Times takes its toll on some flicks from the past. :(

I think the lens the show portrays the character through matters. There was never any doubt that Don Draper was an asshole on that show. It wasn't presented as an ideal.
 
Theater, novels, movies.
Why does anyone want to critique these through the moral lens of the current when they ar from another time?

Reading Mark Twain I'm surprised isn't prohibited now for all the people LOOKING for reasons to be offended.

Times change, these stories can be enjoyed still if you relax. Nobody is presenting them as moral standards in schools.

And O'Hare had that spanking coming......
 
I tend to lump almost all movies from the 1960s and first half of the 70s in that category. They were so transparently a reflection of their time that aging poorly almost seems (to me) to be built in.

I'm with you on this. There are a lot of so-called classic movies from this era that haven't stood the test of time all that well. Easy Rider, for instance, is an excellent example. So is MASH. At least, IMHO.

Exceptions from this period would be movies that aren't set in that period, like the Eastwood westerns, Great Escape, 2001, Young Frankenstein... Mary Poppins, Doctor Zhivago, Sound of Music...

I'm with you on these exceptions with one notable exception: 2001, to me, is like watching baseball on TV. As a local sportscaster once said, or maybe it was a comedian, "Baseball is the only sport I know of where they can cram five minutes worth of action into three hours."

Many of these movies, it seems to me, are self-consciously art movies. Easy Rider was very self-aware, and it shows in the performances. 2001, with its long, still, passages, strikes me as another one (I often wonder if part of Kubrick's effort was to show off just how dreadfully dull space travel would probably be). I'll take Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove over 2001 any day!!

As far as movies go that haven't aged well, some, like D.W. Griffiths' Birth of a Nation, are, in fact, full-blooded assaults on our modern sensibilities. And it's true: Griffiths was a racist.

Other movies haven't aged well because people are now used to moving pictures. Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat by the Lumière Brothers in 1895, reportedly sent film viewers fleeing from the cinema in panic as they feared getting hit by the train. I find other movies by the Lumière Brothers to be immensely fun, and if you're unfamiliar with their work, I highly recommend the modern flick Hugo, directed by Martin Scorcese.
 
Quadman2 said:
Anyone else take in a movie from the past only to find that a lot of the glamour/intrigue had waned after seeing it years after.

Im so sorry Q.. I thankfully still love the movies I used to love in the 70s (And even more now)
 
I think the lens the show portrays the character through matters. There was never any doubt that Don Draper was an asshole on that show. It wasn't presented as an ideal.

And Dumbo was?

Ace Ventura was a comedy. Taken in that light, I see no problem with it. I certainly did not have any trouble watching it.
 
I'll point out that the lens comment wasn't comparing Dumbo to Mad Men, those were separate conversational threads.

That said, Dumbo is simply ignorant, the crows were pretty clearly meant to represent lazy blacks. It has no self awareness. Mad men does. Dumbo is just a product of it's time, like song of the south. I think it's wrong to hold either film to today's standards, but it's equally wrong not to recognize and talk about the things about past films that make them problematic. Especially when we're letting our kids view them. Frank conversations about our history of racism and sexism are helpful and we can use film to have those conversations while still enjoying it.

Mad men is also a modern period piece, it would be whitewashing history if they made all the characters act as if they had today's perspective.

Ace ventura is a harder one. It literally has people throwing up at the idea of a transgendered person. Granted, the transgendered-ness was likely there only as a disguise, but ripping a person's clothing off to expose them and then mock vomiting at the presence of their genitals is well into tasteless territory.

I grew up loving both Ace Ventura movies. To a large extent I still enjoy them. But becoming friends with some individuals of different sexual orientations and having real conversations with them about their own personal struggles has rendered the "hey look how gross the tranny is" schtick a whole lot less funny for me.
 
You can't dictate what you derive enjoyment from. If you don't like it, you don't like it.

I'll rephrase.

We shouldn't ignore the problematic portions of our history. We also shouldn't throw away things we do enjoy because they have problematic parts. If it's something you or I personally don't enjoy because of its problems then by all means we shouldn't force ourselves to watch it out of nostalgia or any other reason. Film is primarily for entertainment after all.
 
I'm with you on this. There are a lot of so-called classic movies from this era that haven't stood the test of time all that well. Easy Rider, for instance, is an excellent example. So is MASH. At least, IMHO.



