black and white movies

[KDawg]

KKF, along with the modern B&W list that KOTLP put, you should add Good Night, and Good Luck and Woody Allen's Manhatten to that list. Its well worth trying to get over this as you are cutting off a tremendous amount of great films

[MrMon]

I suggest an experiment. Let's take two films you probably like and are familiar with - Star Wars and The Road Warrior (Mad Max 2). Watch both with the color turned off, you should be able to mess with your TV to do this. Think about how this changes the films. Trust me, it will change the experience.

Now, to be fair, the directors of these films never intended for them to be viewed as black and white films, but the mere fact that it does change them does indicate there is something to the color angle as to what makes a film. Now, among the two films, I'm willing to predict the The Road Warrior works much better as a B&W film than does Star Wars, in fact, as good as it is in color, I think The Road Warrior as actually better as a B&W film.

Now think what a director can do if he intends for the film to be in B&W. In color, you can't set the same mood, you get totally different effects, it's somehow an unreal environment, more like art. Most people who don't like B&W think that's because they had to make them that way, but that's not always true. In many cases, the choice was intentional, and with good reason. There's no reason The Longest Day had to be done in B&W, but if it were in color, it'd be a totally different experience. Realize that the choice between the two is intentional, or at least integral to the film, and you don't mind if it's one or the other, the same as if you don't care what color of paint an artist uses, if it achieves the desired effect.

[GTL]

check out, Seven Samurai. directed by Akira Kurosawa. It, Is, The Bomb

[katyseagull]

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KKF, along with the modern B&W list that KOTLP put, you should add Good Night, and Good Luck and Woody Allen's Manhatten to that list.

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wow, I forgot that Manhattan was in B&W! I am going to add this to my queue I think. Thanks for bringing it up.

[swede123]

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check out, Seven Samurai. directed by Akira Kurosawa. It, Is, The Bomb

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I think Seven Samurai is a horrible suggestion when it comes to "breaking in" a person not accustomed to black and white movies. Not only is it B&W, it's subtitled, older, and very long.

The modern B&W movies listed would certainly be a good start, getting the viewer used to format without having an "old-movie-feel". Then work your way to mainstream American B&W classics, with Casablanca being the first stop, and then eventually try out some Kurosawa.

Swede

[JaBlue]

completely agree with swede. I have the same problem as KKF with classics and seven samurai was unbearably long and mostly boring for me.

[Blarg]

This is more a matter of an untrained attention span than anything else. It's the same thing that makes books and even long internet posts like mine impossible for really young guys -- they've rarely or never been forced to hold their attention on anything for long. That's why books are almost dead.

The problem is not with the movies; it's with the viewer. Learn to expand your attention span. It will probably make you a much more interesting person to everyone around you, and make everyone around you much more interesting.

Reminds me of coke-heads: "If only I could ditch these bastards and run into the restroom and snort more coke."

A short attention span makes everything suck. As lame as it sounds, a long attention span makes everything kinda cool, even stuff that sucks. Can't really make a fair choice until you can do both.

P.S. -- this is the same kind of thing, in a way, referred to as "plys" in chess and applicable to poker. A more complex subject than poker can stack plys in an at least as interesting pattern, whether that subject be people and real life, or movies. Extending the ability to keep a lot of, as it were, balls in the air regarding conscious apprehension of events and possibilities is vital to practical intelligence and an honest evaluation of most anything, and well worth working on whether regarding mathematics or intuition or art. And at the level of the great films, we may well be at least occasionally be talking about things that it is fair to characterize as art.

Apply to interpersonal relationships/women as seen fit.

Or just f*ck them/eat/sleep/poop/watch t.v./die.

[JaBlue]

Blarg:
Wow, that's the most condescending post of yours that I've read. And you're wrong, at least in my case. My attention span is not what is at fault here.

I used to play tournament chess - oftentimes that meant needing to concentrate for 4-6hrs at a time twice a day for 3 days. When I find an interesting subject its easy for me to get wrapped up in it for periods of time longer than the average movie. When I read books like Sometimes A Great Notion I often do so in 3 or more hour intervals and at a slow pace. Do the same thing all the time when reading philosophy. Today I spent 4 hours transcribing a one-minute section of a Wes Montgomery solo by slowing it down half-speed, listening to short sections on repeat, considering the chords he was playing over and which positions phrases were played in and notating it. As for applying one's long attention span to interpersonal relationships and girls, on Sunday I spent 2 hours talking to my father on the phone and am looking forward to a 12-hour train ride [instead of an hour and a half flight] home this Saturday along the Pacific coast with my girlfriend.

I think that you're right that the problem lies in the viewer as far as being able to appreciate classic movies goes, but do not think it has much to do with attention span [for me]. I believe this because while I may not appreciate many classic movies, other persons whose opinions I respect do. The plies concept only holds when the person is aware of them. For me, its easy to be aware of multiple plies in chess, poker, literature, philosophy, art, and so on. Not so much with movies like Seven Samurai. I'm not contending that the plies don't exist or aren't apparent to many viewers, just in the case of Seven Samurai they weren't apparent to me and as a consequence I found the movie to be overly long.

PS having a long attention span does not make people more interesting for me and it does not make things enjoyable that I think suck.

PPS I do not watch TV except for arrested development DVD

[fish2plus2]

yeah, i am the same as jablue. i also played tournament chess, and play high stakes poker. i also dont watch any TV shows. I think Sopranos, 24 and the other shows people on here love are incredibly boring. I havent seen arrested development.

i dont believe i have a short attention span. many of the movies i enjoy are made overseas, and require subtitles.

i meant classics when i said black and white. there are some black and white films that are good such as maltese falcon and raging bull.

i think the problem might be that i value creativity too much, and these films are very dated. For instance, watch a cretive film like Old Boy, and then watch Casblanca. That is exactly what I did, and I couldnt get past 30 minutes of Casablanca. It was a probably a great film in its day, but I dont think it has much relevancy now except as a historical anecdote. Or take Pyscho. If I talked about it to a film student they would probably say "Oh, its so great and it was the first film to blah blah blah". It is nice that it was the first film to do those things, but those things have now been copied over and over again and they have already been ingrained in my mind.

[fish2plus2]

another problem i have with alot of these classics is that there seems to be ALOT of time in the film that just stands still. For instance, 400 blows. I only watched the first 30-45 minutes, but these scenes could have easily been 10-15 minutes. Maybe one of you can explain what I am missing in these scenes. The Deer Hunter is another classic that does this. They just stand around for the first half hour of the movie. Every single scene just drags on and on and on.

Taxi Driver is filmed as us watching a character, but I never get bored.

Maybe I can start a new film style where I just film a person sitting down and eating lunch for an hour. Then everyone can attach some sort of philosophical meaning to the depth to it, and what it means to society blah blah blah.

FWIW, here are some of my favorite films:

old boy, days of being wild, chungking express, apocolyspe now, good fellas, godfather, rushmore, ammores perros, squid and the whale, full metal jacket, clockwork orange.

can blarg, pryor, dom and company please tell me what you consider to be the greatest movies of all time, and then what are you favorite movies of all time. are these lists the same? if they arent, then why do you think there should be a difference between peoples favorite movies and the greatest movies of all time?