I’ll admit it. Old movies suck to me. I’m in my late 40’s, and it’s very rare that a flick from before my time (1980’s) doesn’t suck. I’ve heard about all the good old movies - Hitchcock to “Gone with the Wind,” to all the 1940’s ones. You name it, they universally aren’t all that good.
Am I film challenged (which might well be the case) or is this love of the old a case of film snobbery?
Do you like old films? If so why?
If you don’t, why do you think they are so touted?
The old films that are still watched are good because the bad ones are generally forgotten. However, you have to adjust your mind to enjoy them: society was different, and filming techniques were different.
It’d take a book to answer this. In the first place, the maxim De Gustibus non Disputandem Est holds – You like what you like, and no one can make you or should shame you into liking anything. Tastes vary.
In the second place, styles change through time, in writing and in film making. Maybe you just don’t like the styles and conventions of older films.
Still, you’re in your late forties and anything before 1980 seems old??? How about Star Wars?
I love films from all eras. It’s not snobbery – everybody who made films thought they had something to say. Out of all the thousands of film from any era, you have to expect some masterpieces. but they may not speak to you, personally. For my part I love Hitchcock and Gone with the Wind and King Kong and The Wizard of Oz and a great many others. My all-time favorites are all from the time you don’t care for – Forbidden Planet and 2001 and a Man for All Seasons and Spartacus and The Seven Samurai.
Because I am old, and I have trouble following the frenetic pace of most of these extended video games they call “movies” nowadays. I can’t think of five films from the past decade that I would categorize as “good.”
As much as I like new CGI techniques and all the great things that come with special effects, it can sometimes be sensory overkill. I watched Ironman a few weeks back and loved it, but man my brain was full at the end.
Watching a good Hitchcock film, or something like “On the Waterfront” or “Marty” has a nice calming effect on me. Also, the freakin’ story lines in old movies are pretty simple to follow. I’ll admit it: I get lost quite easily in new films where the plot twists and turns and special effects just swamp my ability to keep up.
ETA: DrFidelius beat me to the punch.
Movies are just another way to tell a story.
Sure the technology is different, but some of the classic directors are great storytellers, and it’s a shame to overlook them.
@ OP - do you read? If so do you only read the new releases? Classic movies are to me like good classic novels.
spifflog, you might try slowly working your way backwards through the history of film. Start with a classic film from the period in which you say that you like films. Then watch a classic film from the previous year (or just a few years before). Then a classic film from the year before that. Get yourself slowly accustomed to earlier eras of film.
Nothing before the '80s? The early '70s were a golden age in American cinema. And what man doesn’t like Humphrey Bogart?
I thought it was mostly women that liked him – as a man I’m jealous of him getting all the beautiful women.
Yes, but we want to be him. Except for the dying of lung cancer part.
Well, first of all, saying old movies ‘suck’ as some sort of blanket criticism means next to nothing.
Maybe you don’t like stilted-sounding dialogue. Maybe you don’t like dialogue at all. Maybe its the staginess of 30’s and '40s films, based, as many of them were, on stage plays. Maybe you don’t like movies filmed in monochrome. Maybe it was the difficulty of producing convincing special effects prior to the advent of CGI. Maybe the severe technical limitations prior to the 1970s (preferring to film mostly on soundstages to control lighting and sound quality, limitations on movement of the bulky cameras) bug you. Who knows? All I hear so far is that movies prior to some arbitrary cutoff date ‘suck’ to you.
All I can say in response to that, is that I recognize the technical and cultural conditions that films of all eras were made in, and make allowances for them. A compelling story or effective acting performance remains so, regardless, or in spite of, limitations of the form.
You mentioned Hitchcock specifically. If you happen to think that, say, North by Northwest, Rear Window, or Vertigo all ‘suck’, that’s your right, but without some context from you I’m at a loss as to what to suggest that you are missing.
To the OP: It might help if you told us what movies you do like, and why you like them.
For example, if you like films that have elaborate special effects and CGI and let you visit imaginary worlds, then yeah, you’re not going to find much to interest you in older films, or at least you’ll have to find different reasons to watch them.
If there are specific elements of moviemaking that float your boat, we might be able to point you to specific older films that do those things well.
Yes, there are some very good old films. It would be strange if there wasn’t, do you really think people magically learned how to tell a story 31 years ago?
However, I do think films date more quickly than books. With a book, your own imagination fills in much of the background, while you are fed this in a film. Things like style of acting and background music can be off-putting. Once suspension of disbelief is broken, enjoyment goes out of the window.
Often, I find the style of modern hollywood popcorn films to be too much. I quite enjoyed Iron Man and Hellboy for example, but I can’t watch something like Independence Day or Wanted.
Question for the OP, can you give us some examples of modern films you enjoyed please? What, for example, do you think of the LOTR films? They were made in the 2000s, but the books were written in the 30s and 40s.
That’s right. For example, this past weekend I saw Doctor Zhivago for the first time (1961 or thereabouts, I believe). I didn’t like it, and here are some of the reasons why – The costumes, sets, and makeup were too “clean,” very stagy, not creating a sense of reality. Even when people were meant to be shown as being poor and unkempt, they were unkempt in a very mannered way, as if they had put on brand new, clean clothes and randomly smudged and ripped them.
