Some things get better with age. Sex and facial hair are good examples. Two of the happiest days in my life were when I broke the 9 minute mark, and when my moustache finally connected with my beard. Other things don’t handle the years quite so well. Boobs usually sag into this category. Movies, however, can fall into either category. Some age much better than others, and it generally depends on fads.
I’ve never seen all of Scarface. If I’d had some Cuban friends growing up I’m sure I would’ve seen it, but there were no Cubans in my hometown (too far inland, I guess), and now it’s too late. I’ve tried to watch it before, but it’s so dated I can’t get into it. It’s not the synthy music or the fact that Michelle Pfeiffer was still hot. It’s the cocaine. How am I supposed to relate to a movie about a drug empire built on coke when nowadays even Stephanie from Full House is doing crystal meth? You think she’d give a shit if she walked in on Tony Montana snorting mountains of coke? She’d probably mumble “Pussy” through her dissolving teeth before proceeding to fire up another hit of crank and fantasize about a three-way with the Olsen twins.
Rocky, on the other hand, has aged pretty well. It’s 33 years old, but audiences still connect with it because it doesn’t rely heavily on any 70s trends. Rocky doesn’t have a roller-derby disco dance-off with Apollo Creed: they beat the hell out of each other. That’s a time-honoured tradition. How does Rocky train for the fight? He runs up stairs – a practice that’s been with us at least since Anne Frank’s time – and punches large slabs of cow. That shit is timeless. Maybe there are some vegetarians out there who think that shows excessive cruelty to animals, but with any luck the rest of us will have eaten you fucks before Rocky’s 35th anniversary. Then we’ll commemorate the occasion with a big veal dinner courtesy of the descendents of the same cow carcass that Rocky tenderized. But I digress. My point is, the date would’ve been stamped on that movie if Rocky had trained on the 70s equivalent of a Bowflex.
There’s one thing that’ll make a movie seem dated faster than time itself: fads. They come and go so fast, within a year people can’t watch a fad-infused movie without cringing. It took producers a while to learn to be selective about which fads to put in a movie. They must’ve learned a hard lesson with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, a film that featured a climactic battle in which the Turtles defeated the bad guys using a combination of martial arts and break-dancing in the middle of a Vanilla Ice concert. Luckily, some fads were so short-lived that Hollywood didn’t have time to put them in a movie. I bet they had ideas, though. The odds are pretty good that at least one producer, after polishing off a kilo or so of cocaine, started off his pitch with, “Imagine Searching for Bobby Fischer… with Pogs.”
~ Greg Osadec
