Wow, I totally disagree with a lot of these - Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and The Princess Bride I’ve seen within a couple years, and loved. It’s all about the dialog!
My contribution would be The Wrath of Khan. I know, I know, it’s leagues above the Motion Picture, but still - I watched a couple weeks ago, and good god it’s terrible. Talk about plot-induced stupidity - they land on the WRONG FREAKING PLANET, they let another starship that isn’t responding to hails get really close before raising their shields, and they just believe the previously mind-controlled guys that, oh, yeah, we’re better now, totally, can I have your phaser? That movie should have been about 15 minutes long, ending when Khan’s utterly retarded subterfuge tricks no one. Yeesh, talk about plot-induced stupidity.
If I ever want my computer-savvy son to roll on the floor in hysterics, I’ll tune in to WarGames. Good movie, but ooooh, it did not age well.
West Side Story is rather quaint now. The gang members wearing polo shirts and gran-jeteing down the sidewalks? Lovely story, lovely music, but you can tell it’s definitely aged.
I was watching **Steel Magnolias **the other day and Ouiser lit up a cigarette right in the hospital. And that movie came out in 1989!
Anybody seen the original “Lord of the Flies” lately? I remember the soundtrack … first time I ever heard boyschant “Kyrie Elison” <typo there, sorry> … and the dialogue about the Cam and the Bridge. Image of broken glasses.
Not buying it. I think they just wanted to put a hippy in the plot because, like, man, it’d be like, so cool. Anything beyond that is giving the producers too much credit.
I dunno about including Star Wars. It was always cheesy. Critics said so at the time — hell, the actors said so at the time. The movie was nevertheless hugely influential from the standpoint of merchandising, marketing, and (with Jaws) helping spawn go-for-the-blockbuster mentality.
Tech-based movies just don’t do well. People are too tickled by the clunky gadgets to take it seriously. You find yourself thinking things like, “So he’s got the entire engineering blueprints for the 100-story building on a 3.5” floppy? Right."
Like Hazle said, you had to be there to appreciate them when they first came out ( I graduated HS in '82). But as much as they seemed to capture the times at the time, looking back now they seem too naive and silly. It’s one of those “If I only knew then what I know now” type of feelings.
The Graduate doesn’t hold up too well. The idea of a kid being seduced by an older married woman doesn’t seem all that outrageous now. And it’s pretty obvious that Hoffman and Bancroft are almost as close in age as Hoffman and Ross.
The idea that being middle-class is ucky doens’t play well anymore, either, particularly as said class is struggling to hang on. A rosy future in plastics is no longer in the offing, unless you like doing slave labor in Indonesia.
I will say that the closing scene in the bus still plays well, and I still like that Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack.
I think the special effects of Star Wars were amazing for the time, and compare favorably to some of the cheesier CGI effects of the last 15 years or so.
I’m also going to have to disagree with Star Wars. Not a favorite of mine by any means but it does age well. The characters don’t wear 70’s hairstyles and the wise decision of a John Williams score keeps it timeless. Compare it to a 70’s episode of Battlestar Galactica or Buck Rogers with Erin Grays big hair and CHiPs inspired funkadelic soundtrack.
I’m going to say Tron has aged very poorly. Groundbreaking for it’s time it’s not much more than a milestone in computer animation. Sparce geometric environments presented in a “wow, look at what we created” way. Even it’s synthesized music on a Moog keyboard makes it very dated.
Still a masterpiece. Again, if you’re judging it on FX sure it’s dated, but the story is amazing and it does what it sets out to do (tell a story in live action without a single human on screen) brilliantly. I showed it to a friend in his early 20s for the first time recently and he was blown away by it.
On the other hand a very similar film, Labyrinth, had the misfortune of having an incredibly 80s soundtrack which grates a little now. But that aside it’s still a great film.
Oh, I don’t know. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is, what, eighty years old, plus or minus, and while the technology doesn’t stand up to objective scrutiny, the film still achieves a fever-dream otherness that lifts it out of SF and into Fable. On that level, big stretches of the movie work like gangbusters.
Talk about long gone times…how about Easy Rider? Do you think any of the pseudo-Klansmen in the cafe that Captain America and Billy go into would vote for an African-American for president?
I’m not saying those times were necessarily idyllic (especially because of that scene), but on the other hand, that movie does do one helluva job capturing the spirit of the late 60s.
OK, Hoffman gets the girl-both have severed their familial relationships, and head off to a very uncertain future.You would expect they would be talking togther about where they are going to live, what to do…instead, they stare at eachother as if to say “Good god-what did we do!”
Not to fanwank or anything, but every one of those criticisms is answered in the movie:
They didn’t land on the wrong planet at all. It was exactly the right planet. They were looking for a cruddy, lifeless planet and found one. That it was where they’d left Khan had just escaped Chekov’s mind, presumably since the solar system was different than when he’d last been there, and in any event it wasn’t an event he was closely involved in. (He doesn’t even appear in the TV episode.) It’s a much more interesting question as to why Chekov and Khan remember each other when Chekhov wasn’t in the show at that point. It can be argued that he was on the ship anyway, with hundreds of other nobodies, but it was an interesting oversight.
They let the Reliant close in without raising shields because, as Khan himself says, they’re all one big, happy fleet. They DO communicate with the Enterprise, just not visually. There’d be no reason to think a Federation starship would attack them. It’d like like a U.S. Navy ship firing up its defenses when approached by another U.S. Navy ship.
Kirk et al. don’t know anything about what Chekov and Terrell went through. They don’t have any reason not to trust them. Kirk and Chekov are, after all, friends.
In any event, none of these, even if they were problems, go to the movie not aging well. Plot holes are just as bad the day the movie comes out as they are 25 years later.
Five Easy Pieces. I’m way too young to have seen this in original release, but it’s considered a classic. On cable recently, it was completely incomprehensible. The pacing was choppy and weird. Nicholson’s “rebellious” attitude that apparently seemed so cool at the time now just makes him seem like a jerk. We’re supposed to admire him because he harasses a diner waitress?
American Beauty. At the time, I thought it was really deep, but now it just seems snarky and pretentious. The plastic bag caught in the breeze? Please.
That said, there are still two things that I love about that movie. If you’ve seen it, I think you can guess.
