posted
I gotta agree here. It's not like all you old farts respected "A Street Car Named Desire" and "Vertigo" when they were 20 years old, and Tremors is nearly that, while War Games is like 26 years old.
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I'm 22, and for me classic means the Howard Hawkes version of Scarface, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Gone With the Wind, Nosferatu, Frank Capra films, Tokyo Story, City Lights, things like that...
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I agree with 0megabyte. Classic means classic. The films Blayne listed are more nostalgic for someone in their low 20s (I'm 23, I love Wargames, but would never call it classic).
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quote:Originally posted by The White Whale: I agree with 0megabyte. Classic means classic.
Whatever. Is means is. Explain that to me.
I think what he was trying to say is that Classic has a colloquial meaning as well as a literal one. Blayne (sneakily) tried to change its meaning. We caught him.
Classic means Classic.
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quote: classic |ˈklasik| adjective judged over a period of time to be of the highest quality and outstanding of its kind : a classic novel | a classic car.
noun 1 a work of art of recognized and established value : his books have become classics. • a garment of a simple, elegant, and long-lasting style. • a thing that is memorable and a very good example of its kind : he's hoping that tomorrow's game will be a classic.
USAGE Traditionally, classic means 'typical, excellent as an example, timeless,' and classical means 'of (esp. Greek or Roman) antiquity.' Thus:: John Ford directed many classic Westerns; the museum was built in the classical style. Great art is considered classic, not classical, unless it is created in the forms of antiquity. | Classical music is formal and sophisticated music adhering to certain stylistic principles, esp. those of the late 18th century, but | a classic folk song is one that well expresses its culture. A | classical education exposes a student to | classical literature, history, and languages (esp. Latin and Greek), but the study of Greek and Latin languages and their literatures is also referred to as | classics, as in | he majored in classics at college.
The actual value of that length of time is not mentioned. It's relative. It's subjective. By dint of not being right (but thinking you are) you are wrong.
Verdict: you fail definitions forever. Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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Yes. If I tell you that I was having a Classic Movie night, and you were invited, you would come expecting 'Lawrence of Arabia' or 'Casablanca' or 'Duck Soup,' and certainly not 'Wargames' or 'Tremors Return.'
If I were to tell you that we were having a Nostalgic Movie night, you would come and (knowing my age) expect 'Fern Gully' or 'Fievel Goes West.'
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No I'd probably ask you what you meant. A commonly accepted terminology doesn't establish cultural consensus- in fact commonly accepted terminologies reflect very current cultural attitudes, which are not necessarily those that will hold sway in the long term, and are not easily applied to individuals, especially considering that few individuals are familiar with any proposed cannon of classic film, much less any other genre of popular art.
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quote:Originally posted by The White Whale: If I were to tell you that we were having a Nostalgic Movie night, you would come and (knowing my age) expect 'Fern Gully' or 'Fievel Goes West.'
Those movies are not particularly popular, and many would argue they are not particularly good. I believe Blayne is arguing that these movies he mentions are genuinely good films. I don't necessarily agree, but I disagree with the narrow view you presented.
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The Seventh Cross, very surprising movie about 1937 Germany, especially seeing as it was made in America circa 1944.
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How about this? You go to a videostore and walk up to their Classic Movies section. What do you expect to see?
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If this hadn't been a Blayne thread, I would have anticipated a Hatrack classic movie night to have included Logans Run, Blade Runner, Star Wars, Soylent Green, Tron, maybe Star Trek... Posts: 4515 | Registered: Jul 2004
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That list is golden, Blayne. Sure, Orincoro's semantic argument is correct as far as the meaning of the word "classic", but the idea that the Tremors series fits into any definition of the word...*shakes head*
A good reminder that beauty is in the eye of the bee holder.
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I'm not an "old fart" and I consider classics to be films over twenty-five or thirty years old that are generally acknowledged to be great by a large chunk of the population. The more intelligent the movie, the younger it can be. For example, an intelligent thought-provoking from 1986 beats out a film like Back to the Future, which I wouldn't class as classic yet but could definitely gain classic status somewhere down the line.
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quote:Originally posted by malanthrop: Event Horizon is a great movie.
You are dead to me.
quote:Originallyu posted by The White Whale: How about this? You go to a videostore and walk up to their Classic Movies section. What do you expect to see?
