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Katamori

Old movies vs. new movies?

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Agreed that there's probably no trend of improvement or decline in quality of films across the whole gamut over time.

Personally, I think of the period late 90's to early 2000's is my favourite time in film (Usual Suspects, Twelve Monkeys, Memento, Matrix, Fight Club, American Psycho, Being John Malkovitch, American Beauty).

The fact that this period co-incides with a time in my life where I was time rich and had a high amount of disposable income suggests to me that I'd just seen more films during this time and remembered the good ones.

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I tend to prefer the modern generation of films, that is, films made in the last 30 to 40 years or so. I'm not at all against older films, though I have to admit, I've only seen a few made before the 60s. However, being that my favorite film genres are science fiction, surrealism, dark comedy and horror, I definitely prefer the modern take on such styles. "Eraserhead," "Brazil," "Monty Python and Meaning the Life," "Total Recall," "Alien," "Blade Runner," "Gummo," "Clockwork Orange," "Inland Empire," "The Terminator," "Julien Donkey-Boy," "Tetsuo: The Iron Man," "The Wall" and many others immediately come to mind when I think of my favorites, all released in the last 40 years. Those genres have definitely improved with time in my opinion.

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I think I like older movies where special effects were part of the story and not part of the background.

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As far as sci-fi and special effects heavy movies go, I think they were at their best in the late 70s-early 90s. Films like Alien, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Terminator 2, and others had some pretty amazing special effects and didn't rely too heavily on CGI. Everything was real, and it made you feel like the world you were watching actually existed. Aliens was probably the pinnacle of special effects. Everything in that movie was made without the help of computers and was actually filmed as it appears in the movie (with only a little green-screening). It's pretty fucking amazing. Then in the 90s, movies like Jurassic Park came around and ruined everything by making all their special effects CGI, which looked terrible.

That being said, they're finally making CGI that doesn't look bad and/or are using it minimally. There have been a lot of great sci-fi movies recently, like Prometheus, Tron Legacy, and Moon (though the latter wasn't special effects-heavy...more like a classic 50s/60s Sci-fi story).

That being said, even though the 90s sucked for special effects, thanks to indie movies being the popular thing there were a lot of great artsy, quirky, and psychological movies coming out then and was a great era for that sort of thing (Big Lebowski, Fight Club, High Fidelity, Pulp Fiction, Clerks, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, etc.) This era extended into the early 00s as well.

The 80s had a lot of my favorite comedies, but that might be nostalgia talking.

The late 60s through the early/mod 70s had a lot of great experimental movies (both thematically and when it came to film making techniques). Stuff like 2001, Clockwork Orange, Zardoz, 200 Motels, Bakshi's early movies, and others.

So really movies have always had a fairly similar ratio of good:bad, but certain eras had certain types of movies really shine.

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Danarchy said:

Then in the 90s, movies like Jurassic Park came around and ruined everything by making all their special effects CGI, which looked terrible.

Damn you for speaking ill of one of my most favourite movies ever ;_;

A lot of the stuff in JP was done with practical effects. For me it was and is the perfect harmony of physical effects enhanced by CGI, and visa-versa. And it was all built around a simple but solid story and memorable characters. I can watch it today and be equally as mesmerised by that movie as I was when I saw it at the cinema as a child.

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i DO prefer claymation and puppets over CGI (so far) but there have been a decent number of "good" movies in recent years:

Moon
Drive
Batman/Dark Knight trilogy
The Prestige
Pan's Labyrinth
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Sunshine (guilty pleasure added to the list for the powerful first 3 quarters, forgetting about the last quarter.)

etc.

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Danarchy said:

Terminator 2 [...] didn't rely too heavily on CGI.

On the contrary, T2 is one of the best initial examples of CGI on film.

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I think films follow the 80-20 rule quite nicely. I'm glad someone mentioned "There Will Be Blood", what an excellent flick.

One of my favorite scifi movies is from the 50s. Check out Forbidden Planet if you haven't seen it. Hoo boy. They don't make em like that anymore.

I agree that CG has only really "caught up" in the past few years. The Star Wars blurays are terrible (for amongst other things) being a perfect example of the 90's CG ghetto with their "improvements". Thanks, George.

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Ironically, the added CGI effects found on the special editions date the sequel trilogy even more.

Maybe with the 3D re-releases, he'll through some money at them and at least make the films look consistent. Knowing George, he'll take the cheapest rout.

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spank said:

On the contrary, T2 is one of the best initial examples of CGI on film.

Eh, it was really on the cusp of CGI use. Sure it had a lot of CGI in it, like the T-1000, but they still used a lot of good old Stan Winston puppetry and traditional special effects.

This deleted scene is a good example. No CGI was used here:



That's not a mirror, it's a hole into another room where the real Arnold is with Linda Hamilton's twin sister and a John Conner double. That's a prop Terminator on this side of the mirror so it looks like they're reaching into Arnold's brain. It's use of awesome techniques like these that make movies look very real and believable.

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Remember the rat thing in The Abyss? That wasn't an effect; it was real. It would work on humans too if it was easier to cycle the liquid through your lungs. They apparently did it in five takes to five rats.



Different kinds of techniques work for different things. Yeah, CGI looks like fake crap a lot of the time when it's being used to save money, but sometimes it's easily the best thing to use. People used to complain about the CGI in Babylon 5 because models looked more realistic at the time. That was true, but the show was more interesting to watch with all the spacecraft moving around in ways that would have cost a billion dollars to shoot with models.

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Danarchy said:

This deleted scene is a good example. No CGI was used here

Too bad that scene was completely superfluous to the story :p

Now that I think of it, T2 special edition is entirely bloated with cool but unnecessary extra scenes which affect the pacing of the film in parts.

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Danarchy said:

Then in the 90s, movies like Jurassic Park came around and ruined everything by making all their special effects CGI, which looked terrible.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zqsu2AhuXxA
Cesta do praveku (Journey to the Beginning of Time, 1955) with english subs. enjoy!

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I'd say it's perhaps about the same. The reason we think of good movies from the old days is because the bad ones have had time to fade from our memories. For every Hitchcock classic in the 50s and 60s there must have been a hundred stinkers of varying budgets.

1980 was an awesome year in my opinion. We got Star Wars episode V, Airplane!, Caddyshack, The Shining, Friday the 13th, and The Blues Brothers, which showed off Chicago as a prime shooting location for the rest of the decade.

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