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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
by 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 agoAnother example of these timeless movies I think is Bringing up baby (1938) which is still hilarious.
- gozur88 9y agoI 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 agoBecause 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 agoYeah, I watched Breakfast At Tiffany's for the first time yesterday. Parts of that movie aged painfully hard.