Too late

Sorry, you came too late to appreciate this movie.

After so many rip-offs and parodies, you can't take old james bond movies seriously. Or slasher movies. Or monster movies. Or "no we cannot kill it think of what its capture means for science" or "who cares about safety, do you realize how much profit is at stake with this celebration ?". It would have worked the first time, but now it's just a tiresome, outdated trope.

After advancements in cultural understanding, and the boom of international communications, you just can't stand the cringe of old representations of otherness or minorities. Black people aren't inherently threatening, Asians aren't mysterious and mystical, homosexuality isn't intrinsically funny, and tribal natives, be it in the jungle or in the far west, just wouldn't be animal-like savages to eradicate or civilize. Also, these 19 years old leading ladies falling for the 65 years old male lead are just creepy. It would have engaged you at the time, now it's just obsolete at best.

And after Airplane, Police Squad, Naked Gun, no way you can take Leslie Nielsen seriously in a movie. The more serious he looks, the more he makes you laugh. You should have watched Forbidden Planet first. Now, it's simply too late.

And too late for flying saucers. Too late for the big flashy buttons and levers that control them. And these jerky stop-motion animations ? These rubber suit ? They don't scare you anymore, no matter how frightening the trailer claims them to be. Too late, your suspension of disbelief now require the strings to be digitally erased. And the aliens to come from outside our solar system.

Also, a pie in the face doesn't make a movie hilarious. Or does it ? (No it doesn't.)

So, do you manage to teleport your mind back in time, and appreciate a film as you would have at its time of release ? Does it depend on the aspect that has aged (techniques and morality aren't the same thing) ? Do you feel regrets for not managing to get into a movie because of timing ? Or pride of belonging to more advanced times ? Or existential terror at the thought of you own programmed obsolescence ?

What do you actually feel you're born too late to appreciate, what feels fair or unfair about it, and what, on the contrary, do you appreciate all the more with the added poetry of that cultural distance ? What about old old old movies nags you, infuriates you or endears them to you ?

I think it helps to approach films with an understanding of their original context, so that you can see how certain tropes might have worked even if the passage of time may have diluted their effectiveness in later works. I find dismissing movies for "outdated" plot or stylistic elements to be a pretty lazy way to approach them.



That being said, I think a good movie will hold up for its execution, not just the presence of certain tropes (i.e. there are a billion movies now that use the same narrative template as Aliens, but most aren't as well made as Cameron's movie).


I also appreciate that offensive portrayals of other groups aren't equivalent to plot cliches, and can appreciate if someone is bothered by them even if they were common in the movie's original context.

To me trends and timelines are meaningless when watching movies, i try to watch every movie as if i were a child. Of course, repetitions of certain themes are going to bore anyone, and now adays we are all too woke to take portrayals of certain peoples too seriously.

I agree with this very much, and it's something I usually talk about in the context of classic films: we get a lot of people who see classic films many decades after their release, and are understandably overwhelmed, because they have absorbed so much of them through cultural osmosis, from other lesser films imitating them.

I think that's one area where actual Criticism (note the slightly pretentious capitalization) is necessary, beyond a simple reaction as a viewer: it may be true that you weren't impressed by a classic, but it can be instructive, and fairer to the art, to at least try to parse out its influence and contribution by considering how you might have reacted if you had seen it first, before all the things it influenced. If you don't do this, your supposed "taste" in film will be disproportionately weighted not towards interesting or inventive films, but simply which films you happened to see in which order.

Change that question to: What do you actually feel you're born too early to appreciate? My answer then would be, the Woke culture, I don't appreciate it at all

A million thumbs up for that post
I find dismissing old movies as 'outdated' to be a form of Temporal-ism. It's cool if people don't like old movies but saying they're outdated is like going to an art museum and calling an old painting, 'outdated'.

I see the point of the thread, I do. Can’t say I agree. I have been just about as over-exposed to entertainment/popular culture as can be since I was a toddler, and it’s never prevented me from appreciating anything or, for that matter, seeing films with “fresh eyes”, oxymoronic as that sounds. I think the issue overlaps quite a lot with the spoilers thread, it’s up to the consumer to want to appreciate something and look past the “cringeworthy” dated moment or whatever, or not.

I remember very well that I first saw Psycho when I was 16 and it was a classic and old by then, obviously, and despite having been brought up on horror, I thought it was scary, in that loose sense that the shower jump scare kind of worked, and especially the . So I’m afraid I don’t dig the premise.

