Old movies vs. new movies?

The old games versus today's games is a very common and already boring theme, but what about movies?

Were the old films (from the beginnings to the 80's) better compared to the movies of the last 20 years? What do you think about it?

I know, "from the beginnings to the 80's" is a huge category, but I think movies have changed a lot since the 90's.

There's lots of crap and lots of gems in both eras. It's fairy even across the board. The only problem with the movie indurstry today is all the big studios are too afraid to do something new so they're just pumping out remakes and sequels that are guaranteed to make a buck regardless of how good they are. Also "early 80s" is hardly "old."

Nomad said:

Also "early 80s" is hardly "old."

My suggestion was based on "Terminator" which is a 1982 film, so it's 30 years old. I think it's relatively old especially for me cause it was 10 years before my birth. But you may be right =)

In my opinion, my favourite films (Alien, terminator 2) were mostly made in the 60s, 70s, 80s. But tbh there were great and crap films throughout and I have enjoyed many films which I have seen at the cinema recently. Though I do feel that with the exception of horror films, no one wants to push the boat out with film plots. Horror films these days suck and that's despite the improved cgi effects. Give me an old school horror like halloween any day.

I'm not sure, there have been pretty shitty movies lately. I'm especially bored with all the alien invasion movies that took place after district 9, such as battlefield los angelos and battleship. But I do believe there are a lot of good ones out there.I liked Ted a lot despite being directed by seth mcfarlane. I think movies like inception will probably stand out for a while too. Ten years from now I might ask "why don't they make movies like this anymore?"

It seems like hollywood is running dry sometimes but some months are better than others. Its hard to dismiss that all movies are shit these days, especially since the bad movies of the past are forgotten within a couple weeks.

I do believe however, that television (at least in the united states) has gone to shit. Its rather repulsive to be exposed to thousands of channels, spend ten minutes flipping through ALL OF THEM and not finding a single thing worth watching. Way too many reality shows and police/hospital drama, or shows where if you haven't seen all the previous episodes in the season, you won't know what the fuck is going on.

At this point, if I'm not watching workaholics, tosh.0, always sunny in philadelphia, parks and recreation, the office (which has been plummeting since ed helms took over), threes company, futurama, south park, or comedy central presents, then the tv is off.

You watch a lot of Comedy central. I think that the ratio of good to crap movies hasn't changed in the past century, but yeah, TV certainly has.I find myself being stuck with only 4 or 5 good channels. Back to movies, I have favorites from the 70's (Rocky Horror Picture Show, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), 80's (Terminator, Caddyshack, Back to the Future), 90's (Event Horizon, The Matrix, The Green Mile), and the new millennium (Terminator: Salvation, Brokeback Mountain {well what can I say, that's HOT}, Lord of the Rings, No Country for Old Men). I literally have hundreds of favorite movies from all over the past decades.

40oz said:

I do believe however, that television (at least in the united states) has gone to shit. Its rather repulsive to be exposed to thousands of channels, spend ten minutes flipping through ALL OF THEM and not finding a single thing worth watching. Way too many reality shows and police/hospital drama, or shows where if you haven't seen all the previous episodes in the season, you won't know what the fuck is going on.

I can agree with this. I live in the UK and the number of talent shows or reality shows have just polluted tv here. Even the shows I did like (Britains got talent) have turned to crap.
There is very little I enjoy on tv any more. There are a few shows here. For example the BBC's adaptation of Sherlock Holmes in the modern day was brilliant. But there isn't enough captivating and engaging television here these days. It's all brainless crap.
Any way I shall end my rant there as this is a film discussion :)
BTW the last film I watched was Prometheus which I quite enjoyed. So there is hope for the film industry. But yet again I've had word here, and this might be bumping another thread.............

Just thought of a great new series- The Walking Dead. Haven't missed an episode.

trends change as decades come and go, but liking the mainstream production of a certain period is based purely on personal taste. good and bad movies in their own genres are everpresent. just last year i absolutely fapped all over Drive and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. oh, and since 40oz mentioned TV shows, HBO unleashed Game of Thrones upon the face of the world. eat that, crappy 80's with your withered MASH and The Thorn Birds and whatnot.

I just watched Total Recall, its still pretty awsome today. Most new movies suck, I miss the old days. Seems the quality back then was a whole lot better. I do Look forward to seeing the new Dark Knight movie though, not sure what to expect. Thats really the only movie I will check out.

Season 5 of Breaking Bad starts today.
I hope it re-airs because I still have to catch up on Netflix.

Krispy said:

Just thought of a great new series- The Walking Dead. Haven't missed an episode.

That's a great show, but in truth it is one of those series were maybe it's best that you see from the beginning, otherwise you might be lost in some of the characters and plot.

People say the same about games, of course, but the truth is that, as with any art form, time dictates what gets remembered. As such, most people only know films from the 30s-80s that have been lauded over and over while most of the crap, mediocre, and otherwise forgettable ones become lost and ignored.

