Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
Tonight let’s talk about things that hold up well and things that don’t. Books, movies, TV shows. Bands. Musical genres. Songs, musicals. Even adult beverages, holiday activities. Anything culture-related.
Anybody want to play?
In case you are new to Medium Cool, these are not open threads.
WaterGirl
As you can see, I think the original Overboard holds up well!
PSA: I posted this right on top of the Pet Calendar A Review post. So if your pets are in Calendar A, don’t forget to check that.
WaterGirl
I don’t think you could pay me to drink a tequila sunrise at this point. Or a 7 and 7 (Seagrams 7 and 7-up). Is that even how you spell 7-up?
Jive Turkin
Monty Python. Doesn’t hold up at all. The gay “jokes” are truly cringe worthy, and generally are just cruel. The show comes off as a bunch of white males who hate everything, but especially any marginalized population. It doesn’t help that several members have become bitter old guys who are anti-woke warriors.
HinTN
@WaterGirl: Nope to all that. I’ll make a margarita from equal parts fresh squoze lime juice, Cointreau and good tequila, preferably reposado. Whiskey, I sip it neat.
piratedan
I had to think on this a bit, but the works of these folks/characters ring true to me George Carlin, Columbo, Bruce Springsteen, Joan Jett, Sue Grafton, Aretha Franklin, CJ Cherryh, Stevie Wonder
Sure Lurkalot
@WaterGirl: I’ll see your Tequila Sunrise and raise you a Harvey Wallbanger (vodka, orange, galliano).
Jeffro
You know what has held up well over the years? Living Colour (the band). They’re still amazing, especially live.
WaterGirl
@Sure Lurkalot: Shudder!
edit: I also used to drink some really sweet red wine at the awesome Italian place in college. On a Friday night, there would be lines around the block to get in. GREAT food.
Suzanne
Funny you mention. I was a 90s teen, and my older two Spawns are very much into some of the pop culture of that era. Which I find weird. I honestly haven’t pushed them toward it. And it’s weird to me what they like from that era, as well as what they don’t care for. They both really like Nirvana and the Cure and Bad Religion. Fortunately, Limp Bizkit, Creed, and Nickelback have not shown up on anyone’s Christmas list. That shit was terrible the first time and has not improved with age.
I did play that horrible “Cum my lady, cum cum my lady, you’re my butterfly sugar baby” song for Spawn the Younger and we were in hysterics about how shitty it is.
Anyway, I think some of the fashion looks adorable on them. Flannels, wide-leg jeans, Clinique Black Honey lip gloss.
WaterGirl
@Suzanne:
That doesn’t ring a bell. Do you know the name of the song?
Wolvesvalley
Jane Austen’s novels — not just over the centuries, but also through multiple re-readings.
Josie
Back in the dark ages, when I met my late husband, he introduced me to music from a radio station out of Louisiana (We were in Austin). I had never heard it before, and I was mesmerized. Two songs that I remember particularly that I still love to this day were When a Man Loves a Woman by Percy Sledge and Try a Little Tenderness by Otis Redding.
Suzanne
@WaterGirl: It’s called “Butterfly“, by some one hit wonder called Crazytown. It was inescapable for a while there. Just terrible.
Matt McIrvin
My daughter got a vintage Walkman and collects Fleetwood Mac and Bowie and Elton John on cassette.
Almost Retired
@Suzanne: Kinda related to this is the continuing omnipresence of 70’s music. After 50 years one expects it to show up in malls and elevators. But among the yutes?
I went to two weddings and one Bat Mitzvah this year (two in Los Angeles and one in Salt Lake City). Most of the music was from the 70’s, with a sprinkling of more contemporary stuff. Music that was 50 years old. I can tell you we were not dancing the Charleston or singing along with “Yes, We Have No Bananas” at my High School prom in 1979.
Btw the event in Salt Lake was the Bat Mitzvah. Betcha didn’t see that coming.
Matt McIrvin
@Jeffro: I think they were ahead of their time.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: DUDE Spawn the Younger is super-into Fleetwood Mac and Stevie Nicks. Which: awesome. But also: that’s your Gramma’s music!
Spawn the Elder did introduce me to K-pop, though, so it’s not all a rehash.
stinger
Held up well: Dick Van Dyke
Craig
Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid holds up. Jokes. Setup, Payoff. Great acting. Katherine Ross. Phenomenally entertaining movie. George Roy Hill is an underrated director.
AliceBlue
@Matt McIrvin: Speaking of Fleetwood Mac, the ten year old granddaughter of a friend has discovered Stevie Nicks and pretty much abandoned Taylor Swift.
Craig
@Suzanne: my buddy’s daughter thinks it’s hilarious that I like Black Pink.
Matt McIrvin
@Jive Turkin: It’s very sad but I have to agree that a lot of Monty Python does not hold up.
MobiusKlein
The Highlander movie did not hold up well at all.
Even when you discount the sequal
mrmoshpotato
@WaterGirl: Wait, “even adult beverages” is about ones we’ll never touch again? 😱
JoyceH
@Wolvesvalley: I hope you’re listing Austen in the DID hold up category!
Something that didn’t hold up – Gone With The Wind! I loved that book in my youth, though the movie seemed to go on forever. I sort of excused the characters’ racism by considering them products of their times, but gradually I came to notice Mitchell’s own racism. The intelligent hard-working slaves were the ones who stayed devoted to their owner’s family and the only slaves who actually wanted freedom were the stupid, violent, lazy ones. Say what? Wouldn’t an intelligent hard-working person long for a system where they actually got paid for their work? A system that did not allow their spouses and children to be sold and sent away?
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Fleetwood Mac went so far out of style they came back in. Remember how in the 90s they were considered cringe boomer music?
eclare
@AliceBlue:
Interesting. Taylor was on Colbert on Wednesday night and mentioned Stevie Nicks as someone she calls for advice.
Fleetwood Mac’s music has definitely held up. Also Jimmy Buffet.
WaterGirl
@Suzanne: Did they wake up some morning to the sound of something something at their window?
Suzanne
In the category of Things That Do Not Hold Up, I will submit Friends. I remember finding Ross annoying on the show at the time, but I caught a few episodes in recent years when Spawn the Elder watched the series, and man….. he’s a misogynist douchebag. Not merely annoying. It didn’t really dawn on me at the time.
Just look at that parking lot
Not holding up: Western movies from the 50’s-60’s portrayals of Native Americans. Especially ones starring John Wayne. Thinking of The Searchers/Mclintock/The War Wagon. Just brutal.
WaterGirl
@Almost Retired: That’s because we had the best music!
HinTN
@Sure Lurkalot: I sporadically loved a Wallbanger back in the day. Might still but haven’t had one in about 45 years.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin:
Oh yes, but I always loved them. Especially Stevie, of course. I love plenty of cringe Boomer music. SuzMom and I were recently discussing Michael Bolton and I submitted that I don’t think he’s terrible.
eclare
@Suzanne:
I agree Friends does not hold up, but I never saw that in Ross. David Schwimmer was the actor pushing for more diversity and had an Asian American and Black girlfriend.
To me the one that really doesn’t hold up is Chandler with his homophobia.
rosalind
what held up well, as exhibited in this thread, are what we lovingly call the “road dogs” – bands that came up in a pre-MTV world where they worked their way up from garage band to club to theatre to arena to coliseum to stadium. by the time they were playing to 60,000 people they knew how to put on a show and play to that last person in the upper level, holding attention without benefit of video screens and costume changes and frenetic lighting. when they are gone that art goes with them.
