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Excruciating old movies that did not age well
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From the writer of Jurassic Park
Adapted to screenplay by the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Moonstruck
With the editor from Lawerence of Arabia
Being produced by all of Spielberg's producers, and being shot by the guy who shot ET and all of Spielberg's movies
Starring the incredible Laura Linney, the legendary Tim Curry, the irreplaceable Bruce Campbell, a Ghostbuster, and... one of the dudes from Nip/Tuck, along with a slew of other classic character actors
Congrats
The nightmare on elm street films. I tried introducing my son to them as I loved them back in the 80's and 90's. They aren't slightly scary and not funny. The Freddy one liners are just grating. It's super cheesy. My son looked at me like what the fuck are we watching dad?!? I was so afraid of him as a kid...
I just watched it for the first time recently, and aside from moments of intense racism and misogyny I thought it was pretty dope
+ all of the films in Sight and Sound's Top 50. Dogshit the lot of 'em.
We should throw in all the movies featured in Ebert's Great Movies books too just for good measure.
I think you'll find it has aged best versus things like the prequels.
I don't think you understand why people love the original Star Wars movies.
So weird. I just literally watched two reviews of this film today. It seems horrible.
I dunno about "excruciating" but Taxi Driver didn't really have any impact on me at all. My friend and I watched it after his dad went all nostalgia overload about what a sensory experience it was. We ended up concluding that in a modern context there's just nothing particularly shocking or groundbreaking about it.
Behold, the abominable secret child Donald keeps locked and chained in the Trump Tower basement
I just want you to know that your post is appreciated. Thank you.
Comedy ages even worse than horror. Ok horror movies age into being camp. Ok comedies age into being boring or awful.
Also, you're 100% wrong about pre-2008 horror.
Yeah, The Goonies is my pick. I dated a girl who swore by it, so we finally rented it and I struggled to even get through it. Nostalgia glasses are huge with that one.
2001 hasn't aged a single day
A wordless movie was just as bizarre in 1968
The biggest thing making older movies hard to watch for me is the way abuse and assault is commonly used by male characters as a successful flirting method, and the movie in turn condoning the behavior.
I watch a lot of old (mostly 60s onward but some 20s-50s) stuff and I can hang with pretty much any technical or style oddness, but blatant abuse as a dating technique really grates.
Have similar gripes about race in old cinema but often that shows up via absence, as in getting an hour into a film and realizing there's been zero black people, not even as extras.
I watch a lot of old (mostly 60s onward but some 20s-50s) stuff and I can hang with pretty much any technical or style oddness, but blatant abuse as a dating technique really grates.
Have similar gripes about race in old cinema but often that shows up via absence, as in getting an hour into a film and realizing there's been zero black people, not even as extras.
This is mostly due to the fact that they were trying to do an in-camera saber effect and the props were sticks rotating on a moter and were very fragile.
So they has to frame the sabers just right and the actors couldn't hit them hard. In the end, the effect didn't work and they had to rotoscope everything.
Of course, they learned their lesson in Empire which has (imo) the best lightsaber fight in the whole series.
This movie would be problematic if it came out today.
For who?
This movie would be problematic if it came out today.
I would actually like to know why you think They Live would be problematic today, because if anything it would be more topical than ever. In fact, They Live is still commonly used in film studies courses.
WHAT THE FUCK?!!
Those are two movies you'd find in the tiny overlapping part of the Venn diagram of "movies regular folk love" and "movies cinephiles love"
This thread is getting into "if it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college" territory for me so I should probably bail before I scanners myself.
16 Candles, Revenge of the Nerds, Breakfast Club All have incredible racism and sexism in them. Hard to watch with very few redeeming qualities
....I think some people don't understand how this thread works.
This isn't about old movies you don't like.
It's about movies that seem to have lost about 75-80% of their appeal due to certain factors, which keep them time-capsuled in the era they were created in.
Kids movies and TV shows are tricky because the vast majority are aimed at kids. They're not designed to "age well" and appeal to 30 or 40 year-old adults. Most were designed to give 6-10 year-olds a sensory overload and get them to buy the associated merchandise. I think the majority of kids shows and movies never age well. The few exceptions are things like Looney Tunes, Flintstones, and classic Simpsons that had multi-layer humor, which appealed to both kids and adults. When I watch an old episode of The Simpsons, I actually don't laugh at the same jokes when I watched it as a 10-11 year-old. I now laugh at all the humor and adult cultural references that went completely over my head as a kid. So even though I still very much enjoy classic Simpsons, it's a completely different experience. But there are very few kids shows where the creators/writers put in the effort or have the luxury to put in multilevel humor / plot points, so the show can age with the viewer.
As for comedies yeah they can also be tough to make timeless. I'm always amazed at how Coming to America and Trading Places have aged so well. Both movies are still very funny and interesting despite them containing references specific to their time. I think if a comedy has heart or challenges the norms of its time from a social standpoint, then it has a good chance of aging well. But if the main appeal is how edgy it is or it's just a conga line of slapstick jokes, then it's probably not going to survive outside the era it was made in.
Also just because a movie has a few cheesy lines or the visual effects are antiquated, doesn't automatically make it a relic of its time. When my kids watch an older movie with bad effects, at first they may laugh or mock the visual, but if the story is engaging enough they quickly buy-in to the reality and won't even notice those short-comings unless it's overly jarring. My kids got into E.T. (the non-CG enhanced version) just fine. I wasn't sure how well the Brendon Fraiser Mummy movies would age, but my kids were both scared and laughing the whole time, not bad for a movie that was effects heavy, some of which were cringe-worthy at times. Same thing with Wily Wonka, some of the effects look very cheap by today's standards, but both my son and daughter love the movie because of Gene Wilder's performance and the music.
