a CGI-overdosed weapon that vaporised everyone. The forthcoming Tin Tin is capitalising in the same way Cap did. Both use the comforting comic book format to create ripping yarns we no longer find in cinemas these days. Yet the good-old-fashioned story is being refashioned to include some of the best CGI work of recent times.

What we end up seeing is a caricature of what we once loved.Perhaps Midnight’s Gil sums up Hollywood and humanity’s fixation with nostalgia best, “The present is a little disappointing because life is a little disappointing.”