You see this in tons of war movies. The actors almost always look older than the vast majority of the soldiers would look.
Reading a Harlequin romance from 1992. The premise is that the guy is a blood match for the girl’s beloved stepfather. So in order for the groom to agree to donating blood marrow to the stepfather, the girl has to sleep with him.
Then he finds out she’s a virgin. Because he won’t “deflower innocents,” the only logical conclusion is she has to marry him so he can sleep with her so he can save her stepfather’s life. Rather than, you know, just donate the marrow as a gesture of goodwill, or come up with an alternative agreement.
Oh, and at first he doesn’t believe she’s a virgin because all the tabloids write about how many beaus she’s had, because the tabloids always get these thing right.
And when you do see actual children on television, it’s often in a half-hour long family sitcom and the kids are only in some of the scenes.
In the case of Glee not only is it an hour long show, but they additionally require the performers to spend time recording the vocal tracks and rehearsing the dance numbers. I imagine it would be very difficult to pull this off if any of the significant “teen” roles were played by minors who had limited working hours and had to be doing schoolwork too.
I don’t think this has anything to do with the book being written in 1992. I remember 1992, and I think this plot would have seemed pretty stupid to me then too. It sounds like a romance novel thing rather than an early '90s thing. There are romance novels targeted at conservative religious readers that don’t depict premarital sex, and some of these feature rather silly plot devices that force the characters to get married before they really know each other so the actual romancing begins only after they’re married.
I would thought that it would be dated in the post cold war era, but my kids loved it! It’s just about my favorite movie. The pacing is perfect!
I was NOT even born when the original trilogy came out and I saw TPM in the theater as a teen and I found TPM’s visuals cartoonish and overly “fake”. I found ANH and ESB absolutely amazing on the whole visually(there are a few missteps) and they really do a great job of creating a “real” setting that feels lived in and like it could actually exist. What exactly seems so dated about the OT? Compare Jabba in ROTJ to the CGI Jabba in the special editions and TPM, the puppet looks much more real. Compare Mos Eisley in ANH which looks like an actual town, to Mos Eisley in TPM with its overcrowded robot pratfalls and assorted silliness.
BTW if you’ve never seen them in their original non-CGI abomination form you owe it to yourself to see the original versions.
EDIT:Interestingly the Clone Wars CG show has borrowed a lot visually from the original trilogy, which I love.
I feel this way about every Kubrick movie I’ve seen. There’s too much of a “look how awesome these steadycam shots look!” vibe. Good for him for pioneering it, but big chunks of his movies are boring to audiences that don’t consider steadycam to be a novelty.
But always better than shaky cam. Somehow Kubrik managed to convey action and suspense without having some dood with palsy holding the camara.
Are we understanding “dated” now to just mean reflecting the time in which they are set? Because the above sounds like a good thing to me. You might as well say it takes you right out of the movie when 19th-century characters get in a horse-drawn carriage. 
Second smile of the day (don’t feel bad – first was running into a friend I haven’t seen in a while).
I bet kids in general would like the flick – it’s a pretty snappy little number there. I myself am glad it’s around.
You know what cold war (I guess you’d call the “tensions” the beginning of the cold war) comedy flick I thought would age badly has managed to hold up? Ninotchka. Maybe it’s Garbo, maybe it’s Lubitsch, maybe it’s whatever, but for some reason it doesn’t seem as dated as…
what’s the Hitchcock flick with Paul Newman/spies/East bloc. That one. Only for die-hard auteurists, IMO.
1992 was when I started proofreading professionally, and that was pretty much the standard romance set-up at the time. There was a definite cultural sea-change over the next twenty years, and I watched as occurrences of this plot (written by older authors) dwindled almost to nothing. The once-prevalent attitude that “Nice girls don’t, but want to, but can’t admit it, so they need some excuse” had evolved to “Of course nice girls do, and it’s normal and healthy, and what of it?”
Major improvement, I say!
Wasn’t Ninotchka made in 1939? In terms of the Cold War, that’s about ten years too early. It’s about on the same level as Comrade X (1940) with Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr, poking pre-WWII fun at the Bolshies.
If you want to see a real embarrassment, watch Mission to Moscow (1943), a blatant whitewash of Stalinism and pure American wartime propaganda.
As for Torn Curtain, I first saw it in England in 1977, in a TV lounge packed with college students who were laughing uproariously—not because it was “dated” but because it was a really crappy flick. IMHO, Hitchcock is a much overrated director; if I had been Paul Newman, I’d’ve considered Torn Curtain a major embarrassment and a blot on my career.
On the other hand, serving in the military and actually being in combat will definitely age you.
FWIW, the average age of a GI in WWII was 26. In Up Front, Bill Mauldin said that Willie and Joe were in their late 20s or early 30s, “typical ages for the infantry,” as I remember the quote. Korea was presumably the same.
