7 ms·

I've found that a lot of "this is the best X ever" is often just hype, but when I watched Casablanca for the first time I was super happy to find out that wasn'

• benbreen 9y ago
  Agreed. It's interesting to me how some cultural products are completely dated and "of their time" when you experience them decades later, whereas others remain timeless. I'm reasonably sure that Casablanca will still be receiving praising like this in the 2210s. Part of what makes it so compelling for me is exactly what the author identifies toward the end -- a lot of the actors in this movie really are WW2 refugees, and you can see it in their performances. It's impossible for me not to cry when I watch the scene in question.
  • cm2187 9y ago
    Another example of these timeless movies I think is Bringing up baby (1938) which is still hilarious.
  • gozur88 9y ago
    I don't see why movies should be any less "classic" than books. A Tale of Two Cities was published in 1859 and is still a classic - why not Casablanca many years after its creation?
    • coldtea 9y ago
      Because books are a more or less mature art (we've been writing for millennia). Movies, on the other hand, can date because of technological changes (silent vs spoken vs color etc), ways of acting (we don't expect modern actors to act in the theatrical way of those in early cinema), different editing techniques (a 70s series like Kojak looks unbearably slow compared to a modern police series), and even what they were allowed to say (movies being more heavily censored than books can look way more quaint the older you go). An overuse of special effects and fast editing since the 80s has also done much to alter the tolerance of modern audiences for subtler movies.
  • rkuykendall-com 9y ago
    Yeah, I watched Breakfast At Tiffany's for the first time yesterday. Parts of that movie aged painfully hard.
• sytelus 9y ago
  Absolutely. All lists such as "Top", "Best", "Greatest" etc are usually bogus. Even assuming that you had a quantitative criteria, you would need to apply that criteria to all movies ever released and has to watch every scene that was in each of those movies. It's a sorting operation across vast number of movies. Even than I would think that any such criteria can not be universal across the cultures, demographics, individual preferences and long enough time spans. A lot of people try to get away with this by measuring aggregate of social signal but one needs to understand that we have heard mentality. Once someone makes "Best" list, more people checks out the items in it and inflate their importance. Crowd sourcing the "sort" operation hasn't worked yet.
  • Retric 9y ago
    The list of good movies is incredibly long, but IMO most are just that good movies are not really in the running for best movie. Take Life Is Beautiful it turned a 20m budget and 10x that at the box office in large part because it's a good movie, but not really 'the best'. Rocky horror picture show is a very different move though again popular, but not really in the running for 'the best movie of all time'. So, while I don't think you can get a definitive list, you could get 7/10 on most peoples top ten lists out of perhaps a few hundred movies though I suspect significantly less than that.
• PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Ditto. I'm not a huge cinema buff, and I was very much expecting Casablanca to feel quaint and stilted, and it really wasn't. It's fantastic.
  • bshimmin 9y ago
    If you're at all interested in something from a similar era that has also aged (in my opinion) extremely well, try _Kind Hearts and Coronets_.
• russellbeattie 9y ago
  What I find fantastic about Casablanca is that while watching it, you sometimes find yourself thinking, "OMG, what a cliche!" (flashbacks, closeups, famous one liners, etc.) only to realize that it's all the movies that came after Casablanca were what made the cliches, this is the original.
  • bshimmin 9y ago
    You might be interested in this essay by Umberto Eco about Casablanca: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/eco.html http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/eco.html I think the author of this article is right that La Marseillaise is the most important scene in the film, but for some reason the line "I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray, you wore blue" affects me the most.
    • sysbell 9y ago
      I'd never read this before -- thank you! Especially liked this bit: >But precisely because all the archetypes are here, precisely because Casablanca cites countless other films, and each actor repeats a part played on other occasions, the resonance of intertextuality plays upon the spectator. Casablanca brings with it, like a trail of perfume, other situations that the viewer brings to bear on it quite readily, taking them without realizing it from films that only appeared later
  • jacobolus 9y ago
    A lot of it was cliché at the time. But sometimes a whole string of clichés is greater than the sum of its parts.
• exodust 9y ago
  Well yes it's still hype. Obviously subjective in many ways. "Greatest" is nothing more than routine clickbait. Casablanca can be a great achievement without needing to call it the greatest, which is an attempt at both ending and starting an argument. Clickbait. It's a shame that article writers can't use a sensible title such as "re-visting Casablanca's greatest scene." or similar. When the subject matter strikes a chord, that's no reason to elevate a scene's achievement relative to other cinematic scenes in other movies unrelated to war.