New movies vs. old movies

Do you prefer watching newer movies or older movies?

I love older movies, and I'm going to rant on it here. I confess I really don't have much patience for the pieces of crap being shoveled out today. I've sat through more than my share, and I really can't find too many coming out today worth seeing. On the other hand, I never come up short of finding old movies that would be worth watching.

One of my big gripes about new movies is the effects...all the computer animated stuff, then you have, whatever the hell they do that in every movie when it's dark, it's blue, it's not black like it should be, and the sunlight often looks like it was run through a filter or something, things don't look like they should in real life.

And then there are the long, awkward pauses between two people when they just say any word that comes their mind until they can start forming sentences again. It's like '...uh' '...yeah' '...so' '...so' I don't pay $10 to watch two people stand around waiting to get a real piece of dialogue again.

And then there are the way certain people are often depicted in movies, particularly mainstream movies which is about all they get where I live. The women are usually, 9 times out of 10, stiff, rigid, hard, cold, 'mature', 'responsible', can't do anything that might be fun (which their husbands will do) because it might cause trouble, or it might be stupid, or it might be immature. Now this DOES go back a long ways, women were like that in movies even back in the 30s, but there was also a lively bunch back then; Katharine Hepburn in movies like Holiday and Bringing up Baby, Ann Sothern in the Maisie movies, Constance Bennett in the Topper movies, etc.

Then there are the kids...I'm sorry, but I go to movies to get AWAY from all the annoying details of real life, I'm in no mood to watch screaming kids who you want to smack, completely helpless lazy bums who need their parents to do everything or who can't survive if they can't have their cell phone, or the kind that thinks their parents are the dumbest things ever to live and tell them as much every time they open their mouths. I wasn't raised that way and I don't appreciate that being the majority of what they put into the mainstream movies today. You put that in comparison to...well, there was a short film made back in the...40s I think called Who Killed Doc Robbin?, and in tradition with the previous kid gang films like the Little Rascals, you have a bunch of kids who probably aren't even 10, but they'll go off to the old abandoned house in the middle of nowhere and ward off killer apes and police, to look for part of an atomic bomb to clear a professor of a murder charge they know he's innocent of. Who would do a story like that today? But I'll gladly take that over watching two screaming kids who can't live without their video games and telling their parents what retards they are. Or you take a movie like Night of the Hunter...now a lot of people complain about how 'useless' the little girl Pearl is in that movie, but she and her brother have to outwit and outrun a murderous preacher looking for the stolen money in the girl's doll, and they run away from home and lead him on a chase down the river in a boat by themselves. Now that, I like to see, it sort of keeps in tradition with I guess, Tom Sawyer, there you have a boy who sneaks away and witnesses a murder, testifies about it, runs away to an island with no adults around, finds treasure and escapes the killer. They just don't seem to make stories like that anymore.

Then you have the horror movies. The scariest movie I saw as a kid, which has continued to haunt me in nightmares well into my adult life was 'The Bat', from 1959 with Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead. And it was the scariest thing I ever saw, without any blood, without half naked bodies being torn apart, without a supernatural creature that can't be killed...the killer in that movie was just a guy, and not an unstoppable force like Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger, but just a man, who could be any man, he could be anywhere in your town, and he knows how to get in and out of your locked house, he can cut the phone wires, set the garage on fire, kill you and escape before the police get there. That was scary, and there was all this talk about he rips open women's throats with steel claws, but that was implied, we never saw it and it is still scary.

Comedy was a better genre in the previous times as well. What's a plot for a comedy today? Oh watch what happens when this 30 year old woman with no life and dry eggs tries to have a baby. Yeah, how could, say, a movie about a family that dances, plays the xylophone, writes plays, throws darts and makes fireworks down in the basement with the iceman ever compare with that great material, eh? Or today it's like, watch what happens when these fat middle aged guys who were in a fraternity 20 years ago get back together and get drunk. Oh yeah, I'd really rather watch that than a movie about a ventriloquist and his dummies explaining the history of the world through 3 Stooges films and dancing apes.

And you always hear the stereotype of today everybody needs a movie to have car chases and big explosions. Well the older movies were full of those two, and plenty more. There were a ton of car chases, and exploisons of all sorts...like when Lou Costello thought a stick of dynamite was a candle and he lit it, then threw it away because it wouldn't act like a regular candle. And there were always big shootouts, even when it wasn't a western, and there were murders, and fires, and plane crashes and bank robberies and all that good stuff. That's the kind of stuff that made serials survive during the 30s and 40s.

In short (too late for that, I know), I prefer older movies, I think it's quite obvious that everybody made more of an effort waaaay back then, to give you more entertainment for your money, and to try and tell an actual story, instead of putting together 2 hours of unrelated events in hopes of making #1 at the box office over the weekend. How about everyone else?

I like both but I'm starting to lean toward older movies. Hollywood is proving that it has run out of ideas with so many remakes. And the CGI is way overdone. When the movies entire appeal is special effects over plot it says a lot. I enjoy watching people who can actually act. A story well written to make me believe it. I enjoy fantasy & the suspension of disbelief but I like it to have SOME realistic qualities as well.

Old, very few new movies impress me much. CGI makes it too easy. You used to have to build it & blow it up yourself which mean taking an awfully big risk that you were doing it for a flop or going to get someone hurt. I don't mind old "bad" FX, to me they look more real than CGI. I also think acting is going downhill, it's all look and no talent. I'm much more interested in who directed it than who's starring in it.

I largely prefer newer movies.