Submitted by aja_ramirez t3_ygt5lh in movies
I’m in my 50’s and with the option to watch, even ones I saw growing up, it’s interesting to me that movies that I saw in 90’s are starting to feel old. Not all of them but go back a little further (like the 70’s) and something just feels different.
I’m not talking about stuff film quality or special effects or no cell phones, etc. Maybe it’s pacing, or camera work, or scripts, or acting, or director stuff? I can’t always put my finger on it.
If you watch some 60s and 70s shows like Mannix, Rockford files, etc, you'll notice that the muscle/enforcer guys look like they have some meat on them, not like roided out gym rats.
i just watched aliens a few days ago. i had seen it before of course, but i probably hadn't given it a proper watch in ten years at least. it's pretty weird in that basically no one is strikingly beautiful in it. except maybe michael biehn. it's so great that people look normal in it. especially ripley, and not just that she's not beautiful but that she's not put on display. it's so wonderful. but sad that it's not like that anymore.
It's not just that. It's not just "good looking people." It's young looking people.
Leading men used to look like men. They used to cast big, meaty dudes. Tom Selleck was a sex symbol, and he looks like a man. Michael Landon. David Hasselhoff. Mel Gibson.Now Leonardo DiCaprio is in everything, and I know he's 47, but he looks like a 14-year-old or something. Even in all these movies where he plays a scruffy looking person, or somebody his own age, he just looks like a 14-year-old with dirt on his face.
And they do this all the time, with everybody. Christopher Reeve played Superman as a big guy; all the Supermen since him have looked more like gymnasts or something. Henry Cavill is in incredible shape, but somehow when he plays The Witcher he looks like a big meaty dude, but then when he's Superman they try to make him look like a ballet dancer.
I mean sure, there are outlying, unusual characters, like The Rock, but they're the exception. Leading men used to look like if their acting careers didn't take off they could go into lumberjacking.
It feels weird. It always makes me wonder what the goal is.
Leo's just babyfaced. This is not an actual change in cinema or generations. It's not like we haven't had James Cagney or Mickey Rooney.
Pacing. First time I realized it was watching The Hustler after The Color of Money. I'm by no means an impatient viewer and, my god, the long takes. And of course the current frenetic ADHD editing style makes The Color of Money look sedate.
Camera shots. Watch any 70s movie and you’re bound to get at least one slow pan and zoom from a rooftop across the street or from far away in a real world location. It has the feel of surreptitiously filming strangers than it does like a modern movie.
You never see that style used anymore.
I have a soft spot for those sorts of zooms. Obviously they're very tied to films from the 70's, but I think they'd be effective in modern films to evoke that classic paranoid thriller style.
Always find zooms very intrusive
Mid Atlantic accents
As in like Philly and Baltimore?
Haha no the transatlantic or mid Atlantic accents were the name for the accents old movie stars used to talk with
Today most people would know it as Kelsey Grammer’s accent in Fraiser.
Not exactly. Think FDR, Cary Grant, or Vincent Price.
Yeah people saying pheown for phone
Katharine Hepburn sported it quite often!
Flat lighting. Or when not completely flat, basic three point lighting.
This is a big one for me. I think cinematographers and colorists these days have become way too preoccupied with preserving the crazy amount of dynamic range in modern cameras, causing every blockbuster movie to have a really boring low-contrast look.
It's also because of the actors' fragile egos. Everyone's skin has to look as soft and beautiful as possible no matter what tone the scene is going for.
Haha, then there was old Star Trek, where closeups of female actresses suddenly went soft focus
Oh man. Vaseline on the lens
Camera cuts are different they have changed for the shorter attention spans of younger generations.
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One of the resident evil movies had at minimum one cut per second. It was there only movie that's ever given me a headache from the camera work.
>they have changed for the shorter attention spans
Also possible/probably influence from the advertising industry. How so?
They did their research and found that (in a 30s ad) shorter cuts hold the viewer's attention more effectively.
I'm sure some people in Hollwywood took notice of this, adapted the principle for their own work... and it succeeded.
And then got widely copied. And here we are today?
It is called MTV cutting.
Everyone is smoking
And no one ever finishes a cigarette. They light it, take 3 puffs and then ash out a full cigarette
Yeah notice how scenes can drag in in older movies. You were in the scene longer. As an above poster mentioned, camera cuts. Like I remember years ago stoned with friends watching Seinfeld shows on weekends off and analyzing the evolution of the directing and lines, scenes. Later seasons are so fast paced, dialogue seems rushed, jokes are snappy on point. Or the horrible story lines of Kung Fu movies. Lol
When Seinfeld was first created there was a shorter time allotted for commercials during the 30m block then there is now. If you were to watch a rerun on the average cable channel now they actually speed up the show to account for this. It’s nothing noticeable but does affect the comedic timing of the show.
They chop em up too. There'll be lines and jokes cut out if you compare the version the see on cable versus the one you see on DVD, or maybe Netflix
It’s strange to watch old films and see how some things are so dragged out. In older films you might see an actor park their car, get out, grab things form the car, walk to their door and unlock it all in one shot. Modern editing would show the car pull up, have brief shots of them getting out, then we’d see them arriving at the door and starting to unlock it before cutting to the door being opened from the inside. Efficient editing has been refined down to a science.