Bah, I gave up doing that ever since the "oldies" station started playing music that came out while I was alive.
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade:
quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: Also have Event Horizon which im told is essentially a fan Warhammer 40,000 movie, its 100% compatible.
I am having trouble putting my finger on just where Warhammer 40k and Event Horizon intersect beyond both involving space.
BTW Event Horizon is a stupid movie.
Do you know any of the War40k lore? Basically everything said about Hyperspace travel in Event Horizon is 100% compatible with whats known about 40k travel through the warp ie hyperspace being Hell more or less, that and a few other things.
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Every time I think of "Event Horizon", I think of my addition to one of the lines from the trailer: "It's the Event Horizon... It was a scientific breakthrough. They designed a ship entirely out of spikes."
Nostalgia you can get from any movie, I'll grant. And there are certainly movies in the last twenty years that I'd put up against any of the black and white era in terms of quality. But when you bring in the term "classic", I tend to envision movies that were made in the 60's, tops. The 70's are starting to edge in.
And I'll note that I seem to be blasphemous in my feeling that Casablanca hasn't really withstood the test of time that well, but perhaps I had excessive expectations the first time I actually saw it (as opposed to the four minutes or so that get shown in clips on television over and over.)
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quote:Originally posted by The White Whale: How about this? You go to a videostore and walk up to their Classic Movies section. What do you expect to see?
How about I rephrase the exact same statement I just made and see if that flies... no.
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quote:...Three or four times a year, when a classic movie is re-released in a restored version, I'll write something about it...
quote:...I've begun a new bi-weekly feature called ``The Great Movies,'' in which I review a classic from years past...
quote:...If I revisit a classic I've written about previously (for I must include titles like ``Citizen Kane,'' ``The Third Man,'' ``La Dolce Vita,'' ``Psycho,'' ``The Godfather,'' ``Apocalypse Now,'' ``Raging Bull'' and ``E.T.''), I will make a fresh start, a new evaluation, and not recycle my words from the past...
You look under 'T' in almost any classic movies list, such as the one at ClassicMovies.org. You find 'Taxi Driver,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird', and 'The Third Man.' Not surprisingly, you do not find 'Tremors.'
These are what classic movies are. You watch the movies that are talked about 50 or 100 years later, and you call them Classics. I doubt 'Tremors' would be classified as a classic in the year 2050.
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quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: Also have Event Horizon which im told is essentially a fan Warhammer 40,000 movie, its 100% compatible.
I am having trouble putting my finger on just where Warhammer 40k and Event Horizon intersect beyond both involving space.
BTW Event Horizon is a stupid movie.
Do you know any of the War40k lore? Basically everything said about Hyperspace travel in Event Horizon is 100% compatible with whats known about 40k travel through the warp ie hyperspace being Hell more or less, that and a few other things.
No I did not know about hyperspace being hell in Warhammer 40k.
Did you perhaps glean the idea from tvtropes?
"In Event Horizon, the experimental hyperdrive on the titular ship takes it to a dimension of "chaos and evil", according to one of the people who winds up spending a short while there, which is effectively "hell." What's worse, something comes back to our world. Very Lovecraftian. It's a recurring joke among some Warhammer 40K fans that Event Horizon takes place in the same universe."
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I haven't seen Event Horizon but I've read the Eisenhorn Trilogy (very good books, by the way. In particular how the entire society operates under a completely different morality from ours, leaving you free to judge the characters however you want and glean whatever moral you want rather than having the main character say at the end "oh, well clearly today I learned this and if you were paying attention you should have too."
Anyways yeah, the notion of the Warp and how risky/evil it is prevalent throughout the entire story.
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I happen to own the entire tremors saga, and that is simply because I happen to enjoy watching and laughing terrible movies. There is nothing remotely classic about them.
Event Horizon was an awful movie. It was the type of awful movie that I cannot watch for the purpose of laughing at it. It was just bad.
For the record, I would say that Back to the Future will probably have classic status in the future (forgive me). It is held up as one of the gold standards in screenwriting, if you are into that sort of thing.
Wargames is nostalgic, not classic, and the same goes for Logan's Run.
