I wonder if that isn’t a result of actors consciously or unconsciously imitating John Wayne’s speech patterns, much the same way that airplane captains imitate Chuck Yeager’s drawl (as pointed out in The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe).
My vote for movie that hasn’t held up well at all is Tron. Cool at the time, but just laughable now. Also any movie from more than about five years ago that plays on “current technology” much. I love seeing those chunky cell phones that you need a shoulder strap for.
A Summer Place. I like it, but you just know that Molly and Johnny are going to be divorced within two years, fighting over Pine Island.
I think any movie that was made about the end of the world in 2000 is dated and will not age well, there were a bunch of these movies in the last couple of years and I think they were kinda good like Stigmata for instance but it will not be rented in the future. On a different note I have noticed that when ever I show a friend the movie Blade Runner they all seem to think it is horrible although I really liked it when I first saw it and I still like it.
Oh, LifeWillFall just reminded me of another movie that didn’t hold up well at all. This one got dated really, really fast – record time, probably.
I’m talking about Antitrust. Yes, the movie that just came out a couple of months ago, January to be specific. It starred Tim Robbins as the Bill Gates type and Ryan Phillipe as the young hacker recruited into the Microsoft-style company to do evil.
It was written in late 1999, then shot in the middle of 2000. It contains many, many references to, heh heh, “dot-com billionaires.”
In other words, it was dated before it was even released. Like I said, record time. 
P.S. LifeWillFall, you have friends who don’t like Blade Runner? Sound to me like you need a better screening process. 
For the record, Birth of a Nation may have been critically acclaimed by whites, but African-Americans protested against it from the day it was released. Pretty much anything depicting African-Americans before 1960 seems painfully racist today. Song of the South is another example.
A lot of the stuff from the late '60s/ early '70s is heavily dated by now. Any movie in which the women wear mini skirts and go-go boots for example (with the exception of Austin Powers). Also, white people with Afros.
Cervaise makes a good point: it’s much harder to name timeless movies than those that remain artifacts of their era. BTW, I love The General!
Laid up with a cold last weekend, I went on something of a Hitchcock binge and watched The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Rear Window, and North by Northwest. I think the latter two are masterpieces (except for a very awkward bit of exposition in NBNW) and that these, as well as many of his other films, transend their time periods. This is both because Hitchcock was so often ahead of his time and because the techniques he pioneered have become embedded in our culture itself.
Having said that, I find The Man Who Knew Too Much to be almost unbearably dated. The whole first act consists of an American family (Jimmy Stewart, Doris Day, and some obnoxious little brat) on vacation in Morocco naively bumbling into a dangerous situation with shady men that leads to some grave consequences. The attitude toward the Moroccans expressed by the Americans is downright patronizing. A scene in a restaurant where Stewart is unable to get comfortable on floor cushions is a masterpiece of physical humour that’s tainted by the condescending manner in which he treats the waiter and his surroundings.
Aside from the ethnic humour, the film’s is also dated in its attitude toward women. Upon learning some bad news, Stewart hides it from his wife until he can make her pop some sedatives. Can’t have her getting all hysterical now, he knows what’s best for her.
Of course, the biggest problem with the film is Doris Day. Why the heck was she so popular!? She doesn’t sing, she shouts. For those who don’t know, she inflicted Que Sera Sera upon the world in this movie.
Stewart should have slipped her some cyanide instead.
Hodge
Comedy Central perpetually shows movies that don’t age well. Revenge of the Nerds always strikes me as… well, crap of the most pandering sort. And I can’t watch that scene where a nerd beds a popular girl while wearing a mask without thinking about rape and STDs and a lot of other things which do not lend themselves to comedy.
Airplane, Soylent Green, Thelma and Louise… none of them aged well.
The film that instantly came to mind was “Wild In The Streets”. It was extremely painful to watch the entire thing; I had to keep telling myself that it was just “a document of its time”. It doesn’t get much more stale than this.
I didn’t like “Dirty Dancing” the first time around; now they are showing it on VH1 a lot and the dialogue is even more embarrassing than I remembered. (Am I the only female in America who thinks Patrick Swayze is just not all that?)
“Planet of the Apes” is laughable because the costumes are so outdated. They look like humans in ape costumes. Especially since the mouth didn’t move well. Anyway, we sure have advanced in the costume/makeup/special effects departments.
andygirl, with all due respect I think there’s a difference between a movie that doesn’t age well and one that’s politically incorrect, as Nerds surely was. It was a product of its time, yes, but since the overall theme of unpopular kids-versus-popular kids is still extant, I think the movie’s still relevant. And, of course, it’s still comedy, not high drama.
