from the Denver Post:
The test of time
Some films of the '80s and '90s are already obsolete because major portions of their plot rely exclusively on a lack of today's technology.By David Sirota
Creators SyndicatePosted: 02/07/2010 01:00:00 AM MST
Like many thirtysomethings, my wife and I watch a lot of TBS movies, specifically from the 1980s and early 1990s. And, like a lot of thirtysomethings, my wife and I are also thinking about having children. So lately, we've started wondering if our kids will someday lambaste our cultural tastes as those of the crotchety curmudgeons we sometimes chuckle at.
Specifically, will the children of 2032 laugh at us when they see us watching TBS reruns like we laugh at our own parents when they watch flicks on that other Ted Turner creation, Turner Classic Movies (TCM)?
TCM, as any channel-surfer knows, is a museum of archaic Hollywood, providing non-stop reruns of John Wayne, Greta Garbo and Clark Gable. Perhaps the only TCM movie I've ever seen all the way through is "Gone With the Wind," and that one I was forced to watch on VHS tape in my middle-school history class.
When I've seen my parents or grandparents watching TCM, I find it funny not just because they are either in black and white or cartoonish Technicolor, and not just because the ties are thinner, the cars boxier and the language more prudish, but because the plots they present as modernity are so outdated, so divorced from the epoch we live in now. "Vertigo" presents the now-grimy and crumbling San Francisco as a clean 1950s suburb; "On the Waterfront" is about struggles with the kind of all-powerful unions that no longer exist; and "West Side Story" is about gang warfare plaguing a now-ritzy section of Manhattan whose most dangerous element is aggressive Zabar's shoppers.
While watching, say, the Bill Murray classics "Ghostbusters" and "Groundhog Day" on TBS, I've reassured myself that there's no way my 20-year-old child in 2032 will feel the same disconnect I feel with, say, TCM's "Cat On a Hot Tin Roof." I've based this belief only on the fact that Hollywood's language, sex and violence barriers broke somewhere in the early 1970s, and haven't gone back. Whereas TCM flicks of the 1950s and 1960s seem so old, in part, because there's no cursing or nudity, and very little carnage, TBS movies seemed to endure because there's plenty of that stuff. Sure, the lapels and the glasses look too big, but Peter Venkman and Phil Connors are as lewd as any of today's — and probably tomorrow's — typical funny men, and their story's modernity has therefore always felt timeless. ..........(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_14336557