Thirty-six Most Dated Movies

Al Pacino goes undercover as a Village Person. Enjoy.

This must have seemed bold and timely back at the heyday of the drug-fueled counterculture. The modern equivalent would probably feature a senile version of Peter Fonda trying to figure out which one of his teenage grandkids is stealing his prescription Oxycontin.

This was apparently before anyone realized how big of a joke hair metal bands were or that the music business was populated exclusively by hedonistic scumbags and oppurtunistic labels. Shocking expose at the time, though, I'm sure.

Made back in the day when the people who hijacked airplanes were secular, white Europeans, who were only interested in cash, and would prefer to stay alive to use said cash.

.................................. (Spoiler) ...................................... The legalization of abortion and subsequent normalization of promiscuity render this movie a meaningless curiousity to modern audiences.

This movie is so out dated even the 'futuristic computer' fonts and hideous orange-brown color schemes will elicit chuckles (and this is coming from a Cleveland Browns fan). The dystopian future schtick is a staple of Hollywood, but per usual the genre dates terribly. The tag line reads 'In the not-too-distant future, wars will no longer exist. But there will be Rollerball.' No and No. And no bell-bottoms or chest hair fetishes either. Sorry, James Caan.

I suppose it made sense in 1972, and may have even been considered funny, but so was The Brady Bunch. Today where debt, economic decay, disillusionment, and massive unemployment have decimated the director's native Spain, some might long for a time when the worst perils facing society were aristocrats snorting coke and humping each other. The influence of Catholicism, Franco and fascism is now only a distant memory for most of Europe, as is Bunuel and his tiresome surrealism. This film none the less denies the mundane & obvious allure of social status evident in a modern world where no self-respecting pleb can be taken seriously without the latest iphone and designer sunglasses. For all his contempt, he never offers any kind of criticism on human behavior that had depth or lasting resonance here. This genre had pretty much been run dry (and much more effectively) by the likes of Renoir, Struges, Welles, La Cava, countless Monty Python sketches, and Bunuel himself years earlier, but Bunuel was always one careful to repeat himself.

This movie was almost prophetic in its timing, released months before the Three Mile Island fiasco. Subsequent disasters at the Chernobyl and Japanese Fukushima Daiichi reactors now render The China Syndrome's crisis paltry in comparison. In thirty years this movie has been sapped of all its punch. We now oddly live in a detached resignation regarding the ticking time bombs in our back yards. In recent years the nuclear power industry has actually gained some popular support in the US. Kind of a scary thought.

Virtual reality was a big fad in the early Nineties but horribly primitive. I've not seen this in about fifteen years, so my memory is hazy, but I'd not be surprised if there was a scene showing the protagonist drinking Crystal Pepsi and reading Omni magazine. ...Now I've really dated myself.

Designed as a cautionary tale, this movie is admirable in its ambition but pales in comparison to the absurdity and complexity of real life after September 11th. In fact it's actually quite a quaint, mundane, little movie to us modern viewers. What, no color-coded terrorism warning system? No 'freedom fries'? No underwear bombs? No 'truthers'? There were protests at the time by Muslim groups concerning their portrayal as terrorists bent on killing innocent New Yorkers, now an ironic footnote. Unlike the movie, real life has never returned to normal, and we seem uncomfortably flexible on the whole torture and detainment thing.

Conceived as a drama, it became an unintentional comedy within a few years. And kitsch almost immediately.

See above.

With a bi-racial president, this movie appears not just dated, but offensive to all races (but, bizarrely, still enjoyable). A 'blaxploitation' remake of an older, equally mediocre crime flick, Black Caesar implicitly insinuates physical force is necessary to achieve success if you live in low-income areas, revenge is a natural reaction to oppression, and simply putting 'black' in the title is just as good as actually coming up with orginal, meaningful movies for cinematically neglected black audiences.

Clever as it was, Billy Wilder's Oscar winner seems bland by modern standards. Like Alfie, The Apartment speaks to certain era in time, and only that era. Its plot, today, seems perfectly appropriate for a CBS sitcom or Ashton Kutcher date movie. It was out of date within a decade.

This largely forgotten movie has nostalgic value for me, so I'll be kind. The President's Analyst manages to capitalize on three largely passe trends of the Sixties: hippies, psychoanalysis, and the Cold War. Needless to say, time has not been so kind as I.

You could only really appreciate this movie if you grew up in the mid-Nineties. Movies who live by appealing to pop culture and youth sensibilities usually die by it. This movie for all its glory in that decade has had a rather short shelflife.

This list seems to prove there is a tendency among Sixties counterculture types to make overtly political statements and impulsive choices without regard to future consquences, but with Nixon as president who can blame them. Wild in the Streets is perhaps the best look into the zeitgeist of those knee-jerk reactionaries. The plot is too silly to explain in detail; it includes LSD, lowering the voting age, and square authority figures. Time, ironically, has shown even when hippies take power they are square and awkward.

