Old Movies

You know how you expand the boundaries of anything, be it physical territory or your own mind? By exploring.

I don't agree with calling a film boring and brilliant at the same time. If it bored you, don't call it brilliant. Yeah, Tree of Life is slow, but the majestic nature of the film should of been enough to keep you from being bored. Sounds to me like you didn't like it at all, and rather just feel like you should like it.

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I just got the DVD in yesterday, watching it tonight.

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I view entertainment as just one of many aspects that a film should be judged on. I felt that the actual narrative of the film was disengaging and registered exceptionally low marks in terms of pure entertainment value. However, it was that majestic, entrancing quality of the film that I found incredibly worthwhile: the ultimate visual extension of the Soviet Montage. Its direction was brilliance incarnate: inspired, ambitious and utterly flawless. The lack of an engaging narrative was what made it boring for me to watch.

So while admittedly a bit paradoxical, I feel that brilliance can coexist with non-enjoyment.

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Sorry to pile on, but this has to be one of the most ridiculous and narrow-minded things I've read in a while. We endeavor to be inclusive, but I'm really struggling to figure out exactly why you're here.

I think that its harder for me to appreciate newer movies than old ones, simply because i don't have the same "relationship" towards them, as i have with movies i have seen several times.

The distinction between old and new movies seems kind of flat. A discussion between genre / plot driven movies and art movies seems more interesting imo.

Nonetheless i does not matter that much for me whether a movie old or not. It's more about whether its intriguing, evokes a feeling in me etc.

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I'm not sure. I think a lot of people tend to differentiate too much between appreciation and entertainment. Would you say you were bored whilst also entranced by the visuals; the themes? Whilst all those thoughts and ideas the film is provoking are rattling around in your brain? Boredom is simply disinterest after all, and I know I'm certainly not disinterested watching a film in which compelling ideas or majestic visuals happen to take precedence over narrative. They can easily be enough to keep me "entertained" (i.e. not bored).

I think its a good quality to be able to appreciate a film while it doesn't entertain you. Though it probably wouldn't score very high in an immediate evaluation / rating.

If I remember correctly, the score for the DVD is rather obnoxious, there are much better ones out there that don't distract from the genius

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I only read the first three pages of this thread, so if this POV has been expressed, please forgive me.


I'm a child of the 70s, and I cut my musical teeth on Aero, Queen. Nugent, Zep, Boston, Bad Company, Grand Funk, BTO, REO, ELO, Skynyrd, Foreigner, KISS, Eagles, Elton, etc, etc.

I was on the front lines during the war on disco. The war on anything that wasn't considered rock, really.

When I got into my 20s, I started hearing things that I couldn't help but like, even though it *GASP* wasn't rock.

Lo and behold, when I finally said, "You know what? Rock or not, I like this", my musical world got HUGE.

Now, at almost 50, I have music from more genres than I can count. I listened to Shinedown yesterday, out running errands, and George Strait while washing the car.

Listened to an 80s mix playlist while working on the model I'm building. And as I'm typing this, I'm grooving to The Count Basie Orchestra, The ABC Collection.

That covers a span of 60-70 years in music.

My point is, if you're gonna have a hard time accepting something, anything, don't do it because of a premise as inconsequential as the age of it.

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Perhaps boring was the wrong choice of words for me to choose to describe The Tree of Life. I found the film to was very intellectually engaging. I found the overall presentation of the film to be extremely interesting; the contrast between the visuals and the minutiae of the family narrative is the natural extension of the aesthetic that I tend to value in art: similar to the natural beauty of the sunflowers contrasted against the carnage of the murders in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or in Simon and Garfunkle's rendition of Silent Night. It is in this sense that I call the film brilliant.

Its failing is that the film is narratively disengaging. Divorced from the contrast between visuals and narrative, the "story proper" was not entertaining. Extreme visuality and intellectual depth completely carried the film for me, not story of a dysfunctional Texan family.

