Millennials May Actually Care About Classic Movies After All

The New York Post on August 16, 2017 did an article called Millennials don't really care about classic movies. It was based off a so-called poll conducted by FYE.com of 1,000 millennials and 1,000 people over the age of 50. Besides being fairly sloppily written, it asserted that millennials don't watch old movies and find black and white movies boring. Much has been written about this article in the past two weeks, with people offering up vigorous defenses of young people and/or offering up lists of movies that young people should see. That's all well and good but it doesn't address the basic problems with the article. The first of which is simply the fact that the definition of classic movie has evolved over the years whether we are aware of it or not.

Go back to the 1970s when the nostalgia rage kicked into high gear. In 1977, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was 40 years old, Miracle on 34th Street was 30, and Jailhouse Rock with Elvis was 20. It's 2017 now. At this point in time, Star Wars is 40, The Princess Bride is 30, and Titanic is 20. Show me a millennial who hasn't seen Star Wars and I'll show you a weird millennial. The goalposts have moved. Movies that we may or may not necessarily consider "old" are in fact just that. In a couple of years, the first Harry Potter movie will be 20. How many people really look at Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and think "man, that's an old movie!"? But it really kinda is at this point in time. I'm pretty sure there's millennials watching Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Those are movies heading into the classic definition pretty rapidly, too.

Yes, if your definition of "classic movie" is only movies stops on December 31, 1959, you may or may not have a point about millennials. However, if you expand the definition of classic movie to anything 20 years old or older--which seems to me to be a good enough starting point--then yes, millennials are watching classic movies. Just not necessarily the type of classic movie you may be thinking of.

"Ah-ha!" Some old internet troll who hates millennials is probably thinking right now. "You've just proven the point of the Post article! The Post is right! Blasted young people are disemboweling classic movies!"

I don't know about that. And even if they are, I'm not convinced I want to totally throw them under the bus for it, either. But the other issue the Post article fails to take into account is a key one: availability.

40 years ago, you had independent TV stations. These stations would have an eight o'clock movie, a Late Movie, Saturday afternoon horror double features of Universal and Hammer horror movies followed by a Tarzan movie, Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto late night Saturday night, and comedies with the likes of Abbott and Costello, Blondie, The Bowery Boys, The Marx Brothers, Martin and Lewis and Laurel and Hardy. The Eight O'Clock movie and the Late movie were made up frequently of movies from the 30s through to the 60s. You would have an Alfred Hitchcock week or a Humphrey Bogart week or an Universal Monsters week on these stations. None of which happens anymore. There are few if any independent stations left. Those that are left are showing none of the above.

"Yeah," the same cranky old fart troll is saying, "but all that stuff is on DVD!"

Okay. So tell me where you can rent the DVDs of all this stuff. Oh, wait, that's right. You can't. Not really. Once upon  a time there were video rental stores that you could walk into and find this stuff on the shelf. 30 years ago, I could walk into Movies Unlimited and browse the shelves and find a Republic serial or a Hitchcock movie. Those type of stores don't exist anymore. Netflix is pushing streaming over disc and their streaming service mostly consists of their own product. You can't stream Burt Reynolds let alone The Bowery Boys on Netflix. Yeah, you can buy DVDs, but most of the time not in stores. Take a run over to your local Best Buy if you don't believe me. If the movie is more than a couple years old and not a mega blockbuster, you won't find it on the shelf. Seriously. You can't buy Mamma Mia--a movie less than 10 years old--in the store at Best Buy. So how is a young person going to find Charlie Chan? So that leaves ordering the discs through something like Amazon, which means you have to know exactly what you're looking for.

You can't really fault millennials for not watching what they aren't exposed to. The same thing holds up for TV and radio. 30 years ago, stations would show M*A*S*H and All in the Family at 7:00. Nowadays they show 2 Broke Girls or Seinfeld or The King of Queens. There used to be an AM station in Philadelphia that played Big Band music and OTR shows. That station is a Talk Radio station now. In 1987, the oldies station played Billy Haley and the Comets and Lesley Gore. Now they play Huey Lewis and the News and Belinda Carlisle. You can't shake your fist at some 20 year old for not listening to Shake, Rattle, and Roll when the stations won't play it anymore. You can't yell at a 20 something for not listening to Guy Lombardo when the station that played Guy Lombardo replaced him with Rush Limbaugh. And you can't look down on that same 20 year old for not watching Rear Window when Rear Window isn't as accessible as it used to be.

"Yeah, but there's things like the TCM Fathom events! I bet you millennials don't go to that!"