Actually one of my favorite Bond movies, The Living Daylights is no more noteworthy for being dated than any other Bond film, except for one interesting aspect. The very idea of James Bond potentially sharing a foxhole with Osama bin Laden is too much for me to bear. That's right, James Bond battles along side a vague rebel force against the Russians in Afganistan. Obviously it's made up, but still.

There is also the cliched Cold War divided-Berlin, a giant 80's boom box, the theme song by one-hit wonder a-ha, and, if my recollection is correct, 007's last cigarette. I assume Brosnan-era Bond had a nicotine patch under the sleeve of his tux.

It's an unpopular but worthy observation to note this anti-war 'masterpiece' is gravely naive. Jean Renoir portrays war as futile, arbitrary, outdated, and elitist. WWII was precipitated by precisely this mindset of appeasement and baseless optimism. Aristocratic snobbery was the least of Europe's concerns in 1937. Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin were all lower-class populists hungry for conquest, while the bluebloods Chamberlain and FDR dreaded the possibility of war. It was the jingoistic concepts of nationalism, duty, and honor (the very bane of Renoir and GI) that preserved Western Civilization and bailed-out France eight years later, contradicting many of this film's now celebrated platitudes. The centuries-old cycle of humiliation and hatred was only ended by outsiders after both Germany and France were rendered militarily and politically irrelevant. Although many claim it was too far ahead of its time to have made a difference, by my estimation, it was decades too late.

Though the melodramatic bromance between Boeldieu and Rauffenstein plays out unconvincingly, that's hardly the most ridiculous aspect. Negating the heroic escape, a middle-aged Rosenthal would likely have been shipped off to a concentration camp a generation later.

Though funny, this film should make little sense to any jive turkey under forty.

An ode to datedness itself, fittingly, the original Austin Powers is now synonymous with irritating impersonations and terrible fads from two non-consecutive decades.

Perhaps it was a revelation in war-time England that people are attracted to other people who aren't their spouse, but it seems laughably dated in an era where half of marriages end in divorce, and marriage itself has been largely stripped of whatever pretense of 'sanctity' it formerly possessed. In a modern update, the couple would have statistically split up regardless of infidelity sooner or later, then gone into years of fruitless counseling. And the two would-be-lovers would probably have wed eventually and lived mildly contented lives, anticlimactically, with lovers on the side.

The problem, aside from it's irritatingly obvious need to appear hip and contemporary (e.g. lesbian analyst, obligatory & nonchalant signature Seventies' cinema tit shot, teenagers using 'grass,' impossibly spacious Manhattan lofts, disco songs, abstract 'color field' art, etc), is the fact the film feels overwhelmingly humorless, estrogen-soaked, and empowering, like a bad clone of a Woody Allen film by a feminist.

Legendary actor Laurence Olivier is renowned for his Shakespearian roles, and devotion to the craft, but this 1965 version of the classic play goes awry particularly as result of Olivier's depiction of the titular moor (traditional stage acting is notably histrionic, and the Othello role even more so). To start with, he is supposed to be a Mediterranean/Berber character but looks more like a Sub-Saharan African, or worse a Nineteenth century vaudevillian act. Even if his blacker-than-night make-up wasn't so distracting, he mugs and overreacts in nearly every emotionally intense scene he's in, practically thrusting himself in the spotlight, casting a flailing shadow on the more nuanced supporting roles, especially Frank Finlay's excellent Iago. This simply doesn't compare to any of the more immersive filmed versions of the play, Orson Welles's 1952 movie in particular. More recent versions put the great Olivier to shame.

Count the clichés while watching this movie, you'll probably lose count by the second act. James Woods is one of my favorite actors but even he should've been smart enough to know he couldn't save this bomb. I suppose it is possible, considering the title and excessive & formulaic plot, that the creators were actually trying to make a satire. But I can't be sure, the whole thing is played with a straight face. Modern audiences would probably laugh at this today; barely beating out Cobra for most ridiculously clichéd Eighties cop movie.

Remember Y2k? There is a good chance you don't. Don't bother looking it up, smart people didn't worry about it then, so don't you now. Leave it to writer/producer James Cameron to lead the way in capitalizing on an awful fad. This film ironically mocks absurd predictions while undermining complex social issues, but is itself based on several supremely stupid premises such as the proliferation of virtual reality, dystopian futurescape/police states, the longevity of gangsta rap and grunge music, millenarianism, unchecked police brutality and LA gang violence, etc. Some of these trends were already passe by 1995. Like the paranoia surrounding Y2k, Strange Days is now relegated to status as second-rate '90s nostalgia. In comparison, a film like Gattaca doesn't play down to its audience and because of that, works. And opposed to a daft yet fun film like Demolition Man, Strange Days actually takes itself seriously, and is therefore so much more idiotic. It is, after all, only written by James Cameron. Bonus points if you spotted the anachronistic reference to the LA Rams in the future tense. Kathryn Bigelow has since wisely escaped Cameron's orbit.

