New Classics

Who likes being disappointed?  Let down?  Unsatisfied?

Me.  HA. Hardly.  No one does.  Obviously.

All this happens, of course, when your expectations are so high your actuality has nowhere to go but down.  We’re often our own worst enemies with this, but sometimes it’s totally not our fault.  When everyone tells you something is so great and you’ve been hearing about this greatness for years, what’s your reaction to making a personal determination - once you’ve experienced it - that this thing isn’t so great?  I tend to feel like I’m not in on the joke.  If you’re a natural snob you’ll likely think it means you’re superior to common norms. But ultimately, you’re disappointed.

This happens to me frequently with movies, which is why I’m Opening Night Olga.  I don’t read reviews for films I want to see and don’t want to hear your opinions about them either because I don’t want to be clouded (yes, I AM that impressionable).  I can handle this well with new releases, of course, but obviously have a hard time with those life-classic-best-movies-of-all-time films.  I really want to become a true cineaste and whittle down that list of Top 100 Movies of All Time, or whatever, but my brief foray into this project has been so marginally disappointing I had to stop after Taxi Driver.  I know.  I should probably be forbidden to watch another movie again given the pedigree of this film but really, aside from a scarily good Jodie Foster, the film left me pretty meh.  I do apologize to DeNiro enthusiasts, but when you’ve seen Travis Bickle caricatured for most of your adult life it’s hard to look at the performance objectively.  And that’s exactly the problem:  too much talk, not enough watch.  Expectations have been set too high.  Much of it, unfortunately, feels derivative because we’ve seen the clips, it’s been overdone or the technology is so outdated you can’t focus on the film. 

I get that Taxi Driver is a classic.  It’s just not my classic.  It doesn’t speak to me or my world view or where I am in my life right now (or when I first watched it), which is why we need new classics, and not in a New Coke kind of way.  Each generation needs to reset the bar on this ‘classic film’ idea and develop their own list of films that not only speak to the time, but also provide for where moviemaking is at that moment.  I'm absolutely not worthy of this task on a definitive level, but I’ll show you mine if you show me yours ...

Tell me – what’s on your new classic list?