The Cadillac analogy is so-so. What I was getting at is that no one buys a 1950's caddy because it rides better, accelerates faster, brakes better, or is safer than a modern car. Usually it's bought for the nostalgic value
Grrr. But the cadillac analogy is *far* more broken-backed than you allow.
[rant/]
Achievement in the arts isn't normally much like either technology or athletics/sports (your other original analogy). The normal case in the arts (and other creative endeavors) is that there are landmark achievements that powerfully express and exploit the basic potentials of the medium, and that then make much of what comes after look vaguely imitative or either a trivial variation on or gainsaying of the mighty predecessors. Some cases:
Nobody reads Austen (or goes to Austen films) for nostalgia - rather, most rom coms are just witless variations on Austen anyway, and the original books (and their adaptations) are just flat out better. Normally it's not a close call.
There are new operas written every year but none of them are close to being a patch on Puccini or Wagner, say. It's not nostalgia to think this, it's just facing facts. And as for Bach and Beethoven...
Pop songs are an esp. interesting case. The hits that the generation of Cole Porter and the Gershwins and Irving Berlin and Duke Ellington sent into the charts are staggeringly superior to everything that's come since.... with the qualification that it was Ella Fitz. and Sinatra and so on who *really* figured out how best to arrange and sing those great songs in the late '40s and '50s, in many cases 20 years after the songs were written and originally recorded. Obviously lots of good pop music continues to be written, and new talents emerge all the time, occasionally new golden ages colaesce and new peaks occur, but for the most part melodies and lyrics are pretty infantile these days by comparison. berlin, porter, the gershwins, et al. rest very easy, laughing at all the energy moderns put into being louder and louder...
I mainly read big 19C novels, not out of nostalgia but because they're front to back better than counterpart big novels now.
And 2 converse cases: (a) right now, we're (apparently) living in something like a golden age of tv, esp. in the US. There's always been interesting stuff around, but Mad Men and The Sopranos and The Wire are just flat-out great in a way that's very expressive of one of the basic potentials of the medium and that is qualitatively different from everything that's come before (I guess Twin Peaks was the hesitant start of this modern flourishing of great, ambitious long-form tv.). If anything like TV is around 50 years from now, it's a very good bet that ambitious writers and producers will be feeling anxious that they're not going anywhere or doing anything that hasn't already been done better by someone else around the turn of the 20C. (b) Pixar and Ghibli (Spirited Away, Ponyo, Princess Mononoke, etc.) and Aardman (Wallace and Gromit) films: we appear to be living in a (probably the) golden age of animation.
To summarize: At least to a first approximation, you are right that (i) there's no sense in which a sprinter (or linebacker) from the '50s is as good as Usain Bolt (or the latest steroidal NFL monster) is today - Bolt is the fastest that's ever been, end of story. And (ii) the latest cars are safer, more comfortable, faster etc. than those of 50 years ago.
But that's just to say that creative achievement isn't much like either athletic events or technology. There's a joke in Spinal Tap where someone says:
'I could play "Stairway to Heaven" when I was twelve. Jimmy Page didn't actually write it until he was twenty-two. I think that says quite a lot.'
I could imagine Michael Bay seriously saying something like that about Ford or Hitchcock or Peckinpah!
As for the Ryanmatch's third analogy:
(iii) NbNW is inferior to Casino Royale et al. in something like the way that most beautiful person on Slob Island is uglier than (inferior to) the average current LA/Miami hottie/top o' the world-wide gene pool person.
Seriously why would anyone think that that (insulting) model is the right one? A (less insulting) different/changing taste model would seem to be more appropriate - Island A continues to like its beauties curvy whereas Island B gets into an internal skinniness arms-race. Various other (probably insulting in the other direction) models also present themselves: Refined Island appreciates all sorts of subtleties in music and interesting forms of sexiness whereas the inhabitants of Loud X-rated Island (a) have damaged their hearing, only expose themselves to a handful of chords, don't even hear lyrics any more etc. and are generally insensitive to all of Refined Island's musical nuance ('Yeah, Schubert and Gershwin are OK, but they're no Black-eyed Peas'), and (b) if it's not hard core porn it's not sexy ('I'm sure this was sexy in its day, but in our world of constant nudity and explicitness etc. this stuff doesn't even count as sexy').
Lastly, the beauty analogy is additionally irksome because thinking literally/non-analogically about beauty, one thing most people really *do* get out of '30's-50's hollywood films is the overall sense of an upgrade in beauty (shading into grace/movement quality, things like that). There *aren't* males stars as good-looking and so on as Grant and Peck these days, and the Kelly/Taylor/Novak/A.Hepburn/Charisse/Marie Sainte (maybe extending a few more years to Deneuve) generation or so of female stars is some sort of freak of nature/culture. The upshot is that those older films in fact tend to be a sensual experience that recent films can't touch (and, to be fair, aren't that interested in touching) - relatively literally, *we're* the one's on slob island (jessica alba checks grace kelly's coat, matt damon parks cary grant's car, etc.)
