CGI hasn’t existed for much of my movie-going life.
Ed
Explain that to Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne then. 
:rolleyes:
The idea that modern movies aren’t about story is preposterous. Some people have minds incapable of separating the wheat from the chaff and are unable to recognize the difference in the sheer volume of films today and that they are viewing old movies through a filter in that they tend to have already been separated out so they are more likely to not watch the true duds from the time.
Syriana, Traffic, The Fountain, Perfume, Doubt, Schindler’s List, no no story at all.
Hello Mr. Lobsang,
I’m mostly sympathetic to your position. There are only a few great movies made in a given decade, and then many of those are reduced in stature as the years go by.
Some were too topical, some were revolutionary but rendered tame by films that followed in their wake.
And just like with today’s films, a lot of older movies are just not for someone’s individual tastes. Most films nominated for Best Picture are things I don’t care for.
Since joining blockbuster.com I’ve revisited some “classics” and a lot of them don’t hold up.
There are films that do hold up. Have you seen:
Duck Soup?
Rear Window?
High Noon?
I don’t think this is that uncommon.
It can be really hard to wade through all the weird attributes of old movies to actually get into them. Black and white can be distracting, the effects are almost uniformly awful, the style of acting is bizarre and, I agree, annoying and distracting, and the pacing of old movies puts even me to sleep a lot of the time.
Obviously it’s rewarding once you get past all that, and I’m certainly a fan of older movies myself, but it doesn’t surprise me when people used to modern movies have a hard time getting into them, and I don’t think it’s really that big a deal.
Heck, most of the time, I’d rather watch a modern movie, too. Watching an old movie takes a lot more work specifically because I do have to be in a certain state of mind to not let its “oldness” distract me.
If I’m channel flipping on a Sunday afternoon, I’m going to stop on Charlie’s Angels 2 before Casablanca; The Scorpion King before Dracula.
*Edit: It’s also weird how this can apply to recent movies. I watched Tombstone for the first time a few months ago, and it was seriously difficult for me to get around how 1990’s it was.
Have a touch of the vapors, eh?
Yeah, I’m thinking that those who say that movies today are all noise / action / CGI are just watching the wrong movies. You want quiet, story-based drama? I think it’s a fair bet to say that one or two of those get made from time to time.
I agree wholly with the most recent post by mswas. There’s old crap and there’s new crap. There’s also old gems and new gems. The old crap doesn’t get played as much so it seems like the percentage of movies that were gems in the past is much higher than it really was.
To me, the best movies were made in the 40s, and the further you get from the 40s (in either direction) the worse the movies have gotten . . . though I admit, there have been some amazing exceptions. But you have to remember that movies from that period were very stylized . . . the plot, the acting, the scenery, the dialog, the lighting . . . everything was more of an art, and less naturalistic. It’s something you have to get used to, in order to appreciate it.
Sorry, but I have to agree with Archive Guy. While I agree that John Wayne was no actor for most of his career (he got better as time went on) he was no worse than, say, Bruce Willis* and is roughly equivalent. There was nothing magical that happened in the 80s, and most of the really revolutionary, gritty, and realistic stuff happened in the 50s.
[anti method acting rant]Brando and his Actor’s studio buddies started the revolution toward Method acting on film and it was so succesfull that they have convinced a generation of lay people that it is the only style that is valuable. And yeah, that happened in the 50s. But it’s a matter of what you are used to. Method acting and other forms of “realistic” acting, are no more realistic than any other style of acting. You have just been trained to think that they are. You want realistic, go watch the Bicycle Thief.
Also, other styles of acting are just as valid when the situation warrants and sometimes movies are vastly improved by these alternate choices. Screwball comedy for example. And even modern action movies like Die Hard (See Alan Rickman). Complaining that Jimmy Stuart is over acting is roughly equivalent to complaining that Picasso didn’t have a firm grasp on anatomy.[/rant]
*I have Die Hard on the brain right now, I just re-watched it the other day.
I think you are really missing out with your restrictions on movies.
One could debate whether, during any period since the invention of movies there has been a different ratio of “good” to “crap” movies being churned out. But the fact remains that really good movies, and some outstanding movies have been made. I see this as no different than books being published. Every year there are tons of books being published - some good, some not so good. And this has probably always been true (except in early times when there simply wasn’t much being published at all). Do you have the same restrictions (okay, maybe not the “black and white” one about books - you will only read recent books ?
The advantage with older movies is that many people have seen them, and can therefore recommend them.
But to refuse to see such classics as:
“The Seven Samurai”
“The Hustler”
“High Noon”
“Lawrence of Arabia”
“The Maltese Falcon”
“Mister Roberts”
“Dr. Strangelove”
just to name a few off the top of my head based on your restrcitions is SEVERLY limiting yourself.
The first Terminator movie used models for all of its special effects. They didn’t start using CGI until Terminator 2, and even then, only for some of the “liquid metal” terminator shots. A lot of it still used traditional model work, including some scenes that you would assume were CGI.
While the acting styles have changed over the years, I find that the best actors of the '30s, '40s, and '50s could be just as subtle and naturalistic as modern actors. They do speak in a different way, which I think makes them sound unrealistic to modern audiences, but I think this at least partly reflects actual changes in the way people talk, as well as changes in the way certain dialects are valued in the culture. Some of the dialects you hear most often today in American film and TV, and which have actually influenced the way ordinary people talk nowadays, would have been perceived as too low-class during the Hollywood “Golden Age”. There was more snobbery then about regional, urban, ethnic, and working-class speech. Find some elderly, college-educated people from the Northeast U.S. (not necessarily upper crust, but from a middle class background) and listen to how they talk: that’s basically what people thought of as good-sounding speech in the 1940s.