WaterGirl
@mrmoshpotato: Well, mine were about the ones I’ll never touch again, but if I had been drinking margaritas and bloody marys and mojitos in college, those would have held up well. :-)
WaterGirl
@eclare: Timeless.
Suzanne
If we¡re going to be specific about Cringe Boomer Music, I will proffer:
Holds Up: Gordon Lightfoot
Doesn’t Hold Up: John Denver
Baud
@Suzanne:
C’mon. Even Michael Bolton thinks Michael Bolton is terrible.
stinger
@WaterGirl:
I thought of that song, too! “the sound of something moving past your window in the wind” — I think it holds up!
Scout211
One of Bill Murray’s movies from the 80s that we loved when it first came out was Stripes. We tried to watch it again about 10 or 15 years ago and it was so awful that we couldn’t ’t even get through half of it. I questioned where our minds were that we could think that movie was funny. The misogyny was over the top even though the female leads were the skilled soldiers. The movie making fun of the Army and two stupid idiots getting the better of regular military was not at all funny after the Iraq and Afghanistan wars caused so much destruction and lives lost.
Come to think of it, there are only a few Bill Murray movies that hold up. Maybe Groundhog Day? I’m not even sure about that one.
ETA. Clarity
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: Weirdly, Friends is the main 90s TV show that actually has a Gen Z youth following. I don’t really understand it.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
It’s popular on Reddit
Suzanne
@Baud: I think of Michael Bolton and Celine Dion are singers with a great deal of skill, who make music I generally find overwrought. But it’s not bad. I just don’t like it.
The whole “adult contemporary” genre is really like that for me. Like….. man, I just can’t listen to it.
eclare
Moonstruck is one of my favorite movies, and even though it was released in 1987, when I watch it, it holds up. I think because it’s mainly a family based romcom/drama. The issues the characters face are universal.
JoeyJoeJoe
@Suzanne: one of the band members, who went by Shifty Shellshock, recently died.
eclare
@Baud:
I cannot hear that name without thinking of Office Space. I haven’t watched that in a while, I wonder if it holds up?
Another Scott
@eclare: +1
Fleetwood Mac evolved quite a bit – they’re much more than the absolutely huge giant pop machine of the Rumors days.
E.g. Hypnotized (4:49).
Best wishes,
Scott.
Suzanne
@WaterGirl: Mojitos definitely hold up. Favorite drink of Ernest Hemingway. Who knew a few things about alcohol.
WaterGirl
@stinger: I will have to find that and listen again.
Miss Bianca
Casablanca. Can confirm, after my umpty-umpth viewing last night, that Casablanca hold ups. And then some.
@Jive Turkin: Hmm. I would argue that Monty Python films probably hold up better than the TV series sketches. At least, MP and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian. Not sure about the others.
Chip Daniels
Tom Waits.
I was too young to really appreciate his work in the 80s/ 90s, but am still amazed by it now.
Chip Daniels
@Miss Bianca:
Ditto- Casablanca is one I’ve watched several times and loved each time.
Oh, and Its a Wonderful Life.
Go ahead, tell me its schmalzty, I will nod and say that’s what makes it wonderful.
dm
Speaking of Redford, Sneakers, despite its tech-of-the-time focus, holds up pretty well. One has to ignore the McGuffin, though. Stunning cast. Interestingly, it’s basically the same McGuffin as one of the Now you see me movies made decades later.
And The Sting, of course.
Chip Daniels
@Jive Turkin:
Like National Lampoon, they were created by, and aimed at, privileged young college aged men and reflected the hilarious irreverence and blinkered bigotry of such young men.
eclare
Since it’s the season, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and A Charlie Brown Christmas definitely hold up.
For seasonal short stories, David Sedaris’ SantaLand Diaries and Truman Capote’s A Christmas Memory hold up. I think A Christmas Memory is one of the best short stories I’ve ever read.
WaterGirl
@Chip Daniels:
Miss Bianca
@JoyceH: Hhave to agree with you about GWTW. Well-written book, and I still treasure some of the sarcastic gems uttered by Rhett Butler, but yeah…the Lost Cause mythologizing and racism is utter cringe territory.
@Wolvesvalley: Agree about JA! It’s amazing how modern she feels compared to, say, Frances Burney or any of her contemporaries.
eclare
@Miss Bianca:
Agree on Casablanca.
tam1MI
HOLDS UP: Singin’ in the Rain
DOESN’T HOLD UP: Seven Bride’s for Seven Brothers
tam1MI
For the Christmas edition of Still Holds Up:
IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE
TONYG
In my opinion, most of the rock bands and soul music singers that people remember from the sixties have held up very well — but that’s because the lousy or mediocre ones were long ago erased from the collective memory. For example, people know about the Beatles and Aretha Franklin — but the (very mediocre) Herman’s Hermits were long ago assigned to the Memory Hole, even though they sold a lot of records for a year or so in the mid-sixties.
zhena gogolia
@Wolvesvalley: I agree that Austen’s novels hold up.
Maybe a less commonly held opinion: I can read Jane Eyre once a year.
dm
Annie Hall does not hold up, Diane Keaton is too over the top cringe, and then there’s all of Wood Allen’s baggage.
2001: a space odyssey holds up, despite the fact that the only surviving brand is the BBC and its African Genesis/Naked Ape prehistory.
Unabogie
Definitely aged poorly: Pulp Fiction.
There was no reason to have Tarantino and Eric Stolz dropping the n-word. It was supposed to be edgy but it’s just cringe.
Also aged poorly: Scrubs.
A wonderful group of actors with some truly great moments, ruined by constant gay jokes and fat jokes.
Aged well:
Groundhog Day. Still basically a perfect film.
Miss Bianca
@Scout211: Yeah, I would argue that Groundhog Day holds up. On the other hand, watched Ghostbusters (the original) a while back and found Bill Murray’s character – that I had found really funny back in the day – to be *such* a douche, I couldn’t believe it. Granted, Bill Murray’s stock in trade was douche-y characters, but at least by Groundhog Day we weren’t supposed to be finding them cute.
I think a lot of comedies are just so much a product of their time, it’s lucky to find one that *does* hold up.
zhena gogolia
@Scout211: Try the original MASH movie. So, so cringily misogynistic. Unwatchable.
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: That might make a good Medium Cool?
Douche-y characters in TV, film, and books.
zhena gogolia
Each and every Barbara Stanwyck movie holds up, bar none.
Scout211
That is so true. My sisters and I loved that movie when we were kids (and the TV show Here Comes the Brides*) but they definitely do not hold up.
*Teenage me: Bobby Sherman! Swoon!
Jackie
@Suzanne:
HEY NOW! This Boomer still loves most of his music!
eclare
@Unabogie:
I wondered about Scrubs, which I really liked when it was on tv.
Another movie that holds up due to amazing performances is The Devil Wears Prada. Although Andy’s boyfriend is a jerk. A sequel comes out next summer, I hope it’s good.
Unabogie
@Scout211: Scrooged. Groundhog Day. Lost in Translation. Fantastic Mr. Fox. Life Aquatic. Rushmore. And a perfect cameo in Zombieland.
WaterGirl
@Jackie: I am on Team Jackie on this one. Sorry, Suzanne!
Sure Lurkalot
@Matt McIrvin: Went for a long walk today (Denver…68 degrees…yikes!) and listened to Bowie’s Hunky Dory and Ziggy Stardust. I knew pretty much every lyric to every song. Your daughter has excellent taste!
Unabogie
@eclare: it’s on Hulu so you can try a re-watch. It still has some of my favorite scenes ever, but as a whole it fails. I saw they’re doing a reboot with the original cast. From the top ten list of Stuff No One Asked For.
