There. I Said It.: A Series of Blogs.

I know that, this being only my second blog entry, it's probably too early to be starting a series of posts along the lines of a particular topic, but the more I thought about this, the more the idea grew until it became a little overwhelming to try to even start unless I made a deal with myself to break it up and take it a piece at a time. Plus, ideas befitting this topic seem to come to mind daily, so I expect to make this a running piece that I add to on a regular (regular at first at least, semi-regular later on) basis.

What better way to admit your unpopular, although admittedly still not too controversial, beliefs than to post them to a personal blog? Read 'em if you like. Disagree with 'em if you like. And please, respond if you like. They're just my thoughts shared with those who care to read them. My guess is, a silent majority actually agrees with most of these thoughts, but society tells us that we should think differently, so we just don't voice our opinions. We'll see. Anyway, I'm calling it, "There. I Said It."

Belief #1
Movies from our current generation are, almost across the board, significantly better than movies from earlier generations.

For over a decade, the American Film Institute (AFI) has celebrated film by ranking movies made since the beginning of movie-making. Their lists have ranked the top 100: movies overall, comedies, musicals, villains/heroes, quotes, songs, romances, thillers, inspirational movies, movie stars, or film scores. I love movies, so every year I get excited about watching the countdown. And when I sit down and watch it, I have a good time because I get to relive so many of the movies I have seen and I get to be exposed to movies I haven't seen that I would probably enjoy. That, I know, is AFI's intent when putting together these lists.

But I also am consistently disappointed. The Top 10 usually has one or two I might possibly agree with. The Top 100 usually is agreeable, in my opinion, on about 20 or so. As it turns out, the movies I like were made while I was alive. AFI, on the other hand, seems to love movies in black and white, and considers anything made within the past two decades uncomparable to the films from "The Golden Age."

Here's an example. Last year, AFI ran a revisiting of their countdown from ten years prior (they said they were wanting to give credence to newer films, which I knew when they said it, was hogwash and that there was no way any movies from the past ten years would infiltrate their ivory tower list) - AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movies - 10th Anniversary Edition. Here was the Top 10:

10. Wizard of Oz
9. Vertigo
8. Schindler's List
7. Lawrence of Arabia
6. Gone With The Wind
5. Singin' in the Rain
4. Raging Bull
3. Casablanca
2. The Godfather
1. Citizen Kane

Would anyone reading this have more than one of those in their top ten favorite movies? I'll take the challenge a step further. Does anyone reading this even know someone personally that would have more than one or two of those in their top ten favorite movies? Imagine if you asked one of your friends what their favorite movie was, and they replied, "Singin' in the Rain." Wouldn't your continued friendship with that person be in doubt after that moment? Now, while none of those movies are in my top ten, I could understand where someone might list one or possibly two of those movies as some of their favorites. In fact, my own mother's favorite movie is Gone With The Wind. Either that, she says, or Silverado. (It's hard to tell if her Gone With The Wind selection is still really valid or if it's just a pat answer that she's had since she was little, and she just doesn't feel like re-evaluating it. That is actually an all-too-common issue that I think is a fundamental cause of this new-movie discrimination). The only movies from that AFI Top 10 list that I might even allow a friend of mine to have as their favorite movie are
Gone With The Wind (because I can't disown my mother for that), The Godfather, and Casablanca. And if you were personally affected by the Holocaust, then I could understand a Schindler's List selection. The Wizard of Oz was a great movie - WHEN I WAS 8! Ask someone what they thought of Lawrence of Arabia and you'll most likely get one of two answers:

It was long.
or
I've never seen it.

When people say they've never seen Lawrence of Arabia, I don't think anything of it. Because very few, it seems, have. On the other hand, if I find out that someone has not seen Star Wars or Rocky, I am dumbfounded. Those movies should be seen. Lawrence of Arabia? Take it or leave it.

Vertigo is OK - kinda creepy, but watchable. And Raging Bull as depressing and heavy as it is, at least it's a sports movie and has Robert DeNiro, which raises its value in my book no matter how rewatchable the movie might not be.

But Number One: Citizen Kane? That's just absurd. I'm not sure which is more ludicrous - that it was ranked number one on this list or that it retained its title from the first version of this list ten years ago? It was number one for the original "100 Years ... 100 Movies" list. Then the voters had ten years to reconsider their egregious error, add new voters and subtract dead ones, come to their senses, and when it came time to select the number one movie, they selected ... Citizen Kane again! It's almost enough to make you want to stop watching movies altogether. Supposedly it was a breakthrough in film-making of some kind. If that were the case, though, and if it's such a great film, why then was it beaten out for Best Picture in 1941 by How Green Was My Valley? Let me repeat: IT DIDN'T EVEN WIN BEST PICTURE!!! And yet it's considered the best movie ever? Unbelievable. AFI needs to just sacrifice one year and create a top 100 list for Film-Making Breakthroughs. Then they could get past this love-fest with awful movies and get on to the ones that are actually entertaining or, at least, beneficial to society in some way. Citizen Kane was neither.