Forty plus years later this once fashionable Jean-Luc Godard experiment now appears as stagnant as a Le Corbusier housing project or a Guy Debord essay. The film contains an absurdly annoying whispered narration, pointless name dropping and literary allusions designed to appeal to the one percent (and by that, I mean the percent of people who know who Bertolt Brecht is), awful intertitles, clunky and improvised dialogue uttered by beautiful and clueless amateurs (the hallmark of his movies), and an aimless story with political interpretations jammed in whether they fit or not. This is the type of crappy avant-garde film that only could be taken seriously in the late Sixties, when anything new, shocking, or politically unconventional seemed like a good idea. Like most bad experimental movies of that era (e.g. Head, Wavelength, Sleep, Empire, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, and every other Kenneth Anger or Jonas Mekas home movie, etc.), this movie appears almost entirely unscripted and preoccupied with style, contemporary politics, imagery, or the idea of filmmaking. His aim in filmmaking was admittedly to spark revolution, that revolution seemingly was born and died within a few months in 1968. Communism died a slower and more convulsive death. Needless to say, Godard has spent the last twenty years on defense, trying to justify the failed Maoist ideology and unwatchable style he married himself to in this era. It is my contention Godard will go down the greatest cinematic fashion victim in history.

The Sean Connery character solves a case of repressed trauma/ social phobia, borderline personality disorder, and kleptomania merely with amateur Freudian psychology, blackmail marriage, verbal abuse, and rape (which if you remember Goldfinger, seemed to be a recurring theme for Connery that year). We know he is an amateur psychologist because we see him read a book labeled 'Psychology.' These aren't taboo topics, but the film is played as light drama and even romance, and he's practically cast as the 'hero' in the story. He is the most normal and identifiable one at least. The story makes no sense, it never being clear other than physical attraction what a suave businessman sees in this frigid, suicidal basketcase. As with most later Hitchcock films, the cinematography is fabulous but a lot of the sets and backdrops look out of date. The hunt scene is particularly bad and is probably more apt to produce laughs than chills, which actually sums up the film pretty well. The film is more nuanced than I give it credit for, but it's still silly and unintentionally creepy.

Considering this is a pro-eugenics film, the title is, of course, a little ironic and more than a little derogatory. The film takes place before Nazi Germany, in a quaint world where social degeneracy is purely an objective, genetic matter. Where no upstanding citizen can possibly descend from a thieving, selfish 'house full of idiots and cripples.' A world where mentally ill people are readily identified as criminal, sex obessive, slow, addicted, or physically unattractive, etc., (which would just as appropriately have described the Kennedys, interestingly). Still the film admits the flawed, crackpot nature of selective breeding while basically endorsing the premise as a public service of a paternalistic government. Sterilization is literally compared to having a tooth pulled, evidence then established medical science was alarmingly ignorant of the complexity of mental health or any appreciation of civil liberties or basic ethics. The film does have a 'happy ending,' the protagonist is revealed to not have a defective gene pool because she was only adopted by her dead beat family. How's that for upbeat?

It should be said, any film that shows its date within the first twenty seconds actually does represent the shock of the modern age pretty well, though, you still should chuckle at Orson Welles being overwhelmed by the variety of Swanson's dinners. Has CGI art taken over the art galleries? Are super intelligent robots going to replace human beings? Will pre-fabricated houses and communes lead to the breakdown of family and society? Are there faboulous space adventures, or a genetic arms race? No, and actually it is a little dispiriting to learn in forty years there still isn't a robot smart enough to vacuum the floor without ripping electrical cords out of the outlets. While we may be stressed by technology, that is not new, and we manage it relatively easily. Don't be fooled by the ominous moog synthesizer, nobody but religious fanatics, fringe weirdos, and old folks were ever really freaked out by gay marriage or e-mail; Moore's Law and technological advances aside, social progress is about as lumbering as a mammoth.

Unfortunately, If, a nonliteral story of young, British rebels gunning down their oppressors, was rendered out-of-style by our own modern, American variation of youth rebellion, which happens to be literally shooting up our schools. A reversal on Marx's old maxim, this is a case of tragedy following farce.

In addition to its celebration of the House Un-American Activities Committee, Big Jim McLain also upholds that holy trinity of hidebound American culture: god, country, and the traditional family. Ex-communists in this movie are depicted as a remorseful and guilt-stricken lot, which makes all their snitching all that less painful, I assume. Commies are depicted as slanderous or stereotyped caricatures, either brainwashed dupes, racists, duplicitous college professors & infiltrators, murderous saboteurs, or inept workers (as opposed to McLain who is referred to as 'competent' twice in one minute by two separate people. Even by Fifties' standards the writing is pretty lame). James Arness' patriotic threats to pound suspected Communist Party members into submission is as amusing as it is exemplary of America's real attempts to stamp out dissent in any form by any means. McLain's adoration of the Constitution curiously seems to omit the First Amendment.