One of the issues, however, is that anyone born after MTV has a different expectation of pacing. I’m one of those people who saw The French Connection in the theater, and I recall how fast-paced the car chase in that seemed. The same for Bullett and even The Great Escape.

You watch them nowadays, though, and they border on laughable. To a young person, it’s like you or me watching the acting in a silent movie, so over-the-top that it’s not serious any more but all too often flat out comical. The action and pacing in older movies has a similar issue for younger people, in that it seems stodgy and slow to the point of boredom. “Okay, I get it. It’s a long ways. Can we get on with it, or did you want to show the scenery for another five minutes for a reason?”

That’s neither right nor wrong — they have grown up with a sort of visual shorthand and the ability to process visual information much quicker. They are missing out on a lot of great older stuff, sure — But you listen to some of the people who talk here and they smugly claim that they haven’t seen anything new that they liked — they don’t grasp that they are, for the most part, missing a lot of great cinema, too. Sure — there’s a lot of crap out there. Guess what, there was a heck of a lot of crap back then, too. For every Bridge on the River Kwai there was a Manos, Hand of Fate (Okay, okay — I exaggerate: There is only one ‘Manos’… thank God!).

There are a lot of good movies nowadays. Action pictures are easily orders of magnitude better, not just because of stunts and FX but because the directors understand action film techniques better. Most of the stuff by Luc Besson is very, very good — even the stuff he wrote and produced — Banlieiu 13, for example, or Wasabi — is good, escapist fun, as much as his more accessible films like The Professional, The Transporter, and The Fifth Element.

And there are still good talking heads pictures, too, often easily recognizable by certain actors in them, just as it used to be — Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Ed Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Jude Law, Kevin Spacey.

Those are this era’s Bogart, Grant, and Tracy. And no, that’s not heresy — I would put Norton and Spacey up against ANY of the old-school actors, and not just because acting has changed since the 50s after Brando, but because they are just flat out great actors.

I think that if you focus on any single decade as better than any others, or any era as better, you’re missing out on a lot of good movies. Each decade has dozens of movies that are as good as any other. I think the 1990s were the best, but that’s marginal, and it depends entirely on criteria.

But are you really going to say that The Shawshank Redemption isn’t as good as any picture made in the 40s or 50s? Really? Or that L.A. Confidential, isn’t as good as any film noir from the 40s? That The Incredibles isn’t as good as any Disney animated film? If you do, I think that’s a mindless bias speaking, not a valid assessment. And I say that as someone whose favorite Bogey isn’t one of the more well-known ones, but “Dark Passage”. African Queen, The Caine Mutiny, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, all excellent. But DP has a charm to it, even if it’s less polished.

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P.S. Extra Credit —
1947: That Way With Women
1949: Mother Is A Freshman

Compare the female leads in those two pictures, released just two years apart. When did the Feminist movement really, really begin? It wasn’t the sixties….

Thank you for posting the clip from it. Awesome. Must look up movie.

Unfortunately (or skillfully) Wood reminded me of our daughter before she got diagnosed and some medicine that helped. Even now we see some of that. The abrupt shutting of the shade, the inability to face anything…. SMall signs, but just right for someone on the mental edge.

After all these stores are gone, I wonder if anyone will be nostalgic for them…

Moreover, mentioning that Splendor was so cheaply available was probably prompted in my mind by other classics (David Lean’s “Great Expectations” being a good example) that, if available, are prohibitively expensive. Fortunately, I got my copy of GE before the price skyrocketed.

But I understand your sentiment when you broaden the context. It isn’t a question so much of the video store not having it as it is the evidence this gives to it not being esteemed highly enough to be found most anywhere. Imagine a library that carried none of the works of Dickens or Shakespeare.

Well, on this side of the wall we have the Planet Earth. On the other side “Neo” Planet.

I’m sure I’d like Neo Planet except for the fact that the video stores there wouldn’t stock large numbers of film featuring exploding automobiles and buildings.

Its almost as bad as being offered the senior citizen discount at a restaurant