Just look at that parking lot
Holding up strong : The Scream by Edward Munch. It was painted in the late 1890’s, could have easily been painted this morning.
Greg
@Suzanne: the entire cast of characters of Friends are horrible people. But a show about good people is kind of boring.
JoyceH
@tam1MI:
There are SO many depictions of male-female interactions depicted in movies and books that don’t hold up. Kidnapping a bunch of women isn’t lovable hi-jinx anymore.
There’s a trope that turns up in too many movies for teens to count, and that is the nerd-geek getting the pretty popular out-of-his-league girl just by being persistent. Any young man who takes those movies for life lessons would soon find themselves charged with stalking and slapped with a restraining order. Someone needs to sit those guys down and explain to them – ‘hey, in real life, sometimes the nerd-geek does get the pretty popular girl, but first he has to become a multi-millionaire.’
Suzanne
@Jackie: You fill out my ceeeeeeeensuuuuuuuuuussssssss…..
Sorry. It’s so earnest, so overwrought….. so cringey.
Jackie
@Scout211:
Oh, yes! And David Cassidy.
Gloria DryGarden
@Just look at that parking lot: I concur.
golly
Miss Bianca
@Chip Daniels: Sadly, I’m going to disagree about It’s A Wonderful Life – I will grudgingly concede that it’s a well-made movie, but it’s so goddamn GRIM I am absolutely horrified that it’s considered a Christmas classic. Even the “happy ending” is grim!
On the other hand, A Christmas Carol – in all its manifestations, including Scrooged – speaking of Bill Murray – I will defend to the death!
Mark’s Bubbie
@Suzanne: Harry Styles’s cover of The Chain is so good. Dude can really sing.
Matt McIrvin
@dm: I watched 2001 again recently and started to notice that its take on the origin of humanity actually is starting to seem a little dated (hominids were probably starting to use tools WAY back, it doesn’t seem to be a hard thing for them to stumble across).
It is of course a very 1960s Space Age future, if Kubrick is turning a bit of a jaundiced eye on it in the subtext. But what holds up incredibly well now is the struggle with HAL 9000. You know some genius thought a state of the art spaceship had to have a state of the art AI controlling the life-or-death systems. That whole subplot seems more timely now than it did in 2001.
Juju
@Scout211: Bobby Sherman really doesn’t hold up especially if your name is Julie. He was a nice looking man for the era.
Miss Bianca
@TONYG: And yet, perversely, I will argue that even Herman’s Hermits were able to pull out a gem or two that hold up and have been unfairly forgotten, like this one – No Milk Today.
zhena gogolia
@Miss Bianca: Capra is always depressing to me.
Suzanne
@Just look at that parking lot: Oh man. I subscribe to a lot of artbots on social media, and some work just looks so damn good. Egon Schiele, Rembrandt, John Singer Sargent…… so fucking great. In a digital world, that work of expert hands absolutely holds up. Might look better now than it ever did.
I have spoken up for Brutalist architecture here before. I love it, but I also realize I’m in the minority!
dmsilev
I just got back from seeing a performance of La Boheme. Opera from that era holds up, just because the ninety percent of it which was crap has long since been forgotten and it’s only the good stuff which has survived.
Chip Daniels
@Suzanne:
I will second any applause for John Singer Sargent.
His watercolors are always a source of inspiration to me.
Jackie
@Suzanne: When it was on the top 40, it was loved as a soulful love song. <sticks out tongue>
Victor
So many Oscar winners don’t hold up. Shakespeare in Love, Crash …
phein65
@Another Scott: I remember when Bob Welch went 27-3 as a starting pitcher for the Dodgers, and thinking, Why did he waste all those years with Fleetwood Mac? (I used to do my father’s drugs.)
Bare Trees and Mystery to Me are two of the albums I have from that era, and my 30-something kids keep borrowing them and not bringing them back.
Suzanne
@Chip Daniels: The first time I went to the Carnegie Museum of Art when we moved here, I entered one of the galleries and a painting quite some distance away stood out from all the others. On a wall full of top-notch art, this one piece instantly grabbed me, and I thought it looked like Sargent. I walked over to it….. yup. Calling him a master understates the case.
Percysowner
Holds up Bat Out of Hell 1, Meatloaf got caught up in the Trump, but I still love that album. Also holds up anything by Bob Seger
Holds up Shawshank Redemption and Christmas Story
Craig
Hendrix
Whimsical Pickles
Holds up: Ordinary People
Most definitely does not: Animal House
Jackie
@Miss Bianca: There’s a Kinda Hush All Over the World Tonight…
I had all of Herman’s Hermits albums.
PaulB
Doesn’t hold up: sitcom laugh tracks. They are so fake, so horrifyingly cringey that I find it difficult to watch some of those old classic shows. I had a friend who removed the laugh track from the M*A*S*H TV series (a show that I would also, somewhat reluctantly, place in the “doesn’t hold up” category), and the difference was amazing.
Does hold up: The Dick Van Dyke show, even with a laugh track.
Does hold up: The Looney Tunes cartoons from the 30s through the 50s. Doesn’t hold up: The Looney Tunes cartoons from the 60s on.
Does hold up: The older Disney classic animated movies.
stinger
@WaterGirl:
Elusive Butterfly by Bob Lind, later covered by Glen Campbell.
RevRick
Music that holds up well: classical. Music that doesn’t: pop. Music that won’t: forms that exhaust themselves in schmalz or obscurantism.
dm
@Matt McIrvin:
Insert obvious Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg joke here.
All the graphics displays in that movie were done using transparencies and animation, not computer graphics.
cain
@eclare:
Rush does too. Unlike say, KISS. “Christine Sixteen” lawd. Fuck off.
Suzanne
Hot take: “Seven Nation Army” does not hold up. Maybe I just hate that song. Maybe I just kind of hate Jack White.
Marc
I still have vinyl copies of those two from college days, they were always my favorite of their albums.
Sister Golden Bear
@Miss Bianca:
THANK YOU. Definitely agree.
WaterGirl
@Victor: Welcome!
cain
I wonder if Airplane! holds up…
Young Frankestein definitely holds up :D
Gloria DryGarden
Holds up
angel chimes, light the candles, stare at them, listen to the chimes, watch that thing go round and round, hypnotize your cares away; such delight
candlelight. Sage and juniper and sweet grass smoke for year round holiday activities.
Mozart, Beethoven, Hildegard of bingen , thomas Tallis, Henry Purcell, madrigals, renaissance music, lute music, Vivaldi, Bach, Stairway to heaven, john Denver (!), Stevie nicks, Simon and Garfunkel, Cat Stevens, Pink Floyd, Tom petty and the cars. Punk rock. Lisa Gerrard. The Beatles. A lot of 70s and 80s rock
I suspect the show Andor will hold up.
some books: A discovery of witches, and the next two book in a trilogy by Deborah harkness. Freedom and necessity by Emma bull and Steven brust. Both of these, because the characters fiercely have each others backs, and the care about ethics and values is written compellingly into the action and character dialogue. These are books I love to re-read
also The Art of Loving. The Kin of Ata are Waiting for you.
eclare
@Sister Golden Bear:
I’ve never seen it, I know the plot more or less, but that movie doesn’t interest me.
scav
Dire Straits holds up.
I’m having trouble remembering the CDs etc I ditched because they didn’t — I apparently did a brain-wipe at the same time. Warren Zevon & Randy Newman held on, but slightly more niche. Tom Lehrer is a titan.
eclare
@Victor:
I am still pissed that Gwyneth Paltrow won the Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love rather than Cate Blanchett for Elizabeth.
