comedy in film and telvision
Oct. 28th, 2010 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerThis post replaces one I had been considering about comedy, and how I just don't get or enjoy about 90% of what seems to be wildly successful in TV/film comedy these days. But I need to think more about that post. So here instead,
An interesting exchange on
why one person can't relate to films made before he was born
and another is totally addicted to classic films
This was particularly interesting to me this afternoon because there was an extended discussion in the office that I slipped in and out of about the comparative film-blindness of one of the younger team members (born 1988--this freaks me out a bit: he's got his first professional job and can grow a beard within a couple of days of shaving, but he's young enough--born two years after I graduated college--to be my son). He's never seen any of the Star Wars movies, or Top Gun, or Predator (or pretty much any other Schwarzenegger movies), or any of the Alien films, or Red Dawn, or... (you can probably guess the gender of the participants in the conversation by now).
It's always a bit disorienting to realise how much of one's cultural frame of reference is older than many of one's peers (broadly speaking). What these discussions above bring up is how imperfectly people who haven't lived with those references may be able to grasp what they mean to those who have.
As an aside, I feel much more in tune with the Siren than with Mr Shone. I find the Marx Brothers much more hilarious than Jack Black or Sacha Baron Cohen, whom I generally just find tiresome. And while I was painting last night, I flipped through Netflix Streaming and pulled up Jimmy Stewart in "Harvey" from 1950 and was enchanted. Perhaps because, like the Siren and some of her readers, I grew up watching films of the 1940s and 1950s, Bacall and Bogart, Hepburn and Tracy, Greenstreet, Lorre, Flynn, Rathbone and their characters seem as real to me as Liam Neeson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ewan McGregor, Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson, or Rachel Weisz.
An interesting exchange on
why one person can't relate to films made before he was born
and another is totally addicted to classic films
This was particularly interesting to me this afternoon because there was an extended discussion in the office that I slipped in and out of about the comparative film-blindness of one of the younger team members (born 1988--this freaks me out a bit: he's got his first professional job and can grow a beard within a couple of days of shaving, but he's young enough--born two years after I graduated college--to be my son). He's never seen any of the Star Wars movies, or Top Gun, or Predator (or pretty much any other Schwarzenegger movies), or any of the Alien films, or Red Dawn, or... (you can probably guess the gender of the participants in the conversation by now).
It's always a bit disorienting to realise how much of one's cultural frame of reference is older than many of one's peers (broadly speaking). What these discussions above bring up is how imperfectly people who haven't lived with those references may be able to grasp what they mean to those who have.
As an aside, I feel much more in tune with the Siren than with Mr Shone. I find the Marx Brothers much more hilarious than Jack Black or Sacha Baron Cohen, whom I generally just find tiresome. And while I was painting last night, I flipped through Netflix Streaming and pulled up Jimmy Stewart in "Harvey" from 1950 and was enchanted. Perhaps because, like the Siren and some of her readers, I grew up watching films of the 1940s and 1950s, Bacall and Bogart, Hepburn and Tracy, Greenstreet, Lorre, Flynn, Rathbone and their characters seem as real to me as Liam Neeson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ewan McGregor, Kate Winslet, Emma Thompson, or Rachel Weisz.
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no subject
Date: 2010-10-29 08:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-29 11:00 am (UTC)Another vote for Harvey, also Arsenic and Old Lace which is filed in the same area of my brain. I don't know if it'll be screened in theatres in the US but the Frank Capra film It Happened One Night is getting a cinema release over here - to my shame I've never seen it but the clips they showed on Film 2010 on the BBC last night made me think I should remedy that.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-01 05:02 pm (UTC)I saw 'It Happened...' many years ago. It struck me as OK, but it has some iconic moments and two good (classic) actors, which I think account for its popularity more than the plot. How come they're doing a cinema release? Is there a new print or...?
no subject
Date: 2010-11-01 08:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-29 11:19 am (UTC)Will reply to comments anon--rushing out the door!
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Date: 2010-10-29 12:05 pm (UTC)Whereas I think Red Dawn is in my top 3 movies of all time, because its AWESOME, most of the students here just don't care about any movie that doesn't have CGI, so even if they've seen it, they don't have strong feelings about it one way or the other.
---crossing my fingers that I used "whom" right so I don't get made of fun :) -----
no subject
Date: 2010-11-01 05:03 pm (UTC)