The acting and dialogue style of the era was also very mannered and stilted. The speech and physicality of the actors too precise and articulated. The language too literary and expository. The portrayals of characters and emotions were too over-the-top. The dialogue was too precise in its word choice, too deliberate-sounding.
There wasn’t enough acting in the acting. Alec Guinness and Omar Sharif never stopped being Alec Guinness and Omar Sharif.
The soundtrack was heavy-handed and repetitive. I got sick of hearing “Lara’s Theme” over and over.
The story seemed to hint at some kind of grand statement without making any statement. It made hardship and loss look too romantic. It made horror too clean. It was too long. Scenes in which simple things happened were too drawn out and expository.
Julie Christie wasn’t as beautiful as I was told she was.
So, these are some of the reasons I disliked Doctor Zhivago. And perhaps many of these erasons would apply to many pre-1970 movies, but not all of them uniformly.
Yeah, old movies suck.
Except for anything with Danny Kaye. Oh yeah, and Abbott and Costello were always fun. The Rat Pack is usually enjoyable, too.
Come to think of it, most new movies suck too.
Except for anything done by Pixar. And Robert Downey Jr. has been on fire in anything he’s been in. And the Coen Brothers are always worth watching.
Do you universally like “new” movies? If not, what do you like about the movies you do like? I find that what I look for in a movie is pretty similar no matter what era it’s from:
Rich or just plain engaging characters, especially those in the middle-to-background - examples from a handful of eras for this: **The Big Lebowski **(1998), Cool Hand Luke (1967), **The Killing **(1956). I love all three for different reasons too, and picked them at random because I’ve re-watched them recently, but the commonality for me is that I could watch a whole movie or two telling the life story of any character in any of them. “The Jesus”, “Tramp”, and any Elisha Cook character in anything - in a good character movie dozens or hundreds of lives are introduced in perhaps minutes of screen time.
It’s not just characters, an engaging story, like Winter’s Bone (2010) or **Barry Lyndon **(1975 - Kubrick on the brain, and this is a poor example because it wins on characters, visuals and sparkling dialog too!) that’s told using the screen to do things that can’t be done on the page just gets to me. And I’ve read both those books as well - like BL better as a film and *Winter’s Bone *I think the novel edges out ahead but not by a ton.
I ramble on, but I guess what I’m saying is that for me, the age of a movie is only one element in how I judge or appreciate it. It certainly is important sometimes, but it’s rarely the number one way I categorize movies in my mind. So to me, your question doesn’t make much sense in terms of how I watch movies, it’s more like “why is any movie good?” And if you have an answer to that I bet I or others on this board can recommend a bunch from any era that might strike you.
As DrFidelius points out, pacing is one major difference between the bulk of “new” movies and the bulk of “old” movies. I’m no scholar of the concept, but I kind of think of it in pre and post-Spielberg terms. He and his peers kind of ushered in a style that sticks very close to Freytag’s pyramid while cramming in just a huge ton of “stuff” be it dialog, action sequences, effects or subplots, all the while relying on our culturally ingrained acceptance/expectation of the “pyramid” to help us keep the thread straight. For folks who are so used to this style of cinematic storytelling and no other, films that don’t use it can be damn boring. There are older movies that have a fast pace, though I’m blanking on examples, but most will have other barriers like archaic social attitudes or stilted, stagey acting.
In any case, if you don’t feel that your entertainment portfolio is lacking due to not watching/enjoying “old” movies, there’s not really a problem here. If you do feel you’re missing out (which I’d say you are but that’s just me) I think it would be best to narrow your search - don’t look for ‘classics’ or films that I or any other film lovers might thrust at you, look for something that specifically appeals to you on subject matter or other grounds.
And if it makes a difference, I’m in my late 20s and I don’t think of a movie as “old” unless it’s from before my mother’s time, say mid-1950s!
Most movies are not that good. A lot are produced every year, and few are will regarded over time. As you go back in time, movies were more story oriented, while many modern movies are visual spectaculars with only a hint of a plot underneath.
I like a lot of older movies, but this weekend I caught *The Bad Seed *on TCM. The caricaturish melodrama was hilarious. It sounded like a long SNL skit missing the laughter.
The problem with a lot of old movies is that later directors/screenwriters have usually taken the basic concept and run with it. So what was fresh and novel in 1955 has now had all its changes rung. So your reaction on seeing the original source material is now “What, that old gag?” It’s true for not just plot twists but also cinematography and lighting as well.
A lot of the Hitchcock movies are like that.
Old movies aren’t good, but there are any number of good old movies. Personally, given the choice between a random movie from the 80s and a random one from the 40s, I’m going to the 40s every time.
I enjoy old movies as a window into a time and a place now gone. For example: we’re so used to seeing the '50s era through the lens of “Leave it to Beaver”, all kids and suburbs, that it is hard to remember that there were grownups in the '50s as well. Seeing what people looked like, how they talked, and what they did away from that whole milieu is fascinating. The same is true for movies set on the homefront during WWII, the postwar period, etc.
The fact that many of those movies are excellent in their own right is just a bonus.
But, as everyone else said, you like what you like. Whatever tickles your peach, as they say.