The assumption a lot of people make is that “realistic” equals “better”. As NAF1138 points out, method acting can be every bit as stagy as traditional acting. If “realistic” meant “better”, the greatest movie of all time was that Andy Warhol flick where he put a camera in front of the Empire State Building for 18 hours. Movies aren’t about reality, they’re about rearranging reality until it provokes us into emotion.
For example, I watched “Mrs. Miniver” last week–the very definition of a traditional acting style. Is the movie’s depiction of English life very stylized? Are the characters overly wholesome? Of course it is. But the point of the film is to get you sympathizing with the characters and their travails, and that is succeeds brilliantly. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon have an onscreen chemistry that makes you think they’re married in real life–something today’s modern movies almost never do to me today. Plus, today the death scene towards the end of the movie would be much more graphic. Yes that’s more “realistic”, but would make the closing sermon almost impossible to pull off. This movie was the biggest box office hit of 1942. How exactly is it less realistic than say “Transformers”?
(BTW, I’m 33.)
I don’t think that’s fair to Jimmy Stewart. Does he have moments when he gets a bit “stagey”? Sure. But he also had some really wonderful performances, including my favorites The Philadelphia Story and Harvey.
I’m going to add to the chorus of “you’re missing out.” My world was a bleak place until I discovered the aforementioned The Philadelphia Story and Harvey, not to mention She Done Him Wrong, His Girl Friday, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, The Awful Truth, Only Angels Have Wings, The Talk of the Town, Random Harvest, Gilda, The Maltese Falcon, The Apartment, Some Like it Hot…
And that’s just a short list. However, I will not say that classic Hollywood movies were better because they cared deeply about story and art. Some did, but by and large, they were the very definition of formulaic. A modern movie might surprise you, but a classic movie would never take an unexpected turn. Hell, even movies that did not need or deserve happy endings had happy endings. Within a genre, actors would be the same from movie to movie because the studios went with what worked. Directors and writers had very little room to work and create something that reflected their own vision–not that they didn’t succeed. The directors we still watch and remember are the ones who worked with the constraints imposed on them and still created something that was original and vibrant. They were good at working around the Hayes Code, but sometimes I think about the effects that had on Hollywood, and it just makes me really sad for all the lost potential. Also, by and large, the movies you see on TCM, and the ones that survived to DVD and are still watched and loved are the good movies. There was a lot of shit being made.
On the flipside, it’s stupid to say that all movies today are all CGI and no substance. There are still constraints on the film making process, and it’s still all heavily market driven. You still the same actors appearing in film after film of the same genre. But at the same time, there are real wonderful gems out there that are bound to become classics in their own right. I just watched No Country For Old Men, and nobody can tell me that it’s all style and no substance.
I think there’s a lot of genuine ignorance in this thread, going both ways. A good movie is a good movie, regardless of when its made. And if you take a chance outside your comfort zone, you might be pleasantly surprised.
I don’t completely blow off all old movies but there is definitely a tone to the acting style that is very different and more, ‘stagey’, as I see it. Rebel Without a Cause is a fabulous film, but it’s still very stagey, the same with Citizen Cane, Casablanca, Wizard of Oz, Miracle on 34th Street, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy and many others.
Saying that Bruce Willis is a bad actor doesn’t really change the stylistic aspects of the acting back in the day.
Was Jimmy totally gay in that one, or what? I was astonished at how blatant the subtext is.
if you wanted to be a painter would you refuse to look at anything painted before 1950?
You are cutting yourself off from the entire history of movies. Most of the people who make movies today are strongly influenced by the stuff you refuse to watch. You are looking at movies as if you are half blind, missing a lot of context. Even from the CGI perspective, how can you work in the field without knowing 2001? It had a tremendous impact on the very people directing the CGI films you do like. Take a look at the interviews on the new 2001 2 DVD set.
B&W cinematography is not color cinematography with bad film. You can get a sharpness in black and white which is very important for some movies, and which has a style all its own. Take a look at some of the movies people have recommended, and you’ll see for yourself.
Focusing again on the OP, this is basically a really easy question to answer. You don’t like old movies because you haven’t watched enough of them, or enough good ones. Like any unfamiliar style, it can take some getting used to, but old movies are not like some crazy exotic food that only very very few people will ever learn to like. It’s an easy taste to acquire.
Part of the reason is that now we have an incredible amout of video choice. In pre-VCR/cable days, you saw the movie in the theater once (maybe twice); and if you were very lucky, it eventually showed up as a re-run on one of your local TV stations (and in Chicago there were only 5 VHF stations!).
So if you wanted to watch TV, the reruns could be the best thing on (regardless of the merit of individual films). In fact, that’s how I first saw Citizen Kane and Olivier’s Hamlet, as well as The Day The Earth Stood Still, Cheaper By The Dozen, Forbidden Planet, Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes movies, Charlie Chan, and so forth.
In other words, you were quasi-forced to watch the older movies and eventually develop an appreciation for them. Not so today. Better? Worse? Points on both sides, I suppose, but IMHO we’ve lost something. Of course, that happens with every generation.