Gloria DryGarden
@Miss Bianca: in a way, A Christmas Carol is a bit like Wizard of Oz. One sees
sawit every year, one quotes from it, refers to the images from it.Theres something about the transformation, the shift in point of view, the kindness..
stinger
@PaulB:
I’m trying to watch Vicious, but I may not make it past epsiode 3. Derek Jacobi! Ian McKellen! But OMG that horrible laugh track, and the actors pausing for it. Ugh. How could it be so bad??
VeniceRiley
@zhena gogolia: I always thought that Capra movie was a “You need to learn a lesson” movie like some Scrooge derivative on flip.
Other thing that holds up: Aliens (the second movie) Ripley grows from young survivor of the first movie into a leader and maternal powerhouse as well as a fighting the corporate power and not to mention a mom v mom family battle for the ages. That whole vNilla ice cream gurgling android? This time it’s your loyal friend. Every note in that movie rocks
Ps f the guys that did every movie after that who completely missed what the through line and the stakes should be. 3 was a disaster of who cares monsters epic proportions.
mrmoshpotato
@Suzanne:
LOL! Saw Limp Bizkit get booed off stage July 2003.
They were one of the openers for Metallica on that summer tour
ETA
Oh Crazytown…
eclare
@cain:
I haven’t listened to Rush in a long time, but I used to really like them. Very talented band.
Richard Hershberger
@Jive Turkin: I think how well Python holds up varies wildly. My 18 year old trans son adores Holy Grail. Some of the sketches hold up just fine: dead parrot, buying an argument, crunchy frog, Ministry of Silly Walks, etc.
Angry old reactionary: I take this to refer to John Cleese. Has the brain worm taken any other victims? But yeah, Cleese’s schtick was being really good at ranting. This turns everything into a bad look when we see him punching down.
Fair Economist
@Miss Bianca:
Yeah, I sometime read comedy that was just insanely popular at the time – like “The Egg and I” (from the 40’s) and the Barney Google comic (from the 20’s; later evolved into Snuffy Smith). And – they’re just not funny. Sometimes they’re offensive too, which is a separate issue, but humor is almost always something of its time.
Speaking of comics, mid-century Peanuts holds up.
Marc
@Percysowner: +1 on A Christmas Story along anything else written or hosted by Jean Shepherd. I used to listen to him late at night on a clandestine radio I kept under my covers.
NoraLenderbee
@cain:
We watched Airplane! this year. It definitely holds up.
Gloria DryGarden
@Suzanne: For me, re art, what pulls me in across the room is Mary Cassatt. What she did with light, you know it’s her, from a distance. And her subjects were so relatable, personal. Just a warm shift from all her impressionist colleagues.
also, Van Gogh, for a different reason. Mostly what gets me are the sideways planar views of his paintings, when you see them live. He builds his paint up so high, looking from the side, it could be the ocean. It’s a marvel. And did the sky really look like that to him, all those curves and swirls?
mrmoshpotato
@Josie:
Great song.
Snarki, child of Loki
My opinion, which is mine:
holds up: The Princess Bride, Dr. Strangelove (disturbingly topical).
Gloria DryGarden
There are a few holiday carols that I enjoy. Most of them would be better sung in July, as bright extroverted summer songs. Or with their words reworked to fit the message of the moment.
these two hold up really well
TheUkrainian Carol of the Bells; the Holly and the Ivy
Fair Economist
@Suzanne: I like the Postmodern Jukebox version of “Seven Nation Army”. Does that count?
kalakal
Cream, the early Yes albums, Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen, The Band, CSN&Y ( mostly), Let it Bleed by the Stones, Hendrix, Dark side of the Moon, The Kinks
trollhattan
Feel sorry for anybody in middle school in 1985, your most formative musical years, because the #1 hits list from then is mostly dreck. Horrid. Exceptions for Tears for Fears and those old Dire Straits guys.
pastemagazine.com/music/1-hits/every-1-hit-song-from-1985-ranked-worst-to-best
Reason #1 your car had better have a tape deck, buddy, even if it’s totally getting stolen while you’re at the mall.
Spanky
Holds up: anything by Mel Brooks.
Wolvesvalley
@zhena gogolia: Yes to re-reading Jane Eyre once a year. Also Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden every spring.
kalakal
@Richard Hershberger: Monty Python – the TV show – always was hit and miss, for every brilliant sketch there was usually at least 2 flops. Holy Grail & Life of Brian I still find hilarious.
eclare
@trollhattan:
Prince was enormously popular in those years. It’s not fair for me to judge whether he holds up, because his music was the soundtrack to a lot of my high school years, and thus will always hold up.
Mark
Minnie Ripertons “Loving You”. It somehow hit no.1 in the 70,s. How, I don’t know. I hated it then, and I still do.
Miss Bianca
@Victor: Actually, I found I liked Shakespeare in Love a lot better the second time I saw it, years later than the first time I saw it, in the theater, when I pretty much hated it. Maybe I’m just getting mellower in my old age…
Just look at that parking lot
Holding up: Most jazz from the 50’s-60’s. John Coltrane, Kenny Burrell, Ike Quebec, Errol Garner.
Not holding up: Jazz/Rock/ Blues Fusion music from the 70’s -80’s. Chic Corea & Return to Forever, Weather Report, Mahavishnu Orchestra. Been going back trying to listen to this music lately and I can’t believe I could make it through a whole album, much less a concert. I know what you’re thinking and you’re probably right. It must have been the drugs.
Suzanne
@Gloria DryGarden: Can’t argue with Cassatt and Van Gogh. I went to the art museum in Philly a couple of years ago and saw “Sunflowers”. As you would probably expect, seeing it in person brings a lot more to it than seeing it printed in a book or on screen.
The Philly museum has a large collection of Duchamp’s work. “Nude Descending A Staircase” is way better than I expected, so I guess you can say it holds up. But every time I look at it….. I try to figure out why someone would be walking downstairs naked. Like, not even a bathrobe and slippers?
kalakal
A couple of Brit comedies that hold up are, I think, Yes Minister/ Prime Minister and Drop the Dead Donkey. Despite being topical they’re also timeless – Government and the Media
Suzanne
@Miss Bianca: You know what movie was popular and won awards, but I just hated it? Million Dollar Baby. God. I found it miserable and I hated every moment of it.
eclare
Holds up: The Commodores.
Doesn’t hold up: Lionel Richie.
kalakal
I still love The Blues Brothers and WKRP, Barney Miller, & Taxi.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is still great and I saw Romancing the Stone again recently and found it fun. Die Hard still works and I will always have a soft spot for Kelly’s Heroes.
2001 is still superb
eclare
@Suzanne:
Talk about a grim movie…I will never watch it again.
Miss Bianca
@Sister Golden Bear: the thing that still cracks me up about that movie is that in Alternate Potter-verse, George’s wife ends up as…*gasp*…an old maid librarian!
I was like, “wait, what’s wrong with THAT fate?”
Gloria DryGarden
@Fair Economist: great song. I’ve seen some versions of it I love, including one song mix medley in Cinderella by Nicholas Galitzine and a wide group of beautifully costumes women.
post modern jukebox has a few versions of
All About that Bass I especially like this version sung by bass player Kate Davis
Fair Economist
@trollhattan:
You raggin’ on “Take on Me”? Prepare to fight!
trollhattan
@eclare: He managed to not have a #1 hit that year. But Madonna did…
Miss Bianca
@Gloria DryGarden: It just occurred to me the other day that The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is, essentially, a re-telling of A Christmas Carol. Which might account for why *it’s* so perennially popular as well!