I'm with you on these exceptions with one notable exception: 2001, to me, is like watching baseball on TV. As a local sportscaster once said, or maybe it was a comedian, "Baseball is the only sport I know of where they can cram five minutes worth of action into three hours."

Many of these movies, it seems to me, are self-consciously art movies. Easy Rider was very self-aware, and it shows in the performances. 2001, with its long, still, passages, strikes me as another one (I often wonder if part of Kubrick's effort was to show off just how dreadfully dull space travel would probably be). I'll take Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove over 2001 any day!!

As far as movies go that haven't aged well, some, like D.W. Griffiths' Birth of a Nation, are, in fact, full-blooded assaults on our modern sensibilities. And it's true: Griffiths was a racist.

Other movies haven't aged well because people are now used to moving pictures. Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat by the Lumière Brothers in 1895, reportedly sent film viewers fleeing from the cinema in panic as they feared getting hit by the train. I find other movies by the Lumière Brothers to be immensely fun, and if you're unfamiliar with their work, I highly recommend the modern flick Hugo, directed by Martin Scorcese.

For rewatch quality I'm all in on Dr Strangelove, but if I find 2001 on TV I'll watch it too. Maybe a bit sentimental as it was the first non-kids movie parents (or Dad, in that case) took me to. I was all of 6 maybe?

I agree on Easy Rider. Another message movie from that period which tries to have the same impact was Billy Jack; it got a lot of attention but wasn't that great a movie imo. Message movies were a thing in the 70s, and I guess I wasn't into them so much.
 
I love Easy Rider. But it certainly is "of its time." From the dappled sunlight in the camera lens shots to the LSD in the graveyard scene. But I'm fascinated with the death of the 60s ideal (see, also, HST's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and the Rolling Stones at Altamont) and Easy Rider captures that. Peter Fonda's character is skeptical of the hippy communes. And Dennis Hopper's character is basically the greedy scum he thinks he is rebelling against. And the inevitable culture clash at the end is, sadly, still with us today.

As for the OP and Picnic, I agree it just does not hold up. What was "steamy" then, like the dance scene, is now odd. Plenty of way better Holden flicks like, say, Sunset Boulevard.

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Speaking of Holden, I was watching "Network" a short while back, and thought it was a bit contrived. First time around in the theatre during the (almost) vacant boardroom scene I identified with the Peter Finch character, but now I'm heavily on board with the Ned Beatty character "You are meddling with the forces of nature Mr. Beal, and you will atone" (or something like that).
 
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Im so sorry Q.. I thankfully still love the movies I used to love in the 70s (And even more now)


Hey, don't be sorry. I think there's still a host of other flicks from different decades that can and do hold up to the test of time...just not all of them. A good sequel esp is really difficult to pull off.

For the most part, for me anyways, there has to be a universal theme that the movie rides on, and not attached to a certain time period. Some offer hope for the future or provide an enlightenment to just how the human existence operates. In the same way, some books share with the reader common elements that transcend time. At certain ages we all are more impressionable, but as we grow older we (for the most part) become more discriminating in the results that are offered.

As in my initial post, "Picnic" held a special moment in my life, and I guess it was the theme more than the actual acting that caught me up at the time.

On the other side of the time ledger, most of the modern movies flip so quickly from one camera to the other. I find this annoying! This is unlike movies of the past that tended to linger on people's faces for the non verbal messages, or took the time to appreciate the scenery. All seems to hurried today in order to finish off the movie and get the next crowd in. This is just my own personal bias on this technique of film footage taking but it has its impact on me.

Q
 
I’m not going to deny stumbling across something from the way past, being excited to re-watch, only to stop and consider “what was I thinking”

Not too often though, most of my old favs still get a lot of enjoyment from me.

If I come acoss “Guns of Navaronne”, “The Lion in Winter”, or any of the old Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns, I am in to the end!
 
Yet there are old films like "Beat The Devil" [1953] with Bogie, Lorre and Morley,
Jennifer Jones, Gina Lolibrigida and more (check the credits)
that are just screamingly funny in places
- for many folk - and just too dry and too old for others.
 
I can't say that any movie I seen when younger has differed in my mind. There are truly some sitcoms that have drastically
and heaven forbid, even some music/artists. Just can't believe I listen or watched that stuff. Hokey, bad acting and childish, of course I was
a child then so I reckon that stands to reason. Tastes change and without us even knowing it most the time, just wish I was
young enough to enjoy it all again.
 
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