Okay, tell me this. Look at this year's list of TCM Fathom events and tell me how many movies of the 1930s and 40s are on it? Let me answer that for you: one. Casablanca. That's it. Everything else is 1950 on, with quite a few from the 70s and 80s.

This isn't the fault of millennials. If it's anyone's fault, it's the fault of the people doing the programming and running the stores. That's an older folks problem, not a 20 year old's problem. Which, by extension, means that it's not just millennials turning their nose up at older movies. It's people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. I was in Best Buy when Sony released the 1943 Batman serial on DVD about 10 years ago. A guy in his 40s walked up, picked up the box, saw the year of the serial, made a disgusted remark about said year, and put the box back down. And that's Batman we're talking about. Imagine if Sony had released a serial like The Secret Code instead.

Of course, you also have the older folk who feel the need to apologize for old movies. Leonard Maltin did an introduction on the DVD of The High and The Mighty that was absurd in the extreme. He felt the need to explain that it wasn't like a modern movie and moved at a slower pace. Umm, Leonard: the people who are going to watch The High and The Mighty are already aware of that. You don't need to explain it as if you're apologizing for the movie not being like The Fast and The Furious.

So yes, if you want to blame the "slow death of movies from the golden age"--assuming there is such a thing going on--on anyone, blame it on the older folks. If you don't expose the young folks to that stuff, then yes, they aren't going to see it. Truth to tell, my parents didn't necessarily expose me to the old movies I watched. They happened to be on TV, so that's what I saw. If I was 10 now instead of 1980, I probably wouldn't have seen all those old movies because they wouldn't be on.

On the flip side, think of it this way. If the trend continues, in 40 years there will be 20 year olds who haven't watched Star Wars and cranky old people writing articles wondering what was wrong with them. Now that's something to think about.

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

There's an odd thing about The Phantom Menace. During the actual act of watching it, it doesn't really come off as being a bad movie. For the most part the actors range from competent to great, the plot line is intriguing, the pace is good, and there's plenty going on. But, once you stop and think really hard about it, the vitriol comes out and people curse the day they heard the name George Lucas.

Mind you, I can easily name a dozen or more Sci-Fi films that are way, way worse than this. The worst Star Trek movie, Star Trek V, makes this look like Casablanca. And this isn't even the worst Star Wars film ever (hello, Star Wars Holiday Special). For that matter, it's not even the worst of the theatrical Star Wars movies (hello, Clone Wars). But undoubtedly, it is the single most hated film in the franchise.

That's a tragedy since it's actually not a bad movie at all.

Of course much of the hate, besides being directed at Lucas, is directed at Jar Jar Binks, the eponymous comic relief. But as I pointed out previously, Jar Jar isn't even the film's biggest problem. He may be it's most obvious, but not it's biggest.

The biggest issue with the movie is  the same problem that some of the newer James Bond movies have had: it's too much of a cut and paste job. We're not only getting the same basic story, we're getting too many of the same exact scenes. This is most obvious during the film's big finale. It's a mash-up of the finales of the previous three films: the big space battle to destroy the evil Space Base (Star Wars), the light saber duel to the death (Empire Strikes Back), and the primitive planet natives rising up against the evil technologically advanced empire (Return of the Jedi). Mind you, almost all of the sequels and prequels repeat elements. It just comes off as slightly more pronounced here due to the long wait between Jedi and this.

I suspect that the long wait between films is also what doomed it to be a let down. After all, a generation of fans had a decade and a half to wonder what things were like prior to the events of the first movie. How did the Empire rise? What was Darth Vader like when he was Anakin Skywalker? What were the Clone Wars anyhow? Kids played with the toys and imagined their own adventures and had in their minds eye exactly what the prequels would be like.

So naturally when this movie came out and we find out the Emperor rose to power by manipulating a war caused by taxation and Anakin Skywalker was a ten year old who said "Yippee!", a bunch of adults threw a galaxy sized hissy fit. And that hissy fit has only grown in the 18 years since the film first debuted. Screams of Lucas ruining people's childhood have resounded to Dantooine and back by now. Which, of course, is just plain silly. Especially since this film--as almost all of the Star Wars films are--is really a children's film. It wasn't made for 40 year old men wearing Princess Leia costumes and play with action figures. It was made, as the original film was, for ten year old kids who play with action figures and who are far more likely to dress like a Jedi.

But then again, wars have been fought and dictators placed in power over more ridiculous things than taxes. And what exactly did people think a ten year old Anakin would be like? Did they expect him to run around chopping people down with a light saber?

If I sound snobbish and dismissive of the fans, understand that I myself am a Star Wars fan. I'm old enough to have seen the first film on it's original release in the theaters. I played with the toys. I've read some of the books and comic books. I played Star Wars video games on the Atari 2600. I was a member of the fan club and read the fan club newsletter (Bantha Tracks!) back in the day. I even cherished the disco version of the theme song put out by Meco!

