No, I mean Rear Window, together with its sequels Coming in the Rear Window, In and Out of the Rear Window, Breaking in the Rear Window, True Rear Window Stories, and Let’s All Have a Look in the Rear Window.
But its plot is utter nonsense – it makes Prometheus look coherent.
It’s opera, really. The score recapitulates Wagner, after all. “Plot coherence” – an overrated virtue in movies anyway, IMO – takes a backseat to emotional logic, dream logic, and imagery.
Body Double is awesome. De Palma may be derivative, but he made the best Hitchcock film not actually made by Hitchcock, ever. Thematically, it’s better than both the Hitchcock films it mashes up.
Yeah, “plot coherence” needn’t be an obstacle to greatness, witness “The Big Sleep”. Well spotted.
Results of your typing session. You typed X when you meant S 95% of the time. You…need…more…practice!
Uh-oh…
Anyone who thinks that a 50 year old movie is the “greatest movie ever” is more interested in being a movie nerd than in having good taste.
Yeah, some of those grandma movies didn’t even have color!
Or sound!
We all know that advances in technology are what makes art good. That’s why Fifty Shades Of Grey is the best book ever written!
Only on the Kindle.
Sure, because who reads books, anyway? I heard some of them are even older than fifty years, and therefore have absolutely no artistic merit or value whatsoever anymore.
Books far shittier than Fifty Shades of Gray existed 50 years ago. You just don’t know that because it was 50 fucking years ago and everyone’s forgotten about them already. Dozens of movies better than Vertigo are released every year. We’re just far more critical of those because of how close we are to them. Vertigo isn’t great. It’s an uncontroversially decent movie that is old enough to put on a pedestal.
This sounds like a challenge. Everybody try to find a book older than 50 years old that’s worse than 50 Shades of Gray! Worst book wins!
Easy. Paul Clifford, from which we get the classic, “It was a dark and stormy night…”.
I’m pretty sure you can crack open any randomly selected 50’s romance novel and you’ll have a winner. It will probably involve a secretary/nurse/student who secretly loves and eventually wins over her big, strong boss/doctor/teacher by putting on more make up and telling him how big and strong he is.
50 Shades isn’t even that terrible when considered either as porn or romance (hardly genres with high standards). It’s just easy an easy target for jokes.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
The last 50 Shades phenomenon (other than Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying) would be Forever Amber, which made such a stir that it’s even referenced in an old Tom and Jerry cartoon (from the time when they still had the black maid as a character). I presume the book is terrible, but a really good 60s psych band did call itself Forever Amber.
I haven’t actually read it, so I can’t speak to the quality. Besides, I’m pretty sure the real entertainment value of 50 Shades of Gray comes from going to a family dinner and having all your elderly female relatives talk about how much they enjoyed the book, and then realizing what the book is about, and being horrified.
Perhaps you can name a dozen movies from 2011 better than Vertigo to illustrate your point.
I was just going to suggest that.
Why stop at a mere 50 years, StGabe? Surely anything from before 2001 is completely useless to our modern sensibilities, right? Or, hell, why not five years? Or two?
Or maybe - just maybe - there are really great movies from every era, and critics by their very nature are drawn towards the first examples of innovation rather than the millionth iteration of same.
Nah, that can’t be it. Why watch Murnau when we have Michael Bay?