Do movies ''age'' or not?

One film that is now over 80 years old but holds up beautifully today is the 1938 Errol Flynn "Adventures Of Robin Hood". No other version has come near matching it. And it is still of the most visually gorgeous films ever made. It is one of the few GOlden age films that the current generation of movie goers has fully embraced.

All films age because society ages. The more 'modern' a film tries to be, the more it ages whereas I think historical dramas hold up better.

'Aged poorly' is the same as dated and this is definitely a thing. Take for example Sixteen Candles and Back to The Future- the first is incredibly dated and certain scenes are just vile and icky (I don't know to what extent they would have been considered so at the time. Yes, the latter is a better film anyway but it's made in the same time period, it has all the opportunities for the same pitfalls and yet it doesn't feel dated. It feels 80s but in a nostalgic way and a way that appeals to different generations.

To be honest, it tends to be films that aren't actually that old that feel most dated. Love Actually is less than 20 years old but has not dated well at all. This might be because we don't see it as a historical era in the way that we would do from a film in the 50s. We can't just shrug things off and say 'that's how things were in the old days'.

All the philosophizing aside, what irks me is people saying they wouldn't watch a film because it's old. And yet people never say that about music or books.

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Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

Sigh.


Fine! I won't watch a music because it's old.


Happy now?

Stop acting like you never watched a concert!

In some cases, yes. Modern films which feature outdates racial, ethnic, and gender terms, for instance, can be seen as dated. Though those words were thought of as proper in the past and can be excused for being in older films (or films set in the past) if they were the only terms on the subject to exist back then, if a recent film set in modern times did that, you could technically call it dated. And, of course, cgi can be dated.

For the most part though, no. I think the idea of many films (whether they're period pieces or were simply made a number of years ago) are to be windows into the past, and to accomplish this, they'll typically feature older clothing, language, hairstyles, etc. I don't think these kinds of things make films dated though. Rather, since they're capturing the spirit of whatever time period they come from or were made in, they're actually emblematic of their time periods. Really, I wouldn't call a film which feels emblematic of the 1970s dated any more than a film set in the Middle Ages.

So yeah, while I don't think this criticism is always invalid, I think it's all too often used as a misguided attempt to dismiss any old film.

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Some like wine,
Some like cheese

Do movies age?
It's not a content issue.
It's not a intent issue.
It's a perception issue.

It does annoy me when people won't watch an old film, or anything black in white. To be fair, plenty of people don't read old books, apart from maybe a few classics, and whilst people may not actively seek out old music, they wouldn't actively go out of their way to avoid it in the way that they do for old films (I wonder if some younger people could even tell how old a song was just by the sound).