Speaking of The Grinch, what holds up:
The original Dr Seuss book
The Chuck Jones cartoon version
What doesn’t hold up? Any of the live action versions.
kalakal
@Miss Bianca: Chuck Jones was a genius. Roadrunner has me in hysterics even today despite the fact it’s really just a zillion variations on one idea
Gloria DryGarden
@Suzanne: senses, for sure. That song is a matter of taste. But since you spelled it census, and I’ve been a Census worker, and a buddy is doing housing surveys, r now, and it’s sometimes hard to get people to fill out their census…
I think the lyrics could be reworked. And the long drawn out census, so fits the topic, when people think it’s going to take too long. Or it does, with the longer surveys that go on every year.
Fair Economist
@eclare: The thing about “It’s a Wonderful Life” is that the really grim stuff *didn’t happen*. I mean, it feels grim, because the last 1/3 of the movie is dystopian grimdark 40 years before dystopian grimdark (other than the brief happy ending). But if you think about what actually happened, it’s not grim, it’s a “slice of life” kind of movie with an uplifting message (that our sacrifices have a purpose).
Miss Bianca
@mrmoshpotato: Great, great song. Except I can never now *not* hear it as the mondegreen version, which goes, “When a maaaan… loves a walnut…”
I was introduced to that one listening to NPR one afternoon and I damn near drove off the road.
eclare
@trollhattan:
Yeah, Purple Rain was released in 1984, but I bet I listened to nothing else for a good six months. And every football game pep rally started with “Let’s Go Crazy.”
JCJ
@Matt McIrvin: True, but I think some of the antipathy towards Fleetwood Mac was caused by Bill Clinton’s campaign beating Don’t Stop to death
zhena gogolia
@cain: Airplane! holds up, with a vengeance.
mali muso
Just finished watching Home Alone with the 9 year old (her first time seeing it) and it seems to hold up relatively well. Kiddo kept asking why people would not have found it strange to see a young kid like Kevin out and about by himself (in the neighborhood, grocery, etc) and I couldn’t really remember if that was less odd at the time as we were more free ranging back in the day or if the movie just glosses over the weirdness for plot reasons. The score is charming and holds up well imo.
Marc
Man, of course it was the drugs, no one would listen to that stuff straight, true of a lot of music from the era. But, I still love Flora Purim’s vocals and albums, even straight, she has such a great voice.
zhena gogolia
@eclare: I’ve only seen it once. That was enough.
Suzanne
@Gloria DryGarden: I know that the real line is “you fill up my senses”, but I cannot hear it as anything but the mondegreen: “you fill out my census”.
COME FILL ME AGAAAAAAAAAIN!!!
Phrasing!
Gloria DryGarden
@Suzanne: the nude/ stairs would require great central heating, or an epoch of hot flashes, a possibly young or v attractive body, and a reason to answer the door in one’s all-together.. a special occasion. Or, July, without ac. Maybe. You raise some v interesting questions.
Alice walker has a great poem about van gogh’s sunflowers, called “if there were any Justice.”
Miss Bianca
@Just look at that parking lot: Oh, I don’t know…I found myself listening to a bunch of Weather Report, Spyro Gyro, Return to Forever etc lately, and I still liked it just fine. They were all really masterful musicians.
Guess that makes me a Philistine of unrefined taste. Wait till I tell Mom!
Marc
@Miss Bianca: The movie still holds up, too. I still remember seeing it opening weekend, people were up dancing in the aisles and singing by the end.
Miss Bianca
@Suzanne: Speaking of Monty Python and John Denver, you probably would have enjoyed the bit on one of their albums, which was simply…”And now, the sound of John Denver being strangled”.
As I recall, that song was the one he was being strangled to, altho’ I believe the way they rendered that line was, “You came on my pill-ow…”
DivF
Holds up:
ground hog day is one of the great movies of the 90s but was not viewed as such at the time – it did not receive a single academy award nomination. It was viewed as a standard-issue harold ramis comedy, but it had everything from great physical comedy to a lovely exegesis of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Major barbara and pygmalion, from around 1940. Both filmed versions of shaw’s plays, that actually had shaw’s involvement (shaw won an oscar for the screenplay for pygmalion). The dialogue is a delight and wendy hiller is wonderful as major barbara and eliza doolittle. And and and…
in music i would say van morrisons astral weeks, early tom waits. 60’s / 70s soul – a name that hasn’t come up yet is james Brown. Booker T and the MGs.
there are lots of things that haven’t aged well but in many cases i missed them the first time around.
Rusty
@Suzanne: I was surprised when my 17 yearl old son was impressed I had seen Stevie Nicks. She was paired up in a double headliner tour with some band that was aimed at another audience. I guess the promoter thought it would take to acts without a lot of overlap to fill an arena. I went for the other band, which I can’t even remember now, but thought she was the best part of the night and have liked her ever since. And now my son thinks she is good too. Strange world.
Gloria DryGarden
@Suzanne: I love it. Imma call my buddy, and joke with him, sing him a mock up with new words, about the census. It could be funny. This is such a fun idea, thank you. See what your intentional spelling has done?
everyone, I wonder how this new Shakespeare movie Hamlet will hold up. It’s just trailers now, opening in theaters. Paul Mescal stars as Will. It might be a delight, or excessively sad, only perfect if you need to have a good cry.
mvr
Rosanne Cash holds up.
I tend to think that Prog Rock does not hold up.
Drive by Truckers have held up, and do keep making good albums though there is some unevenness there.
I’m trying to think of something newer that I’m confident will hold up. Unfortunately, lately most of what I buy is by people I like and who have been round a while.
Chinatown holds up. OTOH, the sequel doesn’t and didn’t even on the day it was released.
Not quite a point about holding up, (its more about standing up) but for many of the cultural heroes I have, their biographies don’t hold up to their literary/musical talents. Went on a biography binge a long time back and found that Woody Guthrie, Raymond Chandler and a few others that escape my mind were not all that nice as people. Only Dashiell Hammett seemed to have lived up to my sense of who he should have been in that he didn’t rat out his friends to the House Unamerican Activities Committee.
dm
Oh. Stop Making Sense. I saw it when it first came out. The theater audience applauded at the end of the songs.
Saw it again earlier this year. People were dancing in the back of the theater. The audience applauded at the end of the songs.
Talking Heads in general hold up.
eclare
@dm:
Absolutely! I saw that in the theater the first time it was released.
TONYG
@Miss Bianca: That’s true. I remember seeing Ghostbusters back in 1984 and wondering (“why isn’t this funny?”).
Cathie from Canada
In the late 80s, when my daughter was little, we got a DVD of the Disney Cinderella and I could hardly wait to watch it with her because I had loved it myself as a child.
People, it was awful – the misogyny, the sexism, the lack of agency, Cinderella’s inability to take responsibility for her own happiness, the worship of wealth and titles. Even the mice weren’t cute anymore. I never wanted my daughter to absorb any of those views for herself.
dm
@trollhattan: Stevie Wonder is on that list. Also Tears for Fears, “Everybody wants to rule the world” (which, I admit, I like primarily because of its use in the Real Genius soundtrack — I don’t know if that movie holds up, but it probably does). And Dire Straits “Money for Nothing”.
Free associating: Paul Simon holds up, especially Graceland. Peter Gabriel in general. Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks.
Peke Daddy
@rosalind: The Who are the archetype of that type of band. Also, Back to the Future holds up impeccably.