Also, Airplane, while also a product of its time, has sired MANY imitations, including the Hot Shots! films and many others that aren’t so good. Anytime a movie starts a new subgenre, you’d have to say that movie’s not terribly dated. Don’t know about Thelma and Louise, either; it’s only been ten years since it was made. Feminism isn’t dead, is it?
One that springs to mind is Ordinary People, winner of the Best Picture Oscar in, I believe, 1980. The central shocking theme of the movie: the characters talk to (gasp) a psychiatrist! Seeing a psychiatrist just isn’t noteworthy anymore. Hell, it’s more surprising when someone isn’t seeing a psychiatrist, these days…
Max, people had been seeing psychiatrists in movies long before Ordinary People. Hell, Hitchcock did Spellbound in the late forties, and that’s hardly the first.
A comment like this is incredibly sad (and ignorant). So what if the effects aren’t up to current standards? Only the most superficial would condemn a film on that basis. They could certainly make better giant ants nowadays than those in Them!, for instance – but they’re unlikely to make a better movie.
If you pointed out that Planet of the Apes is shot in a self-consciously “70’s” style, you may have had a case.
Wild in the Streets, OTOH is a perfect example of a film that’s badly dated.
I agree. It’s not the effects that make a movie dated, it’s the content. A movie can be a product of its time, but it can also exist out of it. Movies that reflected current events that are no longer relevant are dated.
Here’s a good one: Reefer Madness!
A big second on that one, though for sheer cultural artifact status, I used to own a promotional 45 from the movie by Max Frost and the Troopers, titled, IIRC, “The Shape of Things to Come.”
Even though it has a certain following, I have to go with Roger Corman’s The Trip from 1967. As expertly summed up by the IMDB “Peter Fonda is a commercial director going through a bitter divorce, so he decides to take an LSD trip to get in better touch with himself and his feelings. He gets the drug from dealer Dennis Hopper and has friend Bruce Dern guide him through his drug induced state.”
Actually, it would be possible to make a great film from that premise, but this time it didn’t happen. It’s a thin plot stretched far beyond its limits, and mostly an excuse to play with limited special effects and show nekkid bodies. Of course, that could be my curmudgeonhood showing, as 1967, when this was released, was my high school graduation year.
Does anybody remember this one?-“THE BIG BUS”-this is an “Airplane”-style parody. Excellent flic-but it is rarely shown. I found it to age very well!
I also thing many of the old Humphrey Bogart “film noir” classics have aged well-I still enjoy seeing them. One problem I’ve noted-the really old ones (like “THE MALTESE FALCON”) appear to be very degraded-the print that TBC shows has a sound tract that is terrible! You can’t sometimes make out what is being said, over the moise. Can old sound tracks be restored?
Oh, yes. I remember it. 1976. Starred Joseph Bologna and Stockard Channing. Basically was Airplane-on-a-bus, but they did it well!
Indeed, but Spellbound, as I recall, dealt with psychiatrists against the background of a mental institution (and we know what havens of enlightenment those places were back then, eh?). Ordinary People dealt with the somewhat-unusual-for-the-time idea of (guess who?) ordinary people seeing a psychiatrist to talk out their problems. Reckon I should’ve been clearer…
There’s one John Wayne flick I love to watch; not for the content, but for the location photography. The name escapes me, but he’s chasing them damn commies all over Hawaii in the 1950’s. The film intersperses shots of achingly beautiful Hawaiian scenes with laughably paranoid scenes of ol’ John rooting out the commies. He has some speech about how we should eliminate the fifth amendment, because the Reds are able to shield themselves behind it and it makes it difficult to prosecute them. I guess this film was just paving the way for The Green Berets.
pugluvr: Unless I’m mistaken, the movie you describe is Big Jim McLain.
You’re welcome.
Just to add to the “good” list, I’d have to add eternal classics M, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, To Kill a Mockingbird, On the Waterfront and Night of the Hunter, to name a few I’ve seen recently. All of the above are dated, but the power of their content has not lost its ability to compel.
On another, sadder note, I watched Network for the first time the other night and found myself slightly disappointed. I found myself having to work too hard to spot the subtle humor because some of it was so prescient that it’s, well, normal today. As a result, the truly outrageous parts came off as somewhat campy and trite. It seemed to me like a film that was crippled by its ability to predict the future. I’m gonna give it another try, soon.