Twenty years from now, I'm sure many of the people who continue to complain about how much modern films/games suck will have heard discovered or rediscovered gems that are currently getting a cold shoulder. It happened with Kubrick and Leone's films (and countless others) and there's no reason to think that it won't continue to happen.

I'm more skeptical about music, but then again, [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MiQzAo6Cp8]Sugar Sugar[/url was a massive hit when it was released, but no one compares today's pop music to that load of the dung, and elect to instead compare to, say, The Beatles or, hell, I've even heard compare "Baby Oh" to Sinatra, which is straight-up moronic.

Id est, give it time.


EDIT: Also, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones are great TV shows off the top of my head. There are a couple of okay network programs, but those have, generally, always sucked.

*forget...delete it*

Movies have always been mostly crap. We just remember the good ones. This is true of all media. Look at games. There were loads of shitty Wolf3D clones appearing around the time Doom came out. Most people don't know they existed and probably don't want to.

The switch in TV to non-scripted shows is interesting. That was totally a case of taking the cheapest path. It usually sucks, but just about everyone can find one of those "reality" shows entertaining. There's immense comedy value in that one where they convinced a dumb bunch of British teenagers they were flying on the space shuttle.

Perceived quality shifts also occur because our favourite genres happen in waves. There used to be a lot of space-adventuring sci-fi on. I like that stuff, so I used to love flicking on the TV and just watching it all day. Now things like Star Trek are almost non-existent, so I don't watch much new TV and have been catching up on old things.

I've seen good and bad films from all eras, from the very first days of silent cinema to the very present.

cannonball said:
In my opinion, my favourite films (Alien, terminator 2) were mostly made in the 60s, 70s, 80s.

Recently I watched this Czech film from the early 60s and this Polish movie from the late 70s, and was pleasantly surprised, not only because they were worth watching in themselves but also because they showed evident influence on Alien and its series. In the first case, due to the space ship environment and the exploratory nature, and in the latter in respect to the androids. Amusingly, the fist film also had a robot scene that more of less got stolen by George Lucas for Star Wars... something R2D2 does at one point. Not that much long ago I had watched a recent SciFi movie which had a plot that had the same premise as the one in the Czech movie, and perhaps it was meant to be a remake or some kind of plagiarism, but the modern special effects didn't help a less solid plot. Not the first thing capitalists looking for $$$ ruin something commies had done better :p

Blah. I don't find old films interesting. They're too dated and misogynistic. On the other hand, real recent films are too tired and predictable. I'd say that the best films are those from my childhood, the 90s.

I think it really depends on the genre you're talking about. For example, the horror genre really benefits from the "less is more" mentality which was pretty much forced on the genre in the early days due to budgeting constraints and whatnot. Now with CGI, though, we have the ability to just go right out and show the monster (which often ruins it), and there's no need to rely on practical effects. I'm thinking in particular of The Thing and its recent remake/prequel/whatever. The new one could show a lot more in terms of special effects, but they didn't look nearly as good because they were CGI, and the original was made better by only getting brief glimpses at the creature.

In other cases, the modern day is better. The Avengers was a fantastic movie, and it was just chock-full of CGI. Thing is, it never would've worked in an earlier time. I love practical effects, but they could never have hoped to pull of that movie on practical effects alone - it was CGI, but it was incredibly well-used CGI.

Classics vs. CGI reboots, uninspired sequels and blatant copycats. I'll stick with the classics.

From what I've seen of both eras, I think their overall quality averages out to be the same.

The difference is that the extremes of quality being averaged has expanded over the decades. I rarely find earlier movies to be awful, but I also rarely find anything worth gushing over. On the other hand, there's a lot of recent movies I find awful, but also a lot that are the best I've ever seen.

One thing I don't take issue with is practical effects vs CGI. This debate really blew up when The Thing got remade last year, and even now you can find people flooding movie boards with complaints of the new movie's CGI and its desperate need to have been made with entirely practical effects. This assumes the superiority of Carpenter's prior presentation, which simply isn't true. Though I like his designs better, they're no more or less convincing than the newer CGI versions. Practical effects and CGI both have their own sets of notable flaws, and moving from one to the other isn't a step forward or backward as much as it's staying in the same place but for different reasons. It trades one set of problems for an equally different set of problems, and ultimately makes a movie no better or worse for it.

Lüt said:

One thing I don't take issue with is practical effects vs CGI. This debate really blew up when The Thing got remade last year, and even now you can find people flooding movie boards with complaints of the new movie's CGI and its desperate need to have been made with entirely practical effects. This assumes the superiority of Carpenter's prior presentation, which simply isn't true. Though I like his designs better, they're no more or less convincing than the newer CGI versions. Practical effects and CGI both have their own sets of notable flaws, and moving from one to the other isn't a step forward or backward as much as it's staying in the same place but for different reasons. It trades one set of problems for an equally different set of problems, and ultimately makes a movie no better or worse for it.

I always like to point people towards Terminator 2 whenever the CGI vs practical effects argument crops up. The practical effects for the T-1000 look outdated and awkward compared to the CGI which still holds up well to this day.