It would take too long to go through them all, but believe me when I say, the other dozen or so lists are just as bad, if not worse (the top ten Comedies, for instance, are preposterous: 10. Airplane!, 9. The Graduate, 8. It Happened One Night, 7. M*A*S*H, 6. Blazing Saddles, 5. Duck Soup, 4. Annie Hall, 3. Dr. Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb, 2. Tootsie, 1. Some Like It Hot).

What's interesting to me is that AFI even knows their list is not usually the movies most people like. How can I tell? Because when they are advertising their countdown, and even during their intro to the countdown, they try to suck viewers in by showing clips from relatively new movies, making it look like this year, they're actually going to be reasonable and select good, entertaining movies (I can only conclude that entertainment value is simply not one of their selection criteria). But after they've sucked you in, they proceed to beat you over the head with old movies, insinuating that, "If you consider yourself a movie buff or lover of film, then these must be some of your favorite movies. Otherwise, you are merely a peasant in the Hollywood Kingdom and you really don't even deserve to be watching this countdown."

Now that you've compared the AFI top ten list with your own, let's see how mine compares with yours (in other words, which list would you rather sit down and watch straight through - AFI's or mine?) Here are my top ten favorite movies (comedies have their own category as it seems is required by law in Hollywood, so they cannot be included in a favorite movie list such as this one. Also, the first one on the list is my overall favorite, but the rest are not in any particular order):

Braveheart
Back to the Future
The Natural
Rocky
Rounders
You've Got Mail
Lord of the Rings
Tombstone
Silverado
Love Actually

Here are my top ten comedies in no particular order (please note that I added a criteria to my list that AFI left off of their comedy criteria list - the movie should be funny):

Three Amigos!
Anchorman
Tommy Boy
Dumb and Dumber
Napolean Dynamite
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
Ghostbusters
Monty Python and the Holy Grail
The Jerk
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

Out of both of these lists, the oldest movie is Rocky - 1976. The oldest comedy is The Jerk - 1979. Before that, it seems that movies were not really very funny, and most were not nearly as good as movies made since.

This post is plenty long already, so here are a few additional points that, while abbreviated, still support my stand that new movies are just better than old movies.

1) Actors of our generation act better than those of previous generations. For example, crying scenes today seem authentic, whereas those kinds of scenes in the past are usually too dramatic.
2) Dialogue from old movies sounds very scripted. I haven't done much acting, but I can easily tell in older movies when the script specifically calls for one actor to interrupt another. It's very jilted and I'm pretty sure that the interruptee would simply stop talking at a specific word, whether the other actor interrupted him or not. These days, actors are much more accomplished at this piece of their craft. They know what their character is wanting to say, and will continue to say it (scripted or not) until they are realistically interrupted.
3) Special Effects. No contest. Who cares if technology is just better now? That should not count against newer movies. In fact - just the opposite! Better special effects alone should often be enough to place recent movies above older movies because it makes the movies more realistic, and therefore, more entertaining and higher quality.
4) More realistic portrayals of everyday life. Most serious movies often seem like, aside from the unrealistically beautiful people in them, they are straight from our daily lives. I didn't live in the 40's, but it would be hard to believe that the U.S. Post Office would simply deliver dozens of huge bags of mail to a courthouse on Christmas Eve, when they aren't even supposed to be working, at the simple request of a lawyer defending Santa Claus just because they don't know what else to do with all of those letters. If this is not familiar to you - it's the climactic scene of the original (and far inferior to the modern) version of Miracle on 34th Street. Sorry if I spoiled it for you.
5) Music. Today's scores are moving. The songs are fun and popular. Old movies' scores, even the ones considered "great", like that from High Noon, are repetitive and not nearly as elaborate, spectacular, or engrossing as anything John Williams, James Horner, Alan Silvestri, or Howard Shore ever wrote.
6) Length. Long movies today are long because they have to be to get the story in. For the most part, even when they are long, they are very enjoyable because the story moves very well and keeps you involved, so much so that you wouldn't mind if the movie was actually longer if you could stay involved in the story for a few more minutes. Old movies, on the other hand, are long seemingly because the directors just didn't know how to cut out scenes, so a movie that would have been cut to under two hours today remained at an interminable three.
7) There are some exceptions for all of these. Jimmy Stewart was a great actor and would be today. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" still holds up. And if you take a girl to watch Casablanca at the Paramount Theater, she'll still fall in love with you. But these are the exceptions, not the rules. And they still aren't the best overall in their respective categories.

I would love to know more about film history, and grow in my expertise of the subject, so I still watch, and sometimes even enjoy, movies from the older generations. But when people start claiming that those movies were better than anything we have today, that's where I have to object. Older movies better than today's movies? That's just ridiculous. There. I said it.