And something similar, though not as dramatic, is true when we literalize the technology analogy. The technological side of film *has* seen some undeniable changes and improvements that give directors today *lots* of options that Hitch didn't have - e.g., very small cameras that you can shoot in v. tight spaces with, steadicam mounts, cameras that can survive impacts (allowing for today's ultra-kinetic car crash scenes for example), and so on (One wonders what hitch would have done with this tech in something like the same way that one wonders what Bach would do with a modern recording studio. 'Blow our minds' is almost certainly the answer in both cases.) But it's also true that at the end of studio system there was incredible in-house craft on costumes, sets, music, and the like, that had been built up, which was later allowed to degrade and has that's since been largely lost. That's a huge technological loss for current film: today's directors *wish* they had Hitch's options for sets, costumes, etc.. And, famously, there was a real push towards high-quality images using 65mm+ films on prestige flicks like NbNW, the Searchers, Vertigo, Funny Face, Lawrence of Arabia and so on. Those processes were v. expensive and were abandoned as the big studio systems collapsed in the '60s. Technology that actually got used in making films went backward for 30-40 years! We've in fact only *just recently* started to get films again with the image quality that Hitchcock, Ford, Lean, Donen and others got. Thus, even on a narrowly technological view, films like NbNW have significant/surprising strengths with respect to most later films.
[/rant]
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gnolti
14 years ago
If we were to adopt the OP's standard of evaluating film quality, there would be no point in watching films, because one day ALL films will be dated or in some way coming up short compared to the most up-to-date releases. It's the new car/used car theory of films -- once you drive it off the lot, it loses value. Unless you only plan on watching new releases the rest of your life, that's an unsustainable philosophy in the long run.
There, daddy, do I get a gold star?
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swanstep
14 years ago
Aintitcoolnews has a test-screening review of Knight and Day (the cruise/diaz summer vehicle) up. Link here: http://www.aintitcool.com/node/45075
According to that review the flick involves a mistaken identity for Diaz and Cruise has a maguffin that everybody wants. The review then continues:
The rest of the film is a bit like a cross between “North by Northwest” and “From Paris with Love”. Now, I reference the first film because it’s obvious that director James Mangold was heavily influenced by Hitchcock here, and this film is similar in many ways to that film, except that Diaz would be the Cary Grant character. There’s even a direct homage, and reference, to “The Lady Vanishes”. I’m referencing “From Paris With Love” because [unlike NbNW] we don’t get a lot of breaks here. Just when things start to simmer down, Cruise pops up and before you know it, guns are blazing
The other point of interst to me from the review was the following:
I’ll preface the film review by stating that, as this was a test screening, a lot of the effects work wasn’t completed. This film has loads of green screen work, and much of it was still in an unfinished state. Same goes for some of the larger set pieces requiring CGI, some of which were simply animatics or crude wireframe designs. But you got the gist of what the scenes were about, so it didn’t completely detract from the viewing experience. But it did shine a light on just how much is done on a sound stage these days.
I intellectually know that this is true nowadays, but it's still remarkable that even a pretty straightforward action-comedy directed by an established director with classical, narrative leanings is massively post-produced these days.
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PillowRock
14 years ago
And, famously, there was a real push towards high-quality images using 65mm+ films on prestige flicks <snip> Thus, even on a narrowly technological view, films like NbNW have significant/surprising strengths with respect to most later films.
Of course, how well one can see / discern that difference can be very dependent upon the viewing medium.
On standard def TV and DVD, you really can't see much difference. Even on HDTV and BluRay the difference can be pretty minimal, because the newer movies now are designed specifically to support that exact resolution in all of their digital effects and such.
But .....
If you ever get to see a 70mm print of one of those films projected on a big screen ...... Then that difference fairly leaps off the screen. I once saw a screening (on a *really* BIG screen) of a 70mm print of
Lawrence of Arabia, and that is entirely different movie than seeing
lawrence of arabia on DVD.
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swanstep
14 years ago
Of course, how well one can see / discern that difference can be very dependent upon the viewing medium.
I agree that on one level watching anything on a small home-screen/laptop (the latter's where I watch a lot of stuff these days I confess!) neutralizes a lot of the advantage that the 2001/Lawrence/NbNW/Searchers had... but not quite all. The color depth in the VistaVision films in particular is utterly extraordinary and the sheer no grain/amount of clear detail in the frame in CinemaScope things like 2001 and Lawrence still comes through even when watched massively sub-optimally.
Anyhow, I don't want to harp on about this sort of tech stuff... tech changes and moves on. The large-format films, like true Imax today, were always a fairly elite form. Small towns could never support movie palaces with large-format projectors... and in some respects I really love the graininess of '70s films in particular. And talented cinematographers and directors always work with whatever film stocks and processes are available to kind of get the optimal impact. Hitch's films still looked great after he left large-formats behind after NbNW.
I only mentioned this whole side of things because it's a nice example of how technical change in films isn't completely progressive: lots gets added over time, but other things are lost. It's a good bet, for example, that over the next 20 years crucial on-location shooting skill-sets will degrade severely as more and more people get trained just on soundstage shoots/digital backdrops. Even though its only a small aspect of the pleasure involved, I think it's obvious that some of the special fondness that a lot of us have for films like NbNW/Searchers/2001 etc. stems from their narrowly technical triumphs - they were something out of the ordinary when they were made, and since the ability to shoot in these extraordinary formats that make them look so fantastic disappeared soon after they were made, they still wow us today.
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