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quote:...Three or four times a year, when a classic movie is re-released in a restored version, I'll write something about it...
quote:...I've begun a new bi-weekly feature called ``The Great Movies,'' in which I review a classic from years past...
quote:...If I revisit a classic I've written about previously (for I must include titles like ``Citizen Kane,'' ``The Third Man,'' ``La Dolce Vita,'' ``Psycho,'' ``The Godfather,'' ``Apocalypse Now,'' ``Raging Bull'' and ``E.T.''), I will make a fresh start, a new evaluation, and not recycle my words from the past...
You look under 'T' in almost any classic movies list, such as the one at ClassicMovies.org. You find 'Taxi Driver,' 'To Kill a Mockingbird', and 'The Third Man.' Not surprisingly, you do not find 'Tremors.'
These are what classic movies are. You watch the movies that are talked about 50 or 100 years later, and you call them Classics. I doubt 'Tremors' would be classified as a classic in the year 2050.
Been busy, missed this before.
Look, restating the same premise over and over again doesn't make it more right. I responded to this point in my first post, and I'm not going to keep responding to it after this one. The commonly accepted status of "classic" is not relevant when a person expresses his own opinion. Further, the commercial utilization of "classic" status is not the criteria by which you or anyone ought to judge the worth of a film, or even the notion that it really is a classic in your opinion. The belief that such a standard or cannon exists has led you to this current misunderstanding, and that is not anyone's fault but yours, really. Just think of all the great films and pieces of art you haven't experienced or seen, or even heard about, and try forming an argument under which your lack of awareness of them means they *aren't* classics. It never works- trying to establish rules for this kind of thing is a fools errand.
In short, the narrow view will almost always miss more than it filters out, and yours is the narrow view.
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quote:Just think of all the great films and pieces of art you haven't experienced or seen, or even heard about, and try forming an argument under which your lack of awareness of them means they *aren't* classics.
I have never stated that the only movies worth watching are classics. I stated just here that I love Wargames. But of all of the thousands of movies that have been made over the past century, most of them are garbage. When one is unique, or really good, or exemplifies something in its genre, it becomes a classic and it is a good bet that it will be a good movie to watch. To get classic status, it has to be well liked by many people. Why trudge through hundreds of bad movies to find the good ones, when there is a whole category that contains many of the good ones? To date, I have been very pleased with the classics that I have watched.
It is also a good guide to exploring movies in general. Not all of Herzog's movies are considered classics, but I love watching anything that man has done. Same with Kurosawa. Or Bergman.
You misunderstand me when you claim that I use classics as a filter. I use it as a starting point.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: Look, restating the same premise over and over again doesn't make it more right. I responded to this point in my first post, and I'm not going to keep responding to it after this one. The commonly accepted status of "classic" is not relevant when a person expresses his own opinion. Further, the commercial utilization of "classic" status is not the criteria by which you or anyone ought to judge the worth of a film, or even the notion that it really is a classic in your opinion. The belief that such a standard or cannon exists has led you to this current misunderstanding, and that is not anyone's fault but yours, really. Just think of all the great films and pieces of art you haven't experienced or seen, or even heard about, and try forming an argument under which your lack of awareness of them means they *aren't* classics. It never works- trying to establish rules for this kind of thing is a fools errand.
In short, the narrow view will almost always miss more than it filters out, and yours is the narrow view.
You seem to side with Humpty Dumpty when he says,
quote:"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone,
"it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less."
And while I suppose there is much truth in that, its a truth which presumes the speaker has no responsibility for communicating with others.
A good communicator chooses words to mean what their audience commonly accept they mean because that gives them the greatest chance of being clearly understood.
Quite frankly I have no idea what Blayne meant when he called that list of movies classics. Was he trying to say these movies should be in the classic movie section of the store? Was he saying that these are movies critics will still be talking about 50 years from now? Was he saying these movies will some day be recognize for their greatness? Was he trying to redefine what the word classic means? Was he arguing that these movies don't get the appreciation they deserve? Was he just letting us know he'd been watching a bunch of older B grade movies or was he trying to tell us what kind of movies he likes?
If you know, you are way ahead of me because Blayne's statement could mean any of those. For at least half of those possibilities, talking about what is meant by "classic" and what qualities a "classic" movie should possess are fully relevant.
Popping in to tell us that the commonly accepted meaning of words is irrelevant, says nothing more than that you feel communication is irrelevant (or perhaps communication with Blayne is irrelevant, or communication on this subject is irrelevant). Agreeing on a definition of what words mean is an important starting point for any discussion. Without that, people simply end up talking past each other and no real communication occurs.
