It’s a goddamned perfect horror film really. The ultimate in isolated areas, an unkillable truly superhuman killer, and the plot doesn’t rely on characters doing stupid things to set up the kills.
I saw that movie at a friend’s house on HBO when I was in elementary school. It frightened the holy living shit out of me for months. In junior high another friend had a “making of” book and I had nightmares again. When Aliens came out I was a senior in high school and I was still nervous about going to see it in the theater. I am a huge fan of the movies and even like the not-so-popular last two. The very first Dark Horse comic black and white series also has a permanent place with me.
Wizard of Oz. It’s one of my responses to the tiresome bias against old movies I often see in people. Art reflects the attitudes of the time in which it was made, and though art made in later times may put quotes around the attitudes of earlier times, that does not mean it transcends or necessarily improves upon them; it’s more accurate to say it depends upon them. If that book were filmed today it would be a respectful CG spectacle a la Harry Potter or Narnia. It would not be a vaudeville musical with a lion with a cloth suit and a thick New York accent and a tin man wearing silver paint and crooning “if I only had a haaaaht” and Judy Garland exuding the sort of wide-eyed innocence that our post-irony culture assumes must be phony. It is inconceivable to me that the former would be an improvement over the latter.
I’d say Mad Max more, but we already had this thread.
Hal Ashby’s 1970s run
The Day the Earth Stood Still
City Lights
Dog Day Afternoon
Marathon Man
The King of Comedy
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Sunset Boulevard
George Lucas before Star Wars
MAS*H
Malcolm
Space Is the Place
I thought Midnight Cowboy held up when I watched it last year, and I am pretty surprised to find it is clumped with the utterly unwatchable Easy Rider.
If there was a movie to make a trip to the dentist worse, this would be the one.
So I just wrapped up Alien. Couple notes:
Last week, Community had a joke about an insane cat that kept freaking out the characters. I totally get the reference now. But I mean, really, Ripley? You’re going to to rescue Jonesy? The alien’s slaughtered two of the crew: FUCK THAT CAT.
Love how they worked in some gratuitous cheesecake with Weaver. When she stripped off the coverall… woah. I guess you want to be wearing something comfortable when you go into suspended animation?
And speaking of things that hold up, the in space explosion effect was so incredibly 80s.
Predator, surprisingly enough.
Also, I envy Erikg88. I would also like to see Alien again for the first time. Absolutely amazing movie. The scene down in the ducts with the improvised flame thrower. Man, that scares the shit out of me every time.
Look, you damn kids, don’t stop halfway though Alien to post impressions on a web forum.
Thanks ElGuapo, this thread inspired me to get Die Hard out just now and show it to my girlfriend who’d never seen it :) She’s also German, so I finally got to know what the bad guys were saying half the time. Nothing really exciting to report on that front though.
In a lot of ways it’s not really fair to pick anything that you saw in theaters when it first came out and say “It stands up.” It could be that the reason it stands up for you is that you carry all the history with you.
I might wax rhapsodic about some 80s movie I love, but a 20 year old might see the same movie and conclude that the writing was shallow, the direction weak, the hair tragic, the clothes garish, and the music jaw-droppingly awful. And he might well be right, speaking from the point of view of someone who doesn’t know the context – It’s just that I was there at the time and know why it wasn’t awful back then.
So it really only makes sense to point to movies made before you were born.
In that vein I’d nominate Bridge on the River Kwai, which I went into thinking would be just another 50s WW2 movie but which turned out to be much more.
I’ll second Casablanca. I watched it for the first time a few months ago and was expecting the same kind of mannered performances you often see in those old black-and-whites, but the acting is surprisingly great. The screenplay is amazing also - there’s a real economy to the writing and every scene is important. It’s one of the only Romances I’ve ever seen, maybe the only one, where the leads choose not to be together out of a sense of moral duty, rather than being forced apart because of some external influence (like in, say, The English Patient). Somehow this makes it a lot more romantic.
As an example of movies which don’t hold up, I’ll offer The Producers – the original Mel Brooks one. Where many classic Brooks films can still make me laugh (Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein), in this one the comedy was just too broad for my taste. I think “Springtime for Hitler” probably just isn’t as shockingly hilarious today as it would have been in 1968. And watching Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder roll around on the floor sounds a lot funnier than it is to watch.
Casablanca is the most quotable movie in history.
Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.
Not only absolutely un-provable, but verifiably false.
All of them. What an awful thread.
If the QT3 Movie Club hadn’t died repeatedly and if I’d ever managed to really get into it, my eventual pick was going to be Sleeping Beauty. So it seems likely that I feel it holds up and is, in and of itself, a remarkable achievement.
As you watch it, there are definitely those moments of recognition, as the famous quotes come up and you notice them. In fact I think that can have an appeal of its own for many modern audiences. Hey! Bogie just said Here’s lookin’ at you Kid! I know that quote!
As for me, I was actually worried before watching it that the fame of the quotes would throw me out of the movie. I was worried that the quotes had been repeated so often that they would become kind of meaningless and lose their emotional impact. But in fact, hearing them in context caused them to take on a whole new meaning for me. Which I think is just another sign of that movie’s greatness.
All of what?
That’s ridiculous. A movie can hold up for someone for lots of different reasons. Things like beautiful cinematography, scores, etc don’t “age”. It’s not all about “I liked it/it made me laff/etc”. A Lion In Winter was an amazing film before I saw it in 1994, and it remains amazing.
My DVD collection consists of 300+ titles. Over half of them are over 20 years old (have many of the “classics” from the 30s & 40s and some silent films).
If they didn’t hold up, they wouldn’t be in my collection. So every film I own holds up. For me :)
Oh, wintermuse. Of all the gin joints in all the forums on all the internet, why’d you have to walk into ours?