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Dude, how do you mention "Two Lane Blacktop" but fail to mention "The Driver" or "The Gumball Rally" or "Smokey and The Bandit" or, at the very least, "Vanishing Point"?
Dude, how do you mention "Two Lane Blacktop" but fail to mention "The Driver" or "The Gumball Rally" or "Smokey and The Bandit" or, at the very least, "Vanishing Point"?
Shame on you!
Smokey and the Bandit is on my list of "guilty pleasure" movies. It's really not a very good movie. But I love it.
Let's look at Oscar winners by the decade beginning with the 1930s and do an experiment. How many of the Best Picture films have you see in each decade? Is the decade where you have seen the most Best Picture winners the same decade that you think was the greatest decade of film for all time?
1930s
All Quiet On The Western Front
Cimarron
Grand Hotel
Calvalcade
It Happened One Night
Mutiny On The Bounty
The Great Ziegfeld
The Life of Emile Zola
You Can't Take It With You
Gone With The Wind
1940s
Rebecca
How Green Was My Valley
Mrs Miniver
Casablanca
Going My Way
The Lost Weekend
The Best Years of Our Lives
Gentleman's Agreement
Hamlet
All The King's Men
1950s
All About Eve
An American In Paris
The Greatest Show On Earth
From Here To Eternity
On The Waterfront
Marty
Around The World In 80 Days
The Bridge on The River Kwai
Gigi
Ben-Hur
1960s
The Apartment
West Side Story
Lawrence of Arabia
Tom Jones
My Fair Lady
The Sound of Music
A Man For All Seasons
In The Heat of The Night
Oliver
Midnight Cowboy
1970s
Patton
The French Connection
The Godfather
The Sting
The Godfather Pt II
One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest
Rocky
Annie Hall
The Deerhunter
Kramer vs Kramer
1980s
Ordinary People
Chariots of Fire
Gandhi
Terms of Endearment
Amadeus
Out of Africa
Platoon
The Last Emperor
Rain Man
Driving Miss Daisy
1990s
Dances With Wolves
The Silence of the Lambs
Unforgiven
Schindler's List
Forest Gump
Braveheart
The English Patient
Titanic
Shakespeare In Love
American Beauty
2000s
Gladiator
A Beautiful Mind
Chicago
The Lord of The Rings: Return Of The King
Million Dollar Baby
Crash
The Departed
No Country for Old Men
Slumdog Millionaire
The Hurt Locker
Let's look at Oscar winners by the decade beginning with the 1930s and do an experiment. How many of the Best Picture films have you see in each decade? Is the decade where you have seen the most Best Picture winners the same decade that you think was the greatest decade of film for all time?
1930s
All Quiet On The Western Front
Cimarron
Grand Hotel
Calvalcade
It Happened One Night
Mutiny On The Bounty
The Great Ziegfeld
The Life of Emile Zola
You Can't Take It With You
Gone With The Wind
1940s
Rebecca
How Green Was My Valley
Mrs Miniver
Casablanca
Going My Way
The Lost Weekend
The Best Years of Our Lives
Gentleman's Agreement
Hamlet
All The King's Men
1950s
All About Eve
An American In Paris
The Greatest Show On Earth
From Here To Eternity
On The Waterfront
Marty
Around The World In 80 Days
The Bridge on The River Kwai
Gigi
Ben-Hur
1960s
The Apartment
West Side Story
Lawrence of Arabia
Tom Jones
My Fair Lady
The Sound of Music
A Man For All Seasons
In The Heat of The Night
Oliver
Midnight Cowboy
1970s
Patton
The French Connection
The Godfather
The Sting
The Godfather Pt II
One Flew Over The Cuckoos Nest
Rocky
Annie Hall
The Deerhunter
Kramer vs Kramer
1980s
Ordinary People
Chariots of Fire
Gandhi
Terms of Endearment
Amadeus
Out of Africa
Platoon
The Last Emperor
Rain Man
Driving Miss Daisy
1990s
Dances With Wolves
The Silence of the Lambs
Unforgiven
Schindler's List
Forest Gump
Braveheart
The English Patient
Titanic
Shakespeare In Love
American Beauty
2000s
Gladiator
A Beautiful Mind
Chicago
The Lord of The Rings: Return Of The King
Million Dollar Baby
Crash
The Departed
No Country for Old Men
Slumdog Millionaire
The Hurt Locker
2010s so far
The King's Speech
The Artist
Argo
Well, for many of us, the Hollywood elite's opinion on best picture rarely coincides with our own. There are lots of unremarkable movies on that list. Like Unforgiven, American Beauty, and The Sting, just to name a few.
Most posters here in 2013 are not going to have seen much from the 30s - 50s, so I see this thread as more being about comparing decades from the 60s through the present.
I think it's a tough call between the 60s and 70s.
All decades have their share of great movies. No doubt about that. But the so-called "golden era" of movies ('30s through the '60s) really died when the studios collapsed and were bought by corporations that had no clue what a good movie was. So they pretty much let directors do whatever they wanted, and the '70s saw the dawn of truly great directors --- Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, Philip Kaufmann, John Milius, Brian dePalma, John Landis, John Carpenter, William Friedkin, and yes, even Roman Polanski (a despicable human being, but he's a great filmmaker).
Then in the '80s, studios began to hire hack directors to copy the works of the masters. There were still some really great movies in the '80s, but they became fewer and far between, and even the great directors of the '70s made some bad '80s movies as they had to grapple with the corporate studio system. That trend has continued to today.
Today, most of the really great storytelling isn't in the movies. It's on TV. One film critic said it best a few months ago: "I saw some great movies last year. But I didn't see a single movie half as good as the last 4 episodes of Breaking Bad."
The 70s had a lot of films that are now considered classics. So many familiar titles, just one after another. However, I've seen very few films from the 70s that I like. For my personal taste, the 1930s is still the golden age, by a mile. So many of my favorite films were created in that decade; far more than any other.
Is this old timer's convention or what? In what way were movies better back then?
I think we can all agree on a few points here. Movies today are put together better, have far better special effects, have more freedom, there is a far larger variety of movies out today than in the 70's.
the only thing I've noticed is that in recent history there are SO many movies out that many of them end up being garbage, with weak actors, weak plot, and poor construction of the movie itself. This does not nullify the great movies that still exist, with dynamite actors however.
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