Some movies just don't age well.

The movie was Monsieur Verdoux. Not like the usual Chaplin. It was a dark comedy.

 

Best comedy murder EVER - "Murder by Death"

Stand out head and shoulders - masterful with a gob smacking cast from David Niven to Peter Falk to the Peter Sellers

It has some of the most memorable scenes with the blind butler (Alec Guiness) and the deaf cook (Nancy Walker)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuNzcbCrNHg

 

Depends what kind of movie it is to know if special effects need to be good or not.

You are right about Terminator, but I don't even think it was cutting edge FX for its time.. Whereas Terminator 2 was.. But it is meant to be a serious, dramatic and suspenseful movie.. So cheesy and amateur FX distract you from the plot and somewhat ruin the film. It makes it too implausible.

Compare that to "Army of Darkness".. Came out eight years later, and has arguably even crappier FX than Terminator. Yet it's always a timeless classic. Because of the different theme and mindset of the film. It's a less serious movie. If anything, watching the skeletons that are obviously propped up, and motionless, just stood there before being destroyed, if anything makes the film even more amusing.

So I guess it depends what mood they are after.

After a certain point, FX were good enough that even a serious film could be timeless. Terminator 2, unlike the first, was cutting edge for its time yes, but the FX are good enough that even today it's a plausible watch as a serious suspense film.

 

that was actually part of the point.
it wasn't a "future". it was a plugged in sensory precieved artificially "architected" reality. The "future" until "the one" arrived was a bleak dystopia of enslaved bodies and minds, and a small group of free humans rebels who fought valiantly and fruitlessly until Neo.

 

My favorite of the series was Grey Lensman. Its basically a space opera.
lluved the evil boskonians.

Great 30;s sci fi, but totally dated.

 

If the construct was artificial, why would the "machines" allow the concept of intellectual advancement of any kind? It's a valid argument, however, if the movie was made in 2003, would your assertion be the same? A "timeless" movie would not be defending itself from trivial assertions. The technology of the age would be irrelevant.

 

A truly great movie of its time that has not aged well is "Doctor Strangelove or how i learned to quit worrying and love the bomb".
At the time of its release at the height of the cold war it was a seering satire, but it has lost its contemporary bite.

I also luved Bullit when it came out, but I recently watched it for the first time in years, and the 60's multi screen shots and cut aways were no longer cool and the car chase, while still good, has been totally eclipsed by so many others. Steve McQueen is still the coolest guy to ever hit the screen.

As a kid I was a big fan of the 50's sci fi. the only one that I think is completely ageless of that lot is Forbidden Planet.
I loved It Terror from Beyond Space. The basic plot scenerio and especially the final scene in that move were "borrowed" for Alien.
The whole host of "radiation induced super mutations" were laughable time wasters, with giant ants, scorpions, bees, killer plants, etc.
I did like The Fly with Vinnie Price and The Incredible Shrinking Man.

I'd like to see some azimov books made into movie such as caves of steel, but I don't think the foundation series would be that good.

 

Yes it would be the same. Again, given the scenerio, the architect would determine what was implemented. A certain amount of controlled intellectual, emotional and percieved physical stimulation were vital to the humans well being, which was important to the machines as they were the machine worlds main energy source.

 

Bang for buck I always thought the special effects in "Monolith Monsters" to be among the best I've seen. In this trailer you see the crystals not only grow vertically but expand in all three dimensions. I read an article years ago on how it was done, and seriously it is like a 10 cent solution to a $100.00 problem

[video=youtube;NBaVo2I9hJo]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBaVo2I9hJo[/video]

 

I enjoyed Cloverfield, but that was due more to the way they filmed it, and the down-in-the-dirt feel it gave you. The alien was pretty cool, but I completely understand how you feel about the main characters, especially the guy who holds the camera.

The Mist was okay. For most of the book, it stuck to the short story pretty well, but the very last part in the Jeep they completely made up to the give the movie a standard ending. The story ends with them driving towards Hartford, Connecticut, after they go to his house to see if they can find his wife. I read this story when I was still in high school, so I imagined the story taking place at our local supermarket complex, which is actually fairly similar to the one in the movie. Always made the story a little more frightening to me.

 

The Mist annoyed me because, having grown up on "McGuyver" and others it just seemed that they were under utilising the possibilities of fighting back inherent in even a grocery store. Personally I would LOVE to do an almost comedy take off of that movie exploiting all of the resources that would have been available with some twists - and I am sure I could make it more suspenseful and yet funny at the same time - no the movie annoyed me on a LOT of levels

 

A waste of time and if you do you think it's funny ... and there's so much funny? Cool, Hollywood loves to make movies with a simple blunt humor, and in Europe that movie long forgotten. Who want to look that movie to see now ?
No one to look here. And why not? The Hollywood didn't know what the witty joke is .

 

What kind of dumpster monkey language are you speaking? I can't understand a thing you said.

 

Ghostbusters and Aliens have held up a lot better than the first Terminator. Stop-motion rear-projection shots look horrible.

 

See: Back To The Future.

 

Odo's shape-shifting used the same CGI tricks that were used for T1000 in Terminator 2.

 

Well at the time I can recall thinking a few of the effects were pretty sub par. Who knows how bad they would look 30 years on

 

Spaceballs was and is a prefrontal through a picture tube.

 

Movies that rely heavily on CGI always age poorly.

 

Naw, Take The Lord of the Rings movies. They heavily rely on CGI but the CGI is photo-realistic. I think we are to the point that we can reproduce just about anything realistically.

 

True, but if you look at some of the fully rendered creatures, such as the Balrog and Trolls, they look extremely outdated. Movies like Transformers and even Avatar probably won't hold up as well in twenty years.

 

The scariest part about Cloverfield was the shakiness of the camera. I remember seeing that in the theater, and I felt like I was going to puke for the first 15 minutes of the movie just because the camera work was giving me motion sickness. I think there's a point in which too much realism actually makes the movie worse. And this was a good example.

 

Movies that depend on effects to tell the story as oppose to enhance the story do not hold up.

lots of movies released over the last 5 years or so have spent a hundred million on special effects (Battleship and Invasion LA come to mind) when a few hundred thousand on some good writers would have been a much better investment.

Good writers with good actors and good directors make good movies. If the effects are anything more than icing the movie will fail.

ALSO

I am biased.
I cannot watch 3d movies because I process the layered images (red and green) as separate images rather than combining them into a single image. It is painful producing severe eyestrain and terrible headaches. The 2d versions of the same movies are just as bad. when a scene intended to be viewed in 3d is presented the screen seems to waver and the image seems as if it was shot through a fisheye lens. Very irksome.

 

You could be right. I can't even imagine what movies will be like in 20 years.

 

Depends on the movie classics like Things to Come are dated in film effects but eternal as to ideas and concepts contained in them.

Dated can be very relative to me low budget movies can be amazing and big budget poor for example look at the classic Bladerunner and compare that to lets say the remake of War of the Worlds to me its no contest as to special effects that would be War of the Worlds but for visceral content on what it means to be alive and human can you beat Bladerunner? Both having serious stars in them and of the action drama genre of sci-fi.