andrewducker

Studies show that people only get a temporary lift from having more luxuries. After a fairly short period they become used to their current resource levels and their happiness returns to its previous levels. Until, of course, they get another boost.

I didn't much like Citizen Kane. Having been repeatedly told that it was the best film of all time by whole generations of critics, I was somewhat surprised to see a fairly good fake biopic, nicely told, with some decent camerawork and solid performances.

These two facts are, of course, connected.

(I feel the urge at this point to leave you to draw your own conclusions but let's face it, if you didn't all suffer from a deadly combination of boredom, apathy and fascination with my thought patterns you wouldn't be reading this at all.)

When I was a kid I saw the fantastic black and white silent short that showed a trains-eye view from London to Dover in fast forward. The whole trip took maybe 5 minutes and it was a complete delight to me.

When cinema was first invented the public thrilled to such delights as "A train leaving a station" and "A horse eating hay", neither of which are likely to be troubling the box office this year, despite the fact that people were happy to watch them repeatedly when they first appeared.

When you've seen a 300-foot tall monster destroy New York, is there any point seeing a 200-foot tall monster do the same? When you've seen a true master at work behind the camera, it seems a little wasteful to watch someone whose only good. When you've seen all the reverse-pan-dollies and clever cross-cuts that you're likely to have in the past 20 years, why go back and watch the first film to have used them - unless you're a film historian, that is.

Sometimes I wish that I'd started at the beginning of cinema and not been allowed to watch any recent films until I'd seen the earlier ones. Starting at age 10 I could have been shown films from 1900-1905. At age 11, films from 1906-1910. I'd be reaching the present day round about now, only having enjoyed an awful lot of films that I now can't watch with anything but vague intellectual interest.

Which isn't to say that I can't watch any non-recent films (I love many films from all over the place), but I've definitely become dulled to mediocre films, and frequently even to 'pretty good' films. This, presumably, is part of growing up- after a while one is bound to become a tad jaded with things one's seen hundreds of times before. I find myself ignoring films that are only rated at 3 stars, because they aren't likely to contain anything I'm not bored with or don't find predictable.

What I'd give to suffer from voluntary amnesia, to wander into a cinema with a fresh mind and see these things for the first time. Not just to have a childlike sense of the wonder in the world, but to have a childlike ignorance of what's been done before.

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From my PoV, there are actually two variables, innovation (using a 300 ft monster instead of a 200 foot one) and quality. While part of quality is simply things like glitzier special effects, the other part is having something more elegantly done (excellent cinematography, good scripts, superb acting...). I've found that all of these factors are excellent reasons to watch older movies. Then again, I love old movies - there are few modern actors who can match Katherine Hepburn in skill.

The difference that quality makes applies beyond the realm of film. I don't use my computer for much more than word processing and connecting to the internet. However, I've still found that improved computers make a real difference in my life. The spell checker on my old 486 was not instantaneous (which is a noticeable and persistent annoyance when editing a 50,000 word document), I now also have a grammar checker and a spell checker that an correct common mistakes w/o my needing to retype anything. The same is true with other gadgets, using Tivo instead of a VCR has made a significant positive change in my TV watching and mean that the little television that I watch is notably more enjoyable. More elegant devices make me happier in the long term because they remove previously persistent sources of frustration.

OTOH, most gadgets, like most new movies are not higher quality or more elegant than previous ones, they simply look flashier w/o making a real difference in one's life.

I wonder if this works in reverse -- i.e. I've heard so many people diss "Plan 9 from Outer Space", "Ishtar" and "Gigli" ... maybe I'll enjoy them. ;)

One of my favorite films is Bernardo Bertolucci's ("Last Tango in Paris", "The Last Emperor") "The Conformist". I can't help but think that a large part of the enjoyment was that I'd never heard of the film (due in no small part to the fact that it's in Italian and ~30 years old).

I felt the same kind of disappointment when I finally saw Star Wars. I saw "Return of the Jedi" as a small child in the theater (and what I remembered most was that I had a stomach ache, and eating Junior Mints helped). I never saw the rest, despite hearing fantastic things about them for years. Then they were re-released, and I had the chance to see them again (and at the fantastically huge screen at the Cineplex Odeon Uptown, too!) And they were like: eh.

I knew Leia was Luke's sister. I knew Darth Vader was his father. All the rest of it was just people with funny haircuts and very choppy-looking robots.

I really wished I could have enjoyed them from the beginning on, but by the time I did get to see them, it was just too late.

aww, you poor person... never got to watch that moment of ESB for the first time, where Vader says, "Luke, I am your father...." and to be so shocked by it... and to think, surely he must be lying! It must be some nefarious plot of that evil villain! Or could it.... could it possibly be true?

that's why i hate reading books out of order... it just isn't the same going back and reading the previous books later. if you don't go back and read them, you feel like you're missing something, but if you do go back and read them, they're just not as good as they could have been.

Oh, yeah, reading books out of order is impossible. I normally just leave them on my shelves for years until I can collect their forebearers.

One of the "problems" when looking films like "Citizen Kane" is that they tend to turn out much cooler when you study them in context. "Kane" was the first film to show ceilings, it used innovative camera work and did new things in new ways. Today they seem "old hat" and dated, but they were crazy new things at one time. He used the angle of the camera to show the relative important pf the main characters as well as architecture to show the relationships between people - especially Kane and his wife. These are techniques I see in modern films from time to time.
(I recall a prof of mine espousing the virtues of Kit Marlowe's "Tamburlaine" because although "it's not very good it's *terribly* interesting.")

I once took a friend to see "Casablanca" but before we went in I asked to remember something. "Every character in here you have already seen. They show up in cartoons as caricatures, in jokes and impersonations. Just remember, that they were *here* first. This is the original." Because it is hard to see Sam and not think of the Saturday morning cartoons.

Second, and even more interesting is an article I read recently looking at people who cashed out before the dot-com bust. Some interesting stories of their wealth *not* being anything like they thought or could even handle. To manage that amount of money, that "free time" the social pressures of being rich including the presumptions and expectations of friends, family and complete strangers. The writer mentioned a study that looked at people who won the lottery and people who survived horrific accidents. Over ten years,(I think that was the number) the accident survivors were happier.

I'll toss it in with that book package which hasn't been packaged yet. (Found ultra-cheap shipping option.)

Ekatarina

maybe that's why i'm not so impressed with star wars episodes i, ii... although there are some impressing parts...

even though the special effects are just as good, or even perhaps much better than the original star wars movies, they don't have the same effect on me. all those special effects don't impress me nearly as much any more. whereas back then, watching these things for the first time, they were like, "WOW!!!!" "COOL!!!!"....

and some of the newer character animations, even though they look very real, still end up feeling fake to me. anthony daniels in a metallic suit looked somehow more "real" than the animated version of him. and likewise for artoo and jabba...

nowadays, i think the story told by a movie, and/or the humor in it, is a lot more important than special effects...

although the matrix w/o fx would have been dull. and a jackie chan movie w/o jackie chan fx wouldn't be the same. ahhh... whatever.

Jaded

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heh

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Two things

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