Clerks. The strange thing is that there’s nothing especially dated about it and working in a trashy convenience store has a timeless quality that I’m guessing is largely the same today as it was in the early 1990s but man that movie has not aged well. Something about the overall zeitgeist just doesn’t translate and I’ve seen numerous threads on this very forum along the lines of “Wow, I just saw that and it sucked” followed by “Yeah, I guess you had to be there at the time.”
Like I said, it just strikes me as weird because slacker workers, disaffected 20-somethings and low tier retail isn’t something that’s a lot different these days.
Because it was just on this weekend, I will add Jurassic Park to this thread.
The special FX still stand up, and I think they always will. This movie brought dinosaurs to life that no other has before or since (excluding the sequels, of course). I remember going to the theater and seeing this multiple times when it came out, just because I was amazed at how real the dinosaurs looked on the big screen.
However, the movie itself, outside of the SFX, is genuine grade A Hollywood crapola. When you start to pay attention to the acting, the plot, the dialog, and the rest, the movie is terrible. In fact, I hate to say this, but I think it is one of Spielberg’s worst movies ever. From the annoying kids, to Laura Dern, to the fat kid at the beginning of the movie (I still haven’t figured out if it is boy or girl), the movie just flat-out sucks.
Animal House. This was the height of teh funny back in the day. Watched it last week…or, more accurately, tried to watch it last week, and found myself bored out of my skull half-way through.
I occasionally watch reruns of “Seinfeld” and I think the show holds up pretty well in general. There’s one exception though: whenever they show a snippet of Jerry’s stand-up act, they seem so hacky and dated (“What’s the deal with airplane peanuts?”). I thought those bits were hilarious when the shows were first run, though.
I’ll disagree on this one. It’s not quite the laugh riot for me that it was decades ago, but I think there are enough little iconic moments that it still works. Belushi spontaneously smashing Stephen Bishop’s guitar is always going to be funny :).
Completely agree about the cheesy 80s scores ruining an otherwise good film. Let’s include Remo Williams in this. Never a great movie, but the score killed it.
And a lot of 70s movies were even worse. Why would a science fiction or suspense movie feature a boom-chicka-wow-wow score? Escape from the Planet of the Apes and The Taking Pelham 123, I’m looking at you.
My 13 and 15-year-old kids thought that both Holy Grail and Life of Brian were hilarious. They are relatively well-read for their ages, though and have been force-fed a Biblical education.
I didn’t think Animal House was particularly funny when I got around to watching it a few years ago, despite being told by all and sundry it was one of the funniest things ever committed to celluloid.
Even now I’m not sure if it’s because all the jokes were “old” thanks to pop culture osmosis, or what the issue was, but the film generally didn’t seem to have aged that well to me.
As for the OP: Pretty much anything from the 1970s-1990s involving computers in a “serious” context. The technology has changed so much that stuff which once seemed incredibly far-fetched is now so trivial it’s assumed everyone has an app for it on their phone, or it’s so far-fetched that it appears that no-one involved had ever seen a computer before, much less used one.
This thread is hilarious to me. Falling down, Sneakers, Trading places, Jurassic park, Clerks, they all hold up for me. I still watch Kelly heroes when I see it on tv, it’s pure fun moviemaking.
Same here. In many instances TNG is both more racist and more childish than TOS, all while trying to claim greater civility and maturity. In fairness, though, TNG ran more than twice as long, and had more opportunities to be sublime and stupid.
I think the fact that Randal worked in a video store, and that nobody had cell phones makes parts of the movie kind of jarring in this day and age, and I imagine that it would make it kind of bizarre to someone under say… 25, who may never have known life without cell phones, and may have only visited video stores in their pre-teen days.
They exist, and I think you’d have to be younger than 25 to have only visited them as a pre-teen*, but I just checked Google maps and there apparently isn’t a video rental store within 40 miles of where I live. There are video rental kiosks, a number of places where one can buy videos, and the public library has many videos available for checkout, but it’s a bit of a drive to get to a store where one can rent videos. The local Blockbuster closed down several years ago and it looks like the ones in neighboring towns must have done the same. So at least around here there must be plenty of people who haven’t been in a video rental store in a long time.
*Someone who’s 25 today would have been 12 in 1999-2000. Red Box didn’t even exist then, and Netflix was quite new.
The lack of cell phones and the fashions are the biggest daters of Seinfeld but much of the humor does hold up.
The little snippets we saw of the fake Seinfeld reunion on Curb Your Enthusiasm made me realize just how much I would like to see the show comment on today. There is also a twitter feed called @SeinfeldToday that gives fake modern day Seinfeld plots. They are so good for the most part that I wouldn’t be shocked if the writer was a former staffer.
ETA: I just realized that the writers of the feed are no longer anonymous and aren’t former staffers. Oh well, they still do a good job most of the time
[QUOTE=Stink Fish Pot]
However, the movie itself, outside of the SFX, is genuine grade A Hollywood crapola. When you start to pay attention to the acting, the plot, the dialog, and the rest, the movie is terrible. In fact, I hate to say this, but I think it is one of Spielberg’s worst movies ever. From the annoying kids, to Laura Dern, to the fat kid at the beginning of the movie (I still haven’t figured out if it is boy or girl), the movie just flat-out sucks.
[/QUOTE]
I agree, compare the characters in JP to those in Jaws.
Depends on where you live, I guess. There’s a video store all of two blocks from me.
Even the small rural town where I work has a “corner store” with a rack of movies to rent. Obviously your mileage may vary. But the “video store” is pretty irrelevant to Clerks anyway aside from one or two jokes. It could have sold just about anything and not significantly changed the plot; they just needed Randall to be next door.