I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the films had actually been made in episodic order. If this had actually been the first film in the series, would it still be as hated? I tend to doubt it. The action sequences are first rate.
Liam Neeson, Samuel L. Jackson, Natalie Portman, and Ewan McGregor all do first rate jobs. Darth Maul is a menacing enough villain, even if--like Bobba Fett before him--he doesn't quite live up to his potential. Yeah, Jar Jar is a bit annoying, but no more so than any other comic relief character before him.

Am I saying this is a perfect Star Wars film? Of course not. It has it's issues. All movies do. But the grown men in the Princess Leia costumes screaming that this was a rape of their childhood and the worst thing that ever happened to them need to get a bit of a grip. If this is the worst movie you've ever seen, I'm guessing you haven't seen that many movies. And if this film destroyed all happy memories of your childhood, then maybe your childhood wasn't as happy as you remember it being. And if this was the worst thing to happen to you ever, I'm guessing nobody you know ever died.

At the end of the day, we're talking about something that's just a movie. It's not the worst movie of all time or even the worst sequel of all time. Sure, it's the worst of the episodic Star Wars movies, but--like the worst James Bond movie--it's still better than most other series films out there. It's still entertaining. It had one job to do--to set up the other prequels and make you want to see those prequels. It succeeded in that. It actually did make me curious to see where the story would go. There's a lot of serials I can't say that about. You really want to see a sequel that systematically sets out to destroy everything you liked about the original film? Try Jaws: The Revenge or the Smokey and the Bandit sequels. This film looks like the greatest film of all time compared to them!

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)

Let's start with the answer to the question on everyone's mind: yes, Star Wars The Force Awakens is a good movie. It is, in fact, the movie you've been looking for. As someone who didn't especially hate the Prequel Trilogy, I do have to admit that this one spanks those three and puts them in a corner shame facedly.

It's 30 years after Return of the Jedi. The Galactic Empire has given way to the equally evil First Order and the Rebel Alliance has become the Resistance. Worse yet, Luke Skywalker has disappeared and everyone wants to find him. The bad guys so that the last of the Jedi can be destroyed and the good guys so they can get his help.

Enter into this  X-Wing pilot Poe Dameron (Oscar Issacs). He gets a map to Luke's location and hides it with his droid before being captured. Ex-Stormtrooper Finn (John Boyega) helps him escape and the droid itself is found by beautiful scavenger Rey (Daisy Ridley). Rey and Finn team up with a couple of familiar faces to get the droid back to the Resistance, fighting back the First Order and Big Bad Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) every step of the way.

That's all I'm saying about the plot. To say more would ruin the fun and surprises of the movie and that would be criminal.

The three new leads are all appealing, especially Ridley and Boyega. They get the bulk of the movie's screen time and deservedly so since this is really their journey as heroes. They are this generation's Han and Leia. She's scrappy and resourceful, he's the reluctant hero who manages to come through in a pinch. They're terrific and welcome additions to the mythology.

Speaking of which, yes, the original trio of heroes are here. Harrison Ford slips back into the role of Han Solo in a way that suggests he never left it. Certainly he does better here than in his last Indiana Jones film. Carrie Fisher acquits herself nicely as an older and battle weary General Leia Organa.Other favorites such as Peter Mayhew's Chewbacca and Anthony Daniels' C-3PO likewise show up. They're always welcome to see and they blend seamlessly with the new cast. Ford, in particular, has great chemistry with the newcomers.

This thing zips along, nicely balancing character, humor, and action. One of the things the movie does right is not overstuffing the action at the expense of character development. We get to know everyone in the movie, which better helps us to invest in them and care what happens. The action is as spectacular as ever, but it's not overdone. Some movies have so much action that your eyes tend to glaze over after a while and you wait for something meaningful to happen. This one finds the right balance. As for the humor, it's a merciful return to the wit and dialogue of the originals and not the toilet humor of the Prequels. 

The movie is filled with nods and throwbacks to the Original Trilogy. Some may argue that the film is essentially a beat for beat remake of Star Wars or a Star Wars Greatest Hits collection, but despite that it works in a way the Prequel Trilogy couldn't.  Just like Jurassic World, this movie understands what we want out of Star Wars and gives it to us on a grand scale. It actually feels like Star Wars. The biggest knock on the Prequel Trilogy is that it doesn't seem to be part of the same series as Original Trilogy. This does.  Best of all, it does the one thing that a Star Wars movie should do: it makes us want to see the next film in the series. 