[ September 12, 2009, 05:31 PM: Message edited by: The Rabbit ]
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"A good communicator chooses words to mean what their audience commonly accept they mean because that gives them the greatest chance of being clearly understood."
Yes, agreed. I think, however, that the "commonly accepted" moniker is being misused. Classic means more than that, and we should be careful not to limit our means of expression by only employing vocabulary in ways that are considered acceptable by, for instance, the media. My point was that the word "classic" had been commercialized to the extent that the commercial classic departs significantly from other valid uses.
I'm not being humpty dumpty on this, I'm saying that demanding an adherence to someone else's particular sense of "commonly accepted" meaning is not very useful. We as readers are also responsible for communication, so it cuts both ways. The important element is just good faith.
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I see what you are saying, but still disagree. In my experience, anyone who participates in discussions regarding movies has a definition of classic that is the same as I've outlined here. I worked at a video store for several years, and if someone asked for a recommendation, I would ask what they liked. Action? Foreign? Comedy? Do you like some of the classics? They would know what I meant, because inside the world of movies, classic movies has a specific and accepted definition. All of the links I have provided exemplify this definition. It is commonly accepted, whether or not you agree with it.
If you walked into the video store and told me you liked the classics, I would point you to the classics. If you walked in and told me you liked the "classics, like Wargames and Tremors," I would happily recommend movies like Wargames and Tremors. I would probably avoid recommending the classics.
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quote: I see what you are saying, but still disagree. In my experience, anyone who participates in discussions regarding movies has a definition of classic that is the same as I've outlined here.
As do I, but you're talking past me at this point.
I get it. You walk into a video store, and Gone with the Wind is in the Classics, and Turner and Hootch is not. Message received, and I'm not disputing that fact. I am saying it does not amount to an argument in your favor. It amounts to a peripheral fact.
My point is not that such as standard does not exist, but that such a standard is more troublesome than useful. Clearly, we have been confronted in this thread with an instance in which your narrowed definition was, while it conformed in its broadest strokes to a definition that is mutually comprehensible, nevertheless clearly non-definitive.
As a parallel, consider the results of you and I sitting down and writing out the songs that were the Beatles' top ten "hits." We intentionally do not agree in advance on the nature of a hit. Now, while I could easily list 10 songs here and have you agree that, yes, in large part I have a complete list of the top ten hits (room for disagreement), if we both sat down to write separate lists, we might find that each of us had a list that shared few if any selections in common.
Then we would be aware that when I mean a "hit," I mean a top selling single, or a song most used in media afterward, or the most covered songs, or the most famous, or the ones most relevant only to my generation, or the ones that crossed international boundaries, or only the ones that were big in England, or only the ones big in America. We could still both be right, but the fact is we don't have *that* good of a common definition for "hit," considering that none of the factors I mentioned are necessarily more important than others. You could choose to define "hit" according only to gross total international sales adjusted for inflation, but then you'd find that Jimi Hendrix's "biggest hit" is Purple Haze, which rarely tops the list of his hits, because today his blues standards and covers are more well regarded.
So, while you can sketch the outline of a classic, you cannot get at the heart of it for the purposes of exclusion. Sorry, it's just not going to work. Argue that something has no artistic merit, and you will get closer to being right.
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See, I would go and find a musical authority. I don't know, Rolling Stone magazine, and see what they classify as a hit and what they call the Beatles top 10 hits. Because they clearly have thought about it more, have a large following, and would have the definition of hits that would most likely be accepted by the most people.
But I don't really think this discussion is getting anywhere anymore. I see what you're saying, you see what I'm saying.
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Well, if you have so little faith in your own judgment, I'm not surprised you define a classic as something that comes stamped with a gold star and a 20th to 50th anniversary collector's edition sticker.
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Whoa, whoa, whoa. This has nothing to do with faith in my own judgment. It's a recognition that I do not know everything, that other people or groups of people know more than I do, and there are some things which I think is best deferred to them. I believe that defining what are movie classics is one of these things.
If you wanted me to define all of the movies that I personally thought should be classic, I could come up with a list quite different from this classic list we've been arguing about, and I would gladly defend each and every movie. I could do the same for music as well. But that would be pointless, because I'm fairly certain you would lambaste me anyways.
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