But yes, there's good practical effects and bad practical effects, good CGI and bad CGI. But people who insist that practical effects look "more real" often have nostalgia glasses surgically attached to their faces.

GreyGhost said:

Classics vs. CGI reboots, uninspired sequels and blatant copycats. I'll stick with the classics.

Watch more films. I don't recall David Lynch or Lars von Trier or Tarantino or the Coen brothers ever doing a CGI reboot of anything.

Did you watch Moon, Drive, Children of Men, The Tracey Fragments, or This is England? None of these films are reboots, sequels, copycats of anything and contain no CGI at all*. And there's hundreds more where those come from.

*Except for perhaps one or two shots in Moon. But if that's enough to make you not like a movie then you probably don't like movies :p

The advent of new digital tools to edit colors in films that appeared around the early 00's has sort of contributed to a visual degradation by being overused in tasteless ways (like having blue/orange everywhere, all the time). Soundtracks got a whole lot worse too. In the past even pretty dull and forgettable movies could have memorable and varied scores.

But at least token sex scenes that were rampant in the 80's to early 90's have largely diminished.

myk said:

Not the first thing capitalists looking for $$$ ruin something commies had done better :p

well, americans are hellbent on exporting their own movie culture, but as a mass they seem utterly incapable of accepting foreign cinema in its original form. they DEMAND it remade, localized into american settings and for the love of god, no dubbing! Intouchables are a worldwide hit and there's already an american remake in production, in american settings of course. that's a 2011 movie. it will just make more money off lazy masses that way. scorsese remade Infernal Affairs into The Departed in 3 years. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo took 2 years to be remade from swedish. that incredibly bad remake of Nikita with Bridget Fonda also took just 3 years. Taxi took 6 years and it was atrocious.

i'm well aware of the reasons behind this phenomenon, but they're not something i can calmly accept, despite some of the remakes being quite good movies (The Departed). it's almost inevitable to lose something crucial in translation.

Old or new doesn't matter as long as it's good stuff.

I'm afraid that alot of people watch the movies that is being fed to them and promoted to the max. Ultimately, these movies become the "new" movies, even though there's thousands of movies being made throughout the world every year who get little to no attention because they're made independently, straight to dvd or tv-movies etc.

What I'm trying to say is that claiming that new cinema is bad when you've only seen the blockbusters is stupid.

There is a rather grotesque over saturation in video media right now, and the Hollywood movie-and-telelvision-show-making-machine is really feeling the stress. We are a very impatient and demanding culture, not yet mentally evolved enough to deal with the constant exposure to overstimulating technology. In order to keep up with our needs, movies and TV shows must be pumped out in greater quantities than ever before.

This, and our tendency to forget uninteresting movies from the past, makes it seem as if the overall quality of movies is steadily lowering, but that's debatable. Plenty of excellent independent movies are still being released, but Hollywood's desperation has become painfully obvious. The endless "reboots," sequels and adaptations are bad enough, but thanks to the movie "Bad Ass," it seems that Internet videos are slated to be the next big genre.

I'd also like to make a quick comment on the use of CGI versus practical effects. I think the tendency by some to prefer practical effects comes from the fact that when you see in-camera set pieces, prosthetics, make-up, puppetry and props, they are undeniably real world objects, even if what they are representing still appears fake. Extremely convincing CGI has the "uncanny valley" effect, whereby some people will be disturbed that it almost looks 100% convincing, but not quite. So it's less unsettling, to some, to see an obvious practical effect, as opposed to computer animation which looks very close to reality. However, it cannot be denied that with the extreme ambition of some movies, particularly a lot of modern science fiction, computer animation is the only way to achieve certain shots.

GoatLord said:

Extremely convincing CGI has the "uncanny valley" effect

Depending on where it's used. Any time a human face is rendered with incredible accuracy it comes into play.

Remember that Final Fantasy movie from 2001? That was definitely a case of uncanny valley. As was psuedo-Schwarzenegger in Terminator Salvation. But I never felt that when watching LOTR or those terrible Transformers movies.

It still feels obvious to me, even in those movies, but I just choose to ignore it, because I can appreciate the work that went into it. CGI has been at the "99% convincing" mark for something like a decade now. There's a lot of tiny little subtleties that still need to be worked out. More than anything it's the sense of movement that is still wonky, especially in regards to trying to match the motion blur caused by the shutter speed and camera movement of the "live action" portion of the film.

Case in point, Tron 2. The CGI Jeff Bridges was just really creepy looking and not convincing at all. The awkward camera angles in the beginning so you could barely see his face didn't help.

Use3D said:

Case in point, Tron 2. The CGI Jeff Bridges was just really creepy looking and not convincing at all. The awkward camera angles in the beginning so you could barely see his face didn't help.

Was that entirely digital though? Or did they just make him look younger like they did with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in X-Men 3? Or were they all entirely digital and I was too stupid to know any different? Not sure what the process involves.

In any case, I thought they did a pretty good job with that.