The only bad thing about all this is that Disney didn't see fit to release the 3D version on Blu Ray yet. The 3D version has one of the most crackerjack gimmick shots of all time--a Star Destroyer poking out into the audience. That shot alone makes it worth seeing in the 3rd Dimension. It is possible that Disney will still release a 3D Blu Ray--they claim they will--but for now fans will have to deal with just plain old 2D.

That said,  if you have not already, see this movie you must. Like it, you will.

About Jar Jar Binks...

Over the summer, I happened to go to the opening night showing of a little movie you may have heard of called Avengers: Age of Ultron. The last of the 20 minutes of previews before the movie was for the forthcoming Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The audience absolutely lost their minds seeing that preview, especially cheering when a particularly geriatric Han Solo showed up in the last shot of the trailer. Make no mistake, I'll be sucker enough to go on opening day as I did for every movie in the prequel trilogy. But it struck me as a strange case of deja vu. After all, wasn't it just 17 years ago that people lined up for Meet Joe Black to see the trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and then walked out of the theater? Wasn't there a strong sense of kid-like excitement, adults playing with their action figures and dressing up in costume for the movie on opening day? And when it came out, what was the reaction?


Sheer, unbridled, near unreasonable anger, hatred, and fury--much of it directed at two people in particular: the very real George Lucas and the very CGI Jar Jar Binks.

I'll save the debate over Lucas and the merits or lack of same of Phantom Menace for another post. I plan on rewatching the six films, quite possibly in episode order again, in the run up to Episode 7. But for now, I want to specifically address the much maligned Jar Jar Binks character.


I come not to defend him per se, nor to praise him nor to bury him. But to provide a little insight into just what went wrong with him and why in the grand scheme of things, he's not as worthless as you may think.


First, let's understand something about movies in general. A movie made in 1999 is not actually made for an audience that was around in 1977. A movie made in 1999 is made for the all-important 18-35 crowd, with a special emphasis on the lower end of that scale. If you were a teenager in 1977, Episode 1 wasn't made for you. I was six when the original Star Wars came out, so I can barely say it was made for my age group. More to the point, Star Wars in general always skewed young. It effectively is made for children. Hence the toys. Forty year olds presumably don't play with action figures (maybe they do?). So the first point in understanding Jar Jar is the fact that he wasn't made for adults; he was made for children. Guess what? Know who likes Jar Jar? Children.


And that's the way Star Wars has always been. There were characters in the original trilogy simply created for action figures. Seriously, did almost any characters in the cantina scene actually do anything? No, but they all had their own action figures. I know because I had (have) those action figures.

The second thing to realize about Jar Jar is what exactly he is and what Star Wars in general is. Star Wars is, in fact, a serial. Rumor has it that Lucas's original idea was to remake Flash Gordon. He settled on an original property, instead, and at one point planned to make 12 episodes. In other words, an actual 12 chapter serial. What serial fans know about but the average movie fan doesn't is that the serials had a habit, especially in the 1930s, of tossing comic relief into the action. Republic serials, generally considered the best serials in the business, were also uniformly the worst at comic relief. From 1936-1938, they tried again and again, mostly with Smiley Burnette or a pair of yokels called Oscar and Elmer. Time and again, the problem with these characters came to the foreground. The serial would be moving along at a nice clip and then it would come screeching to a halt for the so called comedy act to do their shtick for two minutes, then things would continue. The comedy bits would nearly ruin otherwise great serials like The Painted Stallion. Certain B Westerns (Durango Kid) would have a similar problem with the film stopping dead for bad Country tunes to be sung.


Jar Jar was obviously built around those type of comics. That seems to be a primary reason why the story seems to stop for him to do some schtick or another. I will give Lucas this, however. Jar Jar's routines are infinitely shorter than Oscar and Elmer and there's at least an attempt to integrate his routines into what's going on.


Finally, there's the fact that he's not as totally useless as you may think. He does do some stuff in the trilogy beyond be a goof. He leads the heroes to the Gungans in Phantom Menace, which helps set up the battle of Naboo. He also ends up making Palpatine the Emperor by giving him Emergency Powers in Attack of the Clones. No, that wasn't a good thing for the heroes, but it does help explain how Palpatine becomes Emperor. Compare that to the character of Alfrid in The Hobbit trilogy: here's a character who does absolutely nothing but snivel and act cowardly and greedy. He has no redeeming moment saving Bard's kids nor does he end up dying like we pretty actively hope he does. Compared to that, Jar Jar is the greatest sidekick in movie history.

