Tonight I watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind on cable. I have seen it many times and own it on DVD. Goddamn is that a great movie. Holds up so, so well. The thing I love about Spielberg's early work is that about 10% of the stuff going on is not directly relevant to the plot, it's just ambience to show that this is real life. Today's tight-assed editors don't let anything onscreen that isn't absolutely necessary. Every extra is costumed and coiffed. Every line in the script has to contribute to the plot somehow or foreshadow something. It's too sterile. It helps that all the effects are practical and not CGI. CGI just looks too perfect. Maybe someday people will go retro and make movies like this again. FOCUS: What bits of pop culture for you have aged well - like wine - or even surpassed their successors? ANTI-FOCUS: What pop culture has aged like vinegar?
FOCUS and ANTI-FOCUS: Transformers. Of itself, it's still as loved and relevant (such that it is) as it ever was. Given a choice of everything, my three year old will choose Transformers - the original tv series - to watch 9 times out 10. Unfortunately, the icons have been hijacked by white trash around here. In the past week I've seen a few cars doing the rounds with Autobot or Decepticon symbols on them. And I even saw a young trailer trash whale saunter into the supermarket the other day with a large Autobot symbol tattooed on the back of her leg. It's sacrilege. I almost wanted to grab her by the scruff of her neck and demand she transform, otherwise I'd take a knife to her leg and carve it out.
Say what you will about Paul Reuban, Pee-Wee's Playhouse has aged really well. It's doing really well on the stage. It's been 24 years since it premiered on CBS, and Pee-Wee is relevant in pop culture.
Movies from the forties and fifties (for an artistic sake, the early sixties counts as the fifties). They're just so flawless (minus the bits of racism and sexism here and there, but hey). They're well-made, tell good stories, have great actors, and are pretty to look at. There are maybe one or two movies that come out each year nowadays that come anywhere close. And the worst part is that if they are good, they're so self-conscious about being A Good Film that it makes it annoying to watch anyway. Those movies were just so effortlessly entertaining. I was just watching Some Like It Hot last night, and I was laughing more than at any new comedy in the past few years, and I must've seen it a dozen times by now. It was such a great balance of humor (and all different kinds of humor), thrills and sexiness. Not to mention Witness For The Prosecution, Casablanca, Double Indemnity, His Girl Friday (this might be from the thirties, that's fine), Roman Holiday, The African Queen, The Waterfront... I could go on and on. Don't get me wrong, I still love movies that are less than sixty years old, but from an objective viewpoint, the quality has just gone down.
Focus: Steve McQueen would have been about 80 by now and he's still cooler than me, you, 90% of men in the world. His movies are just as awesome today as they were 30 years ago.
Any 80's movie that focuses on technology is pretty bad today. Anytime I see green text on a small rounded screen and hear some bee-boop bee-boop and crazy stuff happens, it makes me laugh. This is slightly off topic, but I saw the preview for the new Tron and it looked pretty cool. I haven't seen the original in a very long time and wonder if it is as good now as it was when I was young. Saw Goonies recently and it's just as awesome as it's always been.
Aged Well: Regularly scheduled vagina maintanence Smoking weed. Only cool people do it now. Richard Pryor stand-up. His delivery is still too perfect for words. Sharon Stone Not So Well: Bow Wow-Wow Skinny piano keys ties Knicks fans That thing when hippes put flowers in soldier's gun barrells New York Yankees' disgusting poseur popularity boom Reebok Pumps (actually, FUCK that. they're awesome.)
Except those ones they brought out that needed the compressed air in an obvious grab for more dollars. Fuck you corporate whores.
Focus: Americana, especially old advertisements (the type of shit they go crazy for on American Pickers). It seems like people used to put some artistry into ads, and it blows away the fast-food style new-ad-every-week shit we get now. Anti-Focus: Barack Obama. :-D And also certain sitcoms, like Home Improvement, Saved by the Bell, and Friends. For how massively successful these shows were, they weren't funny. Watching re-runs, the jokes are predictable, unclever, and sometimes jokes people had been telling for years before the episode aired. I think the idea is that when wine goes bad, it turns into vinegar, and while some vinegars are great, it's generally a bad transition. Also, a lot of wines don't age well, and only have a shelf life of a couple years.
Yeah, that. Ask Marsellus Wallace about it. Fuck, I was typing this shit on my iPhone in the middle of the night.