I think any element of a film, when made well enough, can transmit that energy and excitement of creation well past their 'best before' date. For example, I don't think there is a single gag in a Marx Brothers film that hasn't been rehashed a hundred thousand times by now. And yet, even when I finally came to their films in my late twenties, having already had all of their punchlines spoiled by the many many poor and half decent imitations over the years, I found them to be the rare movie that actually was able to consistently make me laugh. I could sense the fire and the mischief of those jokes as if they had just been written, because there was just something deviously alive in Groucho's eyes, and the balletic movement of Harpo, and the....um...ethnic stereotypes of Chico.


I think the same can be said for a lot of the out of fashion looks of older science fiction movies. Sure, we know this isn't what the future is like. But by that same token, it now allows us to view the imagination of how the past imagined the future in a completely different light.


That said, I do wish I could have been at ground zero for the shower scene in Psycho. While I think it is still a monumentally effective scene (again, no matter how many times it has been copped from), I think its initial effect of almost betraying the audience with the level of the violence, and the unexpectedness of its target, is almost unimaginable now beyond just understanding it theoretically.



As for offensive moments (racist, sexist and homophobic elements that were considered acceptable at the time of the film being made), while I'm not here to tell anyone they shouldn't be put off by what they are put off by (we all have our limits as to what can emotionally take us out of a film), as long as we are able to acknowledge what is wrong about them, and don't let the stereotypes and typecasting and prejudices they peddle seep into our own brains, I personally couldn't care less. I see nothing wrong about them existing as evidence of why we should be embarassed about our past, and at their best, their problematic elements can be used as teachable moments for both us and future generations. As long as they are seen clearly enough for us to challenge them, I see almost no issue with them being put out there to be discussed/taught/enjoyed. Personally, I think we can probably learn a lot more about the mechanics and harm of racism from the obviously deplorable Birth of a Nation, than we ever will from well intentioned drivel like Green Book.

There are two levels there. There's the intellectual caution about cultural re-contextualization, judging a work through a given epoch's expectations, which is some sort of requited methodology for fair assessments and critique (and requires some interest, curiosity, knowledge, flexibility, etc).

And there's the level of visceral enjoyment, the emotional involvement. That's quite different. It can, itself, be divided in two or three paths. The appreciation of a work the way it was meant to be appreciated (being genuinely unsettled by Murnau's Nosferatu, fascinated by Lumet's 12 Angry Men, by Casablanca or The Third Man, etc). Or, through a different angle, some sort of condescending forgiveness (finding it cheesy but endearing, fully getting "what it went for" and respecting it intellectually but without any emotional involvement, or giggling at outdated aspects without condemning the whole : it's, indeed, akin to the paternalist view on a child's schoolplay, and can touch technical aspects -flawed effects- or ideological aspects -regrettable worldviews-).

Still, the limit of these emotional involvements interest me. As a kid, I loved James Bond movies - I still do, but now my joy at them is now sometimes very condescending, with a playful irony towards some aspects. I love old monster movies, but most often the poetry I see in Harryhausen models animations is different from the (supposed) gasping awe of their original public. It's like I'm watching it over their shoulders, moved by the whole spectacle+public unit. I'm happy when I can be directly thrilled by Jason's combat versus the skeletons, but most of times, I find it charming, which is very different, and quite off.

So, I do feel the regret of not being able to appreciate all the scenes through the emotion they are meant to elicit. My respect is too often detached, or its object is not exactly the intended one.

I also dislike easy irony towards outdated or clumsy movies. I (almost) never watch films in the MST3K perspective, that I find cheap and pointless. I give a chance to movies by watching them in their expected mindset. But the fact is, it sometimes feel like roleplaying, playing along, playing pretend (what would its intended public feel) more than genuinely feeling it. It's, again, required by fairness. But there's still a barrier that isn't overcome. That's what I call the "too late".

And I'm curious about its threshold in other people.


(And yes, the same can go for paintings in museums. Beyond their qualities, there are often codes and customs that make me giggle, that seem futile in cultural retrospect. For instance the tradition of inserting weird little white dogs in aristocratic scenes, or the tradition of painting the important characters bigger than the others, or the religious constraints, etc... a lot of style-dependant conventions that can be understood, yet create a distance).