For WWI and earlier, remember that most of the US population was still rural, and growing up on a farm will also age you pretty damned fast!
For the Civil War and earlier, just surviving day-to-day would make you old before your time (at least a third of the American military in the 19th century was made up of immigrants, mostly Irish, who had just come off the boat; they had nowhere else to go).
You know I read a lot. Especially things that have to do with history. I find that shit fascinating. In fact, I don’t know if you know this or not, but all good movies were made in 1939. If you don’t believe me, you can look it up.
You’ve gone off the reservation, man. But, yes, Paul Newman was too good for that sort of phone-it-in Hitchcock picture, even though I don’t think he was quite at the peak of his ultimate superstar proto-dresser of salads-not-yet-invented then. Might be wrong about that.
I don’t know what Hitchcock was thinking – I like a few of his later pictures. Speaking of actual cold war, and not the Red tensions of pre-WWII, Topaz is not dated at all, I find.
Topaz is good. So is the Leon Uris novel it’s based on.
Frenzy is probably my favorite Hitchcock movie, but I really think Scotland Yard would have pieced together the true facts long before Blamey was brought to trial.
I have a soft spot for Psycho, though I find myself snickering a lot when I watch it today.
I love Rear Window. I’d say it’s probably the best of his movies.
Lifeboat was also very good.
On the other hand…
In North by Northwest,Cary Grant wouldn’t even have been allowed into that hotel in Chicago (I think it was) after not having bathed or changed his clothes in three days.
In Vertigo, a complete stranger (Jimmy Stewart) just follows Kim Novak home and lets himself into her apartment without her totally freaking out? Were the '50s really that innocent?
Saboteur has so many plot holes in it I can feel a breeze blowing through the room whenever it’s on.
And nothing can get the bad taste of Torn Curtain out of my mouth, ever. Not even if I drank a dozen shots of single-malt scotch in quick succession.
Well, at least you have good taste, Dylan Thomas. Torn Curtain wasn’t SO bad – it’s just a campy little flick with one great actor and one OK (looking) actress.
Turns out I haven’t seen Saboteur – I was sure I’d seen all AH’s movies available on VHS and DVD. I was all set to start mocking you about not recognizing the genius construction of Conrad’s novel on which Sabotage was based (yes, I got confused at first as well, but The Secret Agent is a good flick as well). OK, I remember, whoever adapted the novel made it such that it kind of spoiled one of the best novels of the 20th century for me.
Now I understand. Some things cannot be undone or unseen.
Don’t the book nerds at SDMB come down on you now that I see Dorothy Parker is listed as a co-script-girl for Saboteur?
Speaking of Conrad, and the anti-Red, post-Bolshevik, anti-anarchist bombthrowing etc. etc., has anyone adapted Under Western Eyes?
FWIW, the biggest laugh in the hall came when rapturous Julie Andrews sighed and said “Oh, Michael!”
As for Dorothy, she probably contributed a lot to the stuffy “charity ball” scene in Saboteur.
(“If you say another word, you will be shot … right here in front of 250 very reliable and patriotic witnesses!” Typical somewhat-dense-but-still-very-threatening Hollywood Nazis! :rolleyes: )
Although NBNw is one of my favorite movies, I admit that the stunts and special effects are very lame by todays’s standards.
Slight correction though: Thornhill arrived at the Chicago hotel the evening of the day that he left the train station in Chicago. So he may have had a bath in Eve’s drawing room that morning (although seeing him shave with that tiny razor in the station’s men’s room makes that less likely).
So it was, at most two days since he’d bathed, and maybe only since that morning. (It was, admittedly, a pretty active day, between dodging crop dusters, and grand theft, truck/refrigerator.) We do see him cleaning up with his handkerchief just before he enters the hotel.*
An analogy: when responding to requests for recommendations on old blues records, I always advise people to set aside a time to listen to nothing but old records, rather than following a scratchy old 1927 recording with something recorded last year on a 64-track digital board. Your ears adjust to the dynamics, and you appreciate the music more than than when you first heard it with 2013 expectations.
I think a similar thing happens with great movies that are old and dated - they can help us suspend our disbelief.
- One of my favorite things about the movie is how the tools of an ad man’s trade - monogrammed matchbooks, handkerchiefs, an expensive suit, lots of pocket money, tolerance for alcohol, a classy accent, and being a good liar - allow him to function as a spy on the run.
IIRC, he also stank to high heaven, as was made evident when he was taking the elevator to his floor.
It’s been a couple of years since I saw it last, but weren’t the bad guys going to take off from their private airstrip in the wilds of South Dakota (within jogging distance of a national monument) and fly to Russia? What kind of plane were they going to use—a B-36?
http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/aircraft-pictures/FA_25244slarge.jpg