This isn't about old movies you don't like.
It's about movies that seem to have lost about 75-80% of their appeal due to certain factors, which keep them time-capsuled in the era they were created in.
Kids movies and TV shows are tricky because the vast majority are aimed at kids. They're not designed to "age well" and appeal to 30 or 40 year-old adults. Most were designed to give 6-10 year-olds a sensory overload and get them to buy the associated merchandise. I think the majority of kids shows and movies never age well. The few exceptions are things like Looney Tunes, Flintstones, and classic Simpsons that had multi-layer humor, which appealed to both kids and adults. When I watch an old episode of The Simpsons, I actually don't laugh at the same jokes when I watched it as a 10-11 year-old. I now laugh at all the humor and adult cultural references that went completely over my head as a kid. So even though I still very much enjoy classic Simpsons, it's a completely different experience. But there are very few kids shows where the creators/writers put in the effort or have the luxury to put in multilevel humor / plot points, so the show can age with the viewer.
As for comedies yeah they can also be tough to make timeless. I'm always amazed at how Coming to America and Trading Places have aged so well. Both movies are still very funny and interesting despite them containing references specific to their time. I think if a comedy has heart or challenges the norms of its time from a social standpoint, then it has a good chance of aging well. But if the main appeal is how edgy it is or it's just a conga line of slapstick jokes, then it's probably not going to survive outside the era it was made in.
Also just because a movie has a few cheesy lines or the visual effects are antiquated, doesn't automatically make it a relic of its time. When my kids watch an older movie with bad effects, at first they may laugh or mock the visual, but if the story is engaging enough they quickly buy-in to the reality and won't even notice those short-comings unless it's overly jarring. My kids got into E.T. (the non-CG enhanced version) just fine. I wasn't sure how well the Brendon Fraiser Mummy movies would age, but my kids were both scared and laughing the whole time, not bad for a movie that was effects heavy, some of which were cringe-worthy at times. Same thing with Wily Wonka, some of the effects look very cheap by today's standards, but both my son and daughter love the movie because of Gene Wilder's performance and the music.
This is true, haha.
I did a full Star Wars re-watch with my kids a few years ago going from Episode 1 - 6 in order. My kids had never seen the older movies and it was my first time watching them in order.
So episode 3 ends with an epic lightsaber duel over lava pits and then episode 4 begins with a grumpy old men geriatric saber duel. My kids were laughing, it was pretty jarring. But that's just the nature of making a prequel with modern effects 25 some years after the original.
I was never big on Star Wars and I didn't watch the originals until I was an adult. Personally I'm a big Star Trek fan and aside from the man-whores of Kirk and Riker, the StarTrek universe is fairly liberal and forward leaning. Except for a few anomalies here and there, for example Star Trek: TNG is still very watchable and regularly had episodes that challenged norms of gender and sexual identity, and equality.
Isn't that what's so amazing about the film, though? That it was so prophetic and still really relevant in its eerily accurate depiction of the alienated individual (white male, typically) who goes on a shooting rampage?
I will say there's at least one shot in the film that hasn't aged well at all; when he sticks the gun in the dude's mouth (or up to his head, maybe I'm misremembering it) and blasts him in the big climax, it looks really, really fake.
I haven't read all seven pages of the thread but this ludicrous hot-take enraged me so much that I had to respond.
Firstly, Rosemary's Baby is quite literally all about atmosphere and tone. The focus of the movie is not even remotely on being scary, in a conventional sense at least. It does exactly what you claim a horror movie needs to do to age well. The focus of the movie is on paranoia, claustrophobia and ultimately the worst kind of betrayal you could possibly imagine. That's why it worked so well and continues to work so well today.
Is it slow by today's standards? Absolutely, it takes time to do crazy things by modern horror standards, like establish characters and relationships. Is the 'heil Satan' scene a bit silly in the light of 2018? Maybe. It's hard not to see that as a little comical nowadays. Everything else about it is a masterpiece.
No horror movies made before 2008 are good? Seriously? How old are you? This sounds like the opinion of an edgy teenager.
Yeah, I can see this, but watching it *now* as a modern viewer, it lacks that punch.
Yeah it's crazy they copied the frog bro's from a movie released a two weeks before Monster Squad in 1987
Ehhh.... even as a kid, I always assumed the battle between Obi-Wan and Vader wasn't necessarily 'a battle'. Obi-Wan is clearly just stalling time and just deflecting Vader's blows. It's not meant to be some kind of flashy fight.
Seems like you're focusing this on horror films that were controversial at the time of their release for horrifically violent or shocking content, and saying that they aged poorly because newer films are even more horrifically violent and shocking?
That's... honestly a pretty disappointing take on the genre.
Scarface was always shit though.
I guess I'll add to the bad takes in this thread.
I watched both The Exorcist and The Shining for the first time maybe 5 or 6 years ago and I thought both of them were pretty meh.
(Admittedly, it's probably just that I didn't like them, not that they didn't "age well". The cinematography and acting and such were good, but the atmosphere they were trying to establish didn't grab me at all. Just a bunch of people walking around stressed with ambient unnerving music playing for two hours and occasionally some "scary" scenes.)
I watched both The Exorcist and The Shining for the first time maybe 5 or 6 years ago and I thought both of them were pretty meh.
(Admittedly, it's probably just that I didn't like them, not that they didn't "age well". The cinematography and acting and such were good, but the atmosphere they were trying to establish didn't grab me at all. Just a bunch of people walking around stressed with ambient unnerving music playing for two hours and occasionally some "scary" scenes.)
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My partner is German, and has never seen a Carry On movie. They were a staple of my childhood TV viewing but I really dread watching one today.
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