The music.
Scenes with just dialogue and no score or cinematography or editing telling me how the scene should make me feel.
I take it you think of it as a good thing. But why? Don't music, editing, visuals make the scene what it is, or at the very least enhance it?
Sometimes I suppose it can but putting on a good 70's movie with just actors and dialogue carrying the scene on their own can be really good.
Serpico comes to mind as an example.
Of course, of course.
Yes.
This is not true for all recent movies, but many recent movies have very limited cinematography.
As I understand it, this is often because of time constraint.
And although the camera often moves, there is less movement in a shot.
And most shots are short.
I actually think that these days television shows are more interesting than movies.
Television has moved into the opposite direction (at least some shows).
I think movie studios fall into a formula every so often until someone innovative comes along and resets it.
It's definitely not pacing. Movies today are far more bloated than in the past.
Pacing and overall length aren’t necessary related.
Ha if you want to talk pacing and attention span watch ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’
In older movies, characters go to foreign locales, there are long establishing shots, or a rapid paced montage of foreign countries. Also, lots more location shooting.
When global travel was not as common and simply seeing footage of another country was exciting, it made sense to take a moment to soak it in.
Now it’s in a giant font taking up the whole screen, three seconds max and they don’t even film in that location.
>Now it’s in a giant font taking up the whole screen, three seconds max and they don’t even film in that location
PARIS - no, it's really Budapest
LONDON - no, it's really Budapest
LUXEMBOURG - no, it's really Prague
Long credits sequence at the beginning of movies. Nowadays, the credits are just at the end of the movie and are usually 5 to 7 minutes. In older movies, there is usually establishing shots of the movie with beginning credit sequence that was usually 5 minutes, and the end credit sequence would be like 1 or 2 minutes maximum.
The pace of older movies feels slower. In many cases it takes longer to tell the story. Most of the time a story is linear with fewer flashbacks and certainly not the current trend of starting with an action sequence then flashing back to exposition.
The older the film the greater the possibility that actors were trained more like stage actors. Method acting techniques evolved through Stanislavski to different schools including Strasberg, and Meisner. Throughout the decades acting techniques changed and that reflects in the performances over different decades.
Certain film devices and tropes were popular during particular decades. During the 70's and 80's lots of films had musical montages in them. Tropes change. Every teen film from 1980-2005 or so had a scene in a mall. Kids don't go to malls much anymore so it's not a trope in current teen films.
Most plots in old movies seem to depend on people not being able to access information or to communicate immediately with others in order to solve the problem the plot twists presents. The existence of cell phones would ruin the plot of many older films.
Many older movies depict characters who operate under norms regarding relationships that are considered disrespectful if not downright predatory in the 2020's.
Stock characters in many films, especially comedies in the mid-late 20th century often involved race and gender stereotypes that would be considered racist and homophobic now.
Action sequences look very different. The ability to move the camera with the actor changed a lot after the mid 70's with the invention of the steady cam. The use of stunt doubles required a different way to shooting action sequences. Not many closeups. With digital effects action sequences can look a lot more dangerous without endangering actors or stunt people. With older films, in order for scenes shot using mechanical effects to be somewhat safe there had to be a lot of cuts which sometimes lose continuity.
The evolution of digital effects is evident. People traveling in cars look fake in mid-20th century films. The way a scene looks when it's shot using mechanical effects vs digital effects is different. Scenes shot with actors on physical sets vs actors on green screens with computer generated after effects sets look different. I would argue that performances by the actors are affected by the environment in which the scene is shot.
Tons of extras/background actors.
Normal teeth. Not perfectly straight and gleaming white. When I watch 90s movies , everyone has normal looking teeth.
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The way people in movies from the 30s and 40s talk. Almost no one talks like that anymore. It's distinctive and changes in the 50s.
The change to widescreen movies.
B-movies and serials. Those stopped as soon as TV took off and the 60 minute B-movie was replaced by TV.
Every woman in an action-type movie being a reporter. It's not a mistake that Lois Lane was a reporter being modeled on Torchy Blane (a great series of B-movies).
CGI movies adding camera shots that would be impossible otherwise. See many action scenes in movies from the '80s or '90s.
The steadicam enabling camerawork while moving. First used in 1976 in several films - think Rocky running up a flight of stairs. Those shots were previously impossible.
Title/actor intros
Pacing. God I still can't get past the opening scene of The Godfather
I was watching Ghost Ship, and there was a montage with techno music. So the millennium was random techno music.
Flip phones.
Any other type of phone doesn’t quite get that ‘extremely periodic’ feel to it as flip phones do.
Edit: and I realised that the example of ‘no phones’ in the OG post is kind of eliminating this, but given the actions and often the focus on the phones that it requires instantly break any sort of immersion of the movie and make me think ‘oh this is old’.
GrapplingDummy101 t1_iuapv0e wrote
Normal looking humans. There is something off-putting about the propensity to cast beautiful people in nearly every role.