TONYG
@Miss Bianca: That’s true. They did have a few good songs. They were one of the bands that benefited from the “British Invasion” hype, so good for them. (There was a similar bandwagon in the early nineties after the unexpected commercial success of Nirvana.)
mvr
Also doesn’t hold up. Gone with the Wind. Went to see it once in a Theaterin around 1980 with friends building it up as a great movie. Just hated it. Nowadays I gather that is everyone’s take but at the time I was on my own.
phein65
@Miss Bianca: I want to say this in defense of John Denver. Back in the early 1980’s, he headlined one evening at the Veiled Prophet Fair in St. Louis, under the Arch, in front of something like a million people. I had 8 VIP tickets from my job (I was maybe 23), so 7 of my stoner friends and I went to laugh at the straights and sat in front of the stage: We took coolers full of beer, passed doobies continuously, and two of our female friends were extremely libertine in dress and behavior.
We came to scoff, but we stayed to pray. That man — just him and a guitar — could connect with an audience. When I hear his songs on SiriusXM these days, I do not change the channel.
Rusty
The Sound of Music still holds up. I watched it with my kids when they were in elementary school and they were mesmerized.
Matt McIrvin
@dm: The earlier live compilation, The Name Of This Band Is Talking Heads–I think it’s just gold, particularly the expanded version of that with a bunch more Remain in Light-era tracks.
Two completely different live versions of “Drugs (Electricity)” that are both rather divergent from the terrifying studio version on Fear of Music, and all three are brilliant.
dm
@Gloria DryGarden: I think it’s too early to tell if Andor will hold up, but gosh, does Rogue One work so much better after having seen it.
Marc
@dm: True Stories is still fun, too, how could it not be cool with Pop Staples in the movie? OTH, I knew people on both sides of the argument as to whether Byrne ripped off Ivan Stang after a series of discussions about a movie based on the The Church of the SubGenius.
Just look at that parking lot
@Miss Bianca:
Holding up: Philistines of unrefined taste
Not holding up: People who have to look up what a Philistine of unrefined taste means.
Matt McIrvin
@zhena gogolia: Did you ever see the educational films Capra produced with Bell Telephone, like “Our Mr. Sun”? They’re some of the most brilliant bits of science popularization ever made, just top-notch stuff… and then in the last few minutes, they take this hard right turn into preaching about how “prayer is another form of research” and insisting that science and faith in God are just two sides of the same coin.
Apparently that was Frank Capra’s personal hobbyhorse that he insisted on wedging in there–he had this grand project of reconciling science and religion and he imagined that these films were going to be means of doing it. But they’re just not that convincing in this regard.
zhena gogolia
@Miss Bianca: It’s a great movie. RIP Tom Stoppard. For some reason if a film is witty and amusing, people think it can’t be good. Shakespeare in Love is great.
dm
@Matt McIrvin: Do you know Angelique Kidjo’s Remain in Light? Sooo good.
afropop.org/articles/angelique-kidjo-tackles-talking-heads-remain-in-light
npr.org/2018/06/04/616145303/ang-lique-kidjo-connects-the-talking-heads-with-her-african-roots
WaterGirl
@phein65: Thanks for that story.
Omnes Omnibus
@Miss Bianca: I refuse to acknowledge the existence of anything but the book and original TV version.
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin: He’s preachy.
He loved Stanwyck, but I prefer her with almost any other director.
Captain C
@Suzanne: Perhaps it’s so ubiquitous it’s become generic?
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: I always thought Christine McVie had the most unutterably gorgeous voice. RIP.
Matt McIrvin
@dm: yes, it is AWESOME
Etv13
@Suzanne: A few decades ago, the Smithsonian did an exhibit dedicated to the Sargent painting El Jaleo. A couple of rooms of sketches and studies, and then you get to the painting itself, which (a) is about life-sized and (b) seems to glow with its own light. Prints and posters just don’t do it justice.
eclare
@Cathie from Canada:
When I was married I was also a stepmother to a little girl. I started reading some of those classics to her, and I realized pretty much all of them had an evil stepmother. That stopped immediately.
Ramalama
@Suzanne: yep, I feel the same way about those two. However, I heard on Quebec radio, back when I listened to it, someone singing incredibly well and moving, making me stop whatever chore I was doing to find out who that was. Turns out it was Celine Dion, singing in her mother tongue, or at least on that album, and it was just right. Made me wonder why she had to go so far out when singing in English, a recently-ish acquired skill.
dnfree
@Craig: We saw the Sundance Kid movie recently and I still agree with my opinion back when it first came out that the Katherine Ross character is completely unbelievable. She looks straight out of the 1970s, not of the supposed era of the movie. She spoils every scene she’s in.
lowtechcyclist
(stinger @101)
Yep, that one holds up. Just shy of sixty years since it was first on the air, I’m still in love with that song.
Captain C
@Matt McIrvin: She wrote and sang my two favorite Fleetwood Mac songs, “Say You Love Me” and “Hold Me.”
Matt McIrvin
@dm: Some of the perspective wireframe displays were done by building a physical wireframe and shooting it from different angles.
dnfree
@Miss Bianca: We watched The Holy Grail and Life of Brian just recently, and I’m sad to say they do not hold up. Too much of the humor is cheap mockery, even of stuttering and lisping.
RevRick
@Miss Bianca: When It’s a Wonderful Life first came out it bombed. It was nominated for some Academy Awards but won none. It only became a Christmas classic after its contract was allowed to lapse and ABC grabbed it and decided to use it as a filler during the season.
On the other hand, most people misunderstand Dickens’s A Christmas Carol . Scrooge has become synonymous with stinginess, but actually his problem was he believed in a harsh, demanding morality, which he even imposed upon himself. He worked in the same cold office as Bob Cratchit. Much of Dickens’s work reflected on the dualities that existed in Victorian London. Poverty and wealth existing side by side. Lawlessness and harsh prisons. Ugliness and grandeur. Degradation and progress.
dnfree
@Chip Daniels: Under the surface, It’s a Wonderful Life is far from schmaltzy. Jimmy Stewart is a man who has done his duty but had to give up his dreams. There’s a poignancy to it.
mrmoshpotato
@eclare:
You’re A Mean One, Mr. Grinch!
Matt McIrvin
@RevRick:
I don’t know, Cole Porter and Irving Berlin were totally pop and not all of their stuff holds up, but some of it is still strong 80-100 years later.
mrmoshpotato
@Unabogie:
So true.
Eyeroller
@Jive Turkin: I’ll defend the Pythons on that to some extent. Most of the “gay jokes” were by Graham Chapman, who was extremely gay, but they were very much a product of their time and the British legal system then, and a lot don’t hold up well.
And if by “several” you mean John Cleese, then unfortunately, yep. (Graham Chapman and Terry Jones are dead, so can’t be bitter “anti-woke warriors,” Eric Idle is liberal still as far as I know, and Michael Palin doesn’t say much. Not sure about Terry Gilliam.). But John Cleese was even back then very concerned about offending Christians and other conservatives and demanded some rewrites for that reason, especially in The Life of Brian, so it isn’t really a shock that he turned out to be a Brexit-supporting anti-woke curmudgeon.
Zelma
@mvr: I was way ahead of my time. I walked out of GWTW when it was first rereleased in the 1950s. Already hated the Lost Cause stuff. (I was a big fan of Bruce Catton.). Never read the book, and I am a big romance fan.
Kayla Rudbek
@Matt McIrvin: Northern Exposure has had a lot of problems with syndication, DVD, streaming because there’s a lot of music in it that needs licensing
Kayla Rudbek
@TONYG: Sturgeon’s Law: 90% of everything is crap.