I personally believe that the overall quality of a film lies at a point of intersection between intellectual appreciation and narrative appreciation. While there is often a strong, positive correlation between the two (in my experience), there are a few extreme cases where one his extremely high and the other is extremely low. One one hand, The Tree of Life has an exceedingly high level of intellectual appreciation and an equally low level of narrative appreciation. On the other hand, Sharknado has an extremely high narrative appreciation value, but is utterly bereft of any intellectually appreciative qualities.

Most of this is a question of semantics and unintended meaning. Someone who says, "I think this movie is good" probably means more along the lines of "I liked this movie." A distinction needs to be made between evaluation and opinion.

Opinions can be liking or disliking a movie for whatever reason, and it doesn't even need to be justified. Opinion, however, says nothing about the quality or merits of a film since like and dislike have to do with many external factors and can very easily not reflect the value of a film.

Evaluation is more challenging and deals much more closely with the specific elements of the film itself. Evaluation is all about understanding what the film is about, what specific cinematic, performance, narrative, pictoral etc. tools it is employing, and to what effect. Perhaps the most important trait of evaluation is proof! Without any proof of the legitimacy of your claims, evaluation might as well be opinion.

Evaluation and opinion are not easily separable, but they are in principal. I think that Battleship Potemkin is a technical wonder, with intelligent montage and pioneering technique and craft, but it's such a bore to watch and I probably won't watch it again. It's important to establish what context you're using in talking about a film to avoid logical gaps and make your point as clear as possible

I rather liked the score.

Interesting, though i don't understand the bold part. Is it whether you evaluate or have an opinion?

Though i think it's a hard, if not impossible, to give an "objective" evaluation of a movie. Without knowing to much about film criticism and the sorts, i would say that your'e being subjective just by choosing your approach to how you analyze / evaluate the movie.

I am not so sure about asserting myself to a specific standpoint with my limited knowledge...

I have studied history so i am more at home in that context. If / when you choose a subject for historical research you also choose a method / theoretical background for your analysis. By doing that you are already choosing a standpoint within a wide range of traditions on how to "evaluate" / analyze.

Im not so good at expressing myself in English so i hope you get my drift...

BTW. Battleship Potemkin has a very special part in my heart. We screened it at our first underground arts and music festival at local cinema with music be a well known danish artist called Peter Peter (Sods, Sort Sol, The Bleeder Group).

The point I was getting at is that in casual contexts, like this forum, something that typically causes arguments is asserting an evaluative statement ("this movie is the greatest of all time") into an opinion ("because I really like it"). It's what got part of the whole AdamHanks debacle started. He claimed that The Matrix was the greatest movie of all time. It's probably his favorite movie, and he might think it is the best of all time, but he provided no proof or logic behind that, making it an opinion, which would be fine if he didn't present it as an evaluation, which caused the trouble. I don't think anyone would've cared if he said it was his favorite film.

There are a lot of technical aspects of films that can be mostly objective. Innovation in camerawork, performance, lighting, editing etc. as well as broad trends of filmmaking can all be reasonably objective. The subjective part comes in when relating it back to the context of the films. It's unavoidable, I think, but not too much of a concern if the subjective is grounded in a lot of objective analysis.

That sounds like a cool enough reason to like it to me!

try watching double indemnity with Barbara stanwyck or mildred pierce with joan crawford

I think the one film that can truly absorb both those who hate old films (like I did before I first saw it) and those who love them is 12 Angry Men. Seriously, immortal film that will pretty much appeal to everyone. Give it a try if you haven't, hopefully it'll change your view like it did for me.

There's good stuff and bad stuff in every era. The more I spread my taste around the more I realize is out there. This can apply to music, movies or anything else in life. In my case, I've always had broad taste in movies, but only recently did I come to appreciate some of the greats of the silent era. It's quite an adjustment to really appreciate these movies on their own terms rather than as an antique novelty. Once I learned the "language" of silent movies, I realized just how much some of these flix impacted subsequent film. Broader is better!