Interestingly, going back to point two for a moment, there were comic relief sidekicks in serials who did occassionally do something smart. Smiley Burnette fumbles his way through the first Dick Tracy serial, but does save Tracy on at least one occassion. So yeah, Jar Jar is clearly based off that type of character.


So lighten up. Besides, Phantom Menace has worse problems than just Jar Jar. But like I said, that's for another post.

Thoughts on Star Wars 7, 8, & 9

So, today it was announced that Disney has bought LucasFilm and will proceed to make Star Wars episodes 7-9, with the first one to be released in 2015. This news has been met with much rejoicing and some questions by fans, the main question being "will Disney release the original cuts of the films on Blu Ray?" Truthfully, that's an irrelevant question. IF it happens, and that's a mighty big if, it won't be for a few years anyway. The questions that should be asked should be asked of this new series that's coming.  For instance:
Who is going to direct these films (Lucas said he won't)?
Who is going to be in them?
Most importantly, what the heck are they going to be about anyhow?

I have some worthwhile suggestions for the first question anyhow. Spielberg is the most obvious choice, though I don't see him doing it. The directors of the Marvel Cinematic Universe films are also top suggestions. Anyone who can make a movie like Thor that interesting the way Kenneth Branagh did knows how to blend fantastic worlds and real characters and make it work. Joe Johnston has two very serial-like films under his belt: Captain America and The Rocketeer. And it goes without saying that if Joss Whedon's The Avengers isn't the all time best comic book movie ever, it's in the top five. Frankly, those are the directors you want attached to Star Wars. I think they, better than anyone else, would get it. Hell, they might even get it better than George Lucas himself!

The question of casting ties into the what will it be about question, and both are kinda sticky. As it's 7, 8, and 9 we're talking about, does that mean that Han, Luke, and Leia will be in them? If so, who is going to play them. I may be speaking for myself, but at this point, I don't want to see Harrison Ford, Mark Hammil, and Carrie Fisher reprising those roles. As much as I enjoyed Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the first shot of Ford as Indy had me thinking "Oh my God! He looks ancient!" That was in 2008. By the time of 2015, Ford will likely look a day older than Moses. Hammil has looked like the Joker for a while now. As for Fisher...while she doesn't look awful, she sure doesn't look like she did in 1983. And while that statement may lead to a "so, like...duh!" comment from the readers, contemplate this: by the time the new Star Wars comes out, Fisher will be almost 60. Show of hands of people who really want to see a 60 year old Princess Leia.

Oddly enough, however, there really isn't anyone in Hollywood right now that I would care to see in these parts. I suppose an argument can be made for Robert Downey, Jr. as Han, Hayley Atwell as Leia, and Chris Evans as Luke, but I'd rather see them in the Iron Man and Captain America films (or The Avengers 2) than in Star Wars.

I suppose the original actors can be brought back in cameos or as the wise old sages and new heroes and villains be introduced. Then again, the wild age difference between Ford and Fisher would really come to light if such a thing were to happen. And I don't want people to think I'm just being mean spirited towards Ford. He's a fine actor--always has been--but hell, even Roger Moore recognized when he was too old to be playing James Bond. Sorry, Mr. Ford, your day as swashbuckling action hero is sadly over.

This brings up what the film will be about. This is perhaps even stickier than who should be in it. After all, if you watch the films now, you can plainly see that the saga goes full circle. Annakin Skywalker meets the Jedis, grows up to try to become a Jedi, loses his mind and goes evil killing little kid Jedi (but no actual adult Jedi...hmmm....), finds his kids, kills the Emperor, and dies doing so theoretically redeeming himself. At the end of Return of the Jedi, the main bad guys are dead and the heroes have triumphed. So what exactly can follow? What can possibly be the story? Is it 30 years later and some far flung remnat of the Empire rises up to cause trouble? Is it right after Jedi and the messy clean up has to happen? That one might make for a better one-off movie, but if it's the previous idea, then the danger becomes that the films just end up repeating themselves. We already kind of had that with Phantom Menace, which borrowed it's climax from all three previous films. Do we want it again? More to the point, do we need it?

I would argue no. When I was a lot younger, I really wanted Indiana Jones four. As I got older, I realized how little such a film was needed. And when it finally came out, while it was fun, I felt no need for a fifth film. I still hope that Spielberg gives up the idea of a fifth Indiana Jones film and just carries on with Tintin or some such. Similarly, now that the prequels are out--and one can argue the necessity of the prequels, too--I don't feel that 7, 8, and 9 are absolute necessities. In fact, I'd rather Disney not make these movies but instead concentrate on the Marvel films. I know they'll make the Marvel movies regardless, but I'm far more excited about those possibilities than anything that will go on in the future Star Wars universe. But, that's just me.