Matt McIrvin
Science-fiction movies are notorious for dating badly but Alien holds up so well it’s breathtaking. It actually feels less dated than all of the sequels, even Aliens, which I love (it has most of the quotable lines) but which is such a 1980s beast.
Kayla Rudbek
@Suzanne: eh, I would argue that both of them still hold up for me.
zhena gogolia
@Kayla Rudbek: Northern Exposure is on Prime. It holds up extremely well. It’s hilarious.
mrmoshpotato
@Just look at that parking lot: Do I even want to know what “this morning” event you’re referencing?
Kayla Rudbek
@Miss Bianca: come sit by me! My Catholic grade school forced It’s a Wonderful Life on us every single year around Christmas, so I absolutely hate that movie.
Kayla Rudbek
@zhena gogolia: ooh, thank you very much for letting me know this! Now I can go catch up on it while I knit…
Gloria DryGarden
@mrmoshpotato: i just assumed it was like the song said, “ I read the news today, oh boy..”
Matt McIrvin
@Marc: I know a lot of people who just do not get the humor in A Christmas Story, including my wife and my daughter. Which makes me think the appeal of Jean Shepherd might be somewhat generational.
That’s a weird one for me because I never saw the movie all the way through until quite recently, but I felt like I knew the whole story, because my 7th grade English teacher had read the relevant parts of Shepherd’s book to us in class years before the movie appeared, and some of the side plots like the Nehi lamp had already been adapted on PBS’s American Playhouse.
mvr
@Zelma:
Does sound like you were ahead of that time anyway.
I guess I could walk out of a movie before the 50s were over (just barely must have walked by then) but I didn’t see that movie until 1980. My mom would not have taken me to GWW anyway cause she would have hated it as well. So it was college when I saw it with people who should have known better.
RevRick
@Suzanne: There’s a difference between nakedness and nudity. Nudity suggests vulnerability and exposure. Nakedness connotes brazenness. In the story of Adam and Eve they are initially described as being naked and unashamed, which implies a mutual here-I-amness, but after they eat from the tree of knowledge, they scramble to cover themselves, because now they understand how weak and dependent and pathetic they really are. At the end of chapter three, God sews them some garments so that they can live with themselves and their deep feelings of inadequacy and estrangement.
dnfree
A lot of James Thurber’s humor holds up, to me. I still can’t read “The Night the Bed Fell on Father” without cracking up. ((Spoiler alert: the bed did not fall on father.) But the story is old enough that you have to be able to imagine a civil war veteran grandfather living in the house.
Gloria DryGarden
@Matt McIrvin: i think my cassette song collections friends made for me decades ago, would still hold up. All their favorites, including one Joan Armatrading song, “ I’m lucky” in which,
my friend danced too close to her record player while recording, and the record skipped. The song makes me dance, too. It makes me so happy to have this recording of her dancing by the record player.
eclare
@Kayla Rudbek:
IIRC WKRP in Cincinnati also has that problem.
Gloria DryGarden
@Gloria DryGarden: my friend did laugh when I sang him my census version of that John Denver song..
Just look at that parking lot
@mrmoshpotato: “This morning” was just a reference point. Cross it out and insert any time you like. This evening/last week/November 5th, 2024.
lowtechcyclist
@Miss Bianca:
Because then some fly-by-night con man romances you and for some reason you fall for him. ;-)
Matt McIrvin
@eclare: I think I appreciate Prince more now than I did when he was huge. Same for some other artists: Devo, The Cure.
Gloria DryGarden
@dnfree: James Thurber has a lot of stuff that holds up. He created a cartoon, the last flower, about an apocalypse, that I love.
He’s quoted in “Eats Shoots and Leaves” in a discussion about commas: it’s a book about grammar and punctuation that holds up, and is surprisingly fun to read. Someone wrote to him about an excess comma in one of his books, and his reply was that he supposed his editors, who insisted on that particular comma, wanted to leave time for the characters to push in their chairs before they moved on. It was hilarious to read it.
lowtechcyclist
@Gloria DryGarden:
You fill up my Census, like a family of Mormons…
Matt McIrvin
Earlier this year in Copenhagen I rode a roller coaster that was 111 years old. It holds up.
(To be fair, I suspect it started out with a tamer design and was substantially modified to keep up with newfangled competitors a mere 90-odd years ago.)
piratedan
OT but reading over on Bluesky that Rob Reiner and his wife were found stabbed to death in their California home….per TMZ
Ravenscroft
@rosalind: Cheap Trick comes to mind..
Omnes Omnibus
This holds up.
As does this.
And this.
p.a.
Rockford Files holds up as a great document of the 1970s look, at least for Cali. And great stories of course, with an if-not-anti-hero at least a not-hero protagonist.
lowtechcyclist
@dnfree:
It’s been years since I watched Life of Brian, but Monty Python and the Holy Grail continues to be the greatest comedy ever.
mvr
@Ravenscroft:
Fuse, which was ur Cheap Trick used to play the Sinnisippi park Bandshell in Rockford Illinois in the late 60s or maybe around 1970. They put out one album under that name. So yeah, they’d been playing forever.
But it didn’t hurt that Rick Nielson’s dad owned one of the two music stores in town so he was likely playing from a very very young age.
Gloria DryGarden
@lowtechcyclist: you get it! Even the short decennial census could take a long time with big families. I remember my first family, my first door on the 2020 census was a big family. I had just started it when my lead wanted to meet me with some materials I needed. I was in there for half an hour.
And the current census is a long form about housing, and takes two hours. One pleads with clients to please do it…We’ll even in 2020, we needed to convince people to do it. Didn’t help that orange whozit didn’t want immigrants to be counted. Pleading, in spanish, through closed doors, explaining that the census doesn’t talk to la migra, and really it’s safe.
RevRick
@Matt McIrvin: I looked up Cole Porter’s Wikipedia page listing all his songs, and 90% are a complete blank for me and I know his hits because my mom listened to a radio station that played pop music from her teens and twenties.
My judgment about pop music is based on my sense that the vast majority of it appeals only to the sentiments, whereas classical music aspires to go deeper and inform our emotions.
I mean I have enjoyed the Marvel Universe movies with all their bam-pow weirdness, but I would never describe them as edifying. They’re a cheap thrill.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gloria DryGarden: While I was living in Newtown, CT, they found some cartoons that Thurber had drawn on the plaster wall of bedroom in a house at which he was staying. They cut out squares of plaster with cartoon. They were framed and then displayed in the public library.
Just look at that parking lot
Holding up : That bobble head dog looking out the rear window of your car.
Not holding up: That pair of fuzzy dice hanging from your rear view mirror.
mrmoshpotato
@cain:
Even better when Svengoolie is showing it.
Omnes Omnibus
@RevRick: We remember songs like Greensleeves and other folk tunes. They were the pop music of their day. People hummed Chopin’s tunes in the street. They are remembered because they were worth remembering, not because they were classical. We will remember the music of today that is worth remembering.
Gloria DryGarden
@Omnes Omnibus: oh! I would like to see those! I wonder if someone made photos or prints, and got those wall cartoons into a published book.
your music choices, such delight, the Vivaldi, and the guy singing, I don’t know his music, but that line, “perhaps someone you know, could sparkle and shine…” is choice. Think I’ll look him up some more, and also go hang out with that Vivaldi channel.
Vivaldi holds up so well, that in spite of all the jokes about how he plagiarizes himself in every new composition, he’s still a delight to listen to. He probably thought, “that musical phrase holds up so well, I think I’ll just use it again
develop it furtherin this next composition”Old Dan and Little Ann
@Cathie from Canada: My wife and I watched a bunch of Disney movies when our daughter was real little. Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty. They were terrible.
HopefullynotCassandra
Jane Austen for certain endures. Tolkien and Lewis Carroll still grab my attention. These days especially I find the Once and Future King captivating although I hardly ever read beyond the sword emerging from the stone. Dashiell Hammett has still got it even though I know all of the plots inside out, upside down and twisted into pretzels.
Frank Capra movies have held up and I wish there were more. The Expanse series and books also hold up and when will the last part start filming?
I find myself singing Marley’s 3 Little Birds first thing when I wake up needing a boost. It works too. Definitely that song keeps me swimming.
Czar Chasm
@Baud: ”Why do I have to change MY name? HE’s the one that ruined it…no-talent ass clown!”
hitchhiker
@Suzanne: That fucking show.
I’m married to a quadriplegic, (injured skiing in 2001) and have come to know dozens of people with various kinds of spinal cord injuries in the last 25 years.
You can’t even imagine how enraging it is to me that our lives are used as entertainment that ends (nobly!) with suicide.
UGH.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gloria DryGarden: When I played violin, I used Vivaldi for my audition pieces.
Gloria DryGarden
@Omnes Omnibus: Cool. did you memorize them, the way those soloists do, in performances of the four seasons? What great music; I hope it made you feel happy to play it.
I grew up with a violinist in the house. The sound of people practicing their instruments still makes me happy.
hitchhiker
@zhena gogolia: Agree. I still remember sitting in the theater watching the opening scenes of Shakespeare in Love and thinking how much I love being in a world where I got to see it.
Still love it, too. I’m this many days old and realizing for the first time that some people hate it.
Czar Chasm
Holds up:
Jimi Hendrix
Seinfeld
Laibach
Deep Space Nine
Not So Much:
GI Joe cartoon
The most popular song from each of Eminem’s albums
Star Trek: Voyager
Shalimar
@Chip Daniels: Holly Cole did a whole album of Tom Waits covers in her minimalist jazz style, and it really highlights what an amazing lyricist he is.
RevRick
@Omnes Omnibus: I remember the tune Greensleeves only because it’s used for the Christmas carol What Child Is This? But I don’t think I ever heard the original song
Omnes Omnibus
Additionally, this holds up.
Omnes Omnibus
@RevRick: I maintain that my point still stands. :-)
Omnes Omnibus
@Gloria DryGarden: Did I have the music in front of me? Yes. Did I really need it? Probably not.
ETA: Three in a row? Oh, dear.
Czar Chasm
@Shalimar: She needs to another one, if only to cover the best tracks from Orphans.
Jacel
@Gloria DryGarden: Timothy Snyder posted a wonderful essay about the Ukrainian “Carol Of The Bells” that put it into contexts I didn’t know of previously.
mvr
Apparently this is The Clash’s London Calling’s 46th birthday (English release). It has held up pretty well.
kalakal
A couple of things that have stood the test of time
Brandenburg 3
Ode to Joy
Shalimar
The Commodores had a great saxophone player and Lionel Ritchie’s songs mostly don’t.
Maj TJ Kong
Pretty much much any film by Mel Brooks, but a special shout out for Silent Movie. I love there is only one word spoken and it is spoken by Marcel Marceau. 😎
rikyrah
Peanut wanted to watch Rocky Horror.
All I could say was that it was a different time and decade
Gloria DryGarden
@Jacel: love it. great to have the original song translated, too.
Just listened to the basket ball version, I’ll need to save that link and listen to all the other version included in that article.
it really is my favorite holiday tune, and no wonder- it’s about spring! I probably enjoy the gentle sweet folk tune quality of it. I don’t know much Ukrainian music, I’m no musicologist, but I wonder if that’s part of the flavor.
Recently found a variation on that translation, on YouTube. Ukrainian carol of the bells
Comrade Colette
Does: anything by Jane Austen
Does not: anything by James Michener
Really, really does not: Exodus by Leon Uris
RandyG
Late to the game here…. but this just came up at a dinner with friends tonight: Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In does not hold up well AT ALL.
RandyG
@kalakal: … and Brandenburg 2, and 4, and 5!
…on period instruments or modern instruments and even on the Moog.
prostratedragon
@Matt McIrvin:
The HAL sequence holds up like a charm, among my favorite movie sequences. Since the whole thing is like a myth or allegory I don’t worry about the details, it’s just a way to set up the monolith — a portable doorway, like the cartoon portable holes. No abras nunca esa puerta.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Holds up: The Muppet Show, and several of the Muppet movies, specifically The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, Muppet Christmas Carol, and Muppet Treasure Island.
Doesn’t hold up: Muppets Tonight and most of the modern works that don’t quite get the dynamics of the group.
Not being locked into a specific time in history helps. Which is the case with a lot of things – Mel Brooks had some clunkers too, that may have relied a bit too much on jokes that were too dependent on the zeitgeist of the moment. (Thinking specifically of Robin Hood: Men In Tights and Dracula: Dead and Loving It, which don’t hold up nearly as well as timeless classics like Young Frankenstein.)
prostratedragon
@Miss Bianca: I think even in the day that was meant to be kind of tongue-in-cheek. What George is assumed to think, to help pull him back off that bridge.
prostratedragon
@kalakal:
Just two words — earthquake pills.
WTFGhost
@Suzanne: Don’t shame – the model was trying to earn money for a bathrobe!
@Miss Bianca: The Chuck Jones version will always be The One True version, where the true meaning of Christmas imbues the titular character with super-grinchan strength, sufficient to save the day (that he, admittedly, had put in danger). I’m sorry. Dr. Seuss…
@Rusty: (scoffs) of *course* the *sound* of music holds up, what would hold up, the visuals? The textures? Not everyone’s been taking those recreational pharma… oh… you mean the musical, The Sound Of Music.
Never mind.
@Captain C: Did they ever do a documentary on how they got so many syllables into “hold?”
mrmoshpotato
@WTFGhost:
And the excellent narrating by William Henry Pratt.
Gloria DryGarden
@dm: one day, I’ll be able to see rogue one, without having to fork out $12.99-$20/ month for streaming. I can ask around.
Gloria DryGarden
@Ramalama: Arianna grande does a great imitation of Celine Dion singing. There are clips of her singing in the style and tone of many different singers.
Gloria DryGarden
@mrmoshpotato: a Charlie Brown Christmas is up on YouTube. I thought about watching it tonight, to see if it held up.
Gloria DryGarden
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: didn’t you just have some more surgery? How are you doing after that? If you’re comfortable saying. I hope you’re bouncing back well.
Gloria DryGarden
@RandyG: especially on period instruments…
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Gloria DryGarden: Rogue One is available on movie disc; I’ve got a copy. I don’t know if they’ll release Andor in that format.
(And in answer to your question: operation went well. Got my voice back. Healing process is, well, a process, and it’s proceeding.)
Gloria DryGarden
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: it’s so great you got your voice back.
villiageidiocy
@Marc: BOB!
Miss Bianca
@lowtechcyclist: HA! Dead thread and all, but just in case you end up seeing this…tou-freakin’-che, my friend!
Apsalar
Already mentioned I think but Dick Van Dyke Show holds up very well. The jokes are mostly based on stuff that is truly funny, not cringe humor or bashing anyone. The relationships are well balanced.
I went with my 10 year old to watch Wicked For Good, and after she wanted to watch The Wizard of Oz. It held her attention the whole time and after she asked some questions that never occurred to me (“Who was Glinda in Dorothy’s real life? All the others were people she knew.”) If a 10 year old can watch an 85 year old movie and not be bored, I’d say it holds up pretty well.
Nancy
Does your daughter like Albatross?