What are the classics of the 21st century thus far?

*weeps*

if ever there was a thread to fill with tumblr porn gifs

am0n i enjoy yr posting but what do you actually unironically *like*

so happy to have been part of 21st century masterwork ilx

take that, jonathan franzen!

Pulphead really is great. I've given out 3 or 4 copies as gifts now - every time it's been a hit.

http://genrelasagna.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/cover.jpg?w=200&h=300

am0n i enjoy yr posting but what do you actually unironically *like*

― mookieproof, Friday, January 25, 2013 6:02 PM

impression i got was that the thread is not about personal likes but canonization

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Pje34fUgLQ

i still gotts buy that! they even have a copy at a store in town. i'll get it i promise. i think its that one. does he have more than one?

x-post

sadly, it's the only one

tv is cool tho, scott otm

"Forget You" / "Fuck You"
Hostel and Hostel: Part II
James Tate's The Ghost Soldiers
"Piece of Me"
Act 2 of August: Osage County
Human Smoke
Doctor Atomic
James Perse hoodies

Act 2 of August: Osage County

huh i weirdly was just reading abt this 2day. movie adaptation coming out this yr f/ meryl streep & julia roberts

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August:_Osage_County_(film)

impression i got was that the thread is not about personal likes but canonization

nah that's cool, i just honestly wondered

Also, while Avatar is not a great work of the decade, it will be im the canon as a reaction to drones.

By the way, just to dilute my challops earlier in the thread, let me add to the chorus of those saying that "Mulholland Drive" is the obvious movie choice from the current era.

I wish the first half of Wall-E was the whole movie.

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, January 25, 2013 8:08 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

if this had been the case I'm not sure I'd've survived last year (when I first saw it). Emotional wreck.

yeah I don't get this whole half of Wall-E thing either. I think it was Morbz who said he liked 25 mins of it.

Frederik you really like to be surprised huh?

Is your least favourite song No Surprises?

Predictable! That was the word I was looking for! It's just boring how predictable these last few seasons have been.

My least favourite song is John Wayne Gacy Jr. In the future Illinois will be seen as the insencere cloying dreck that it is, while Michigan will rise and take it's place in the indie-pantheon.

Finised season 4 of Breaking Bad last night (in fact I need to give it back to the library to avoid paying a fine...this is what saturdays are for after all) and you know it was predictable as in you couldn't see Walter dying but something can be uetterly predictable and nevertheless enjoyable and well worked out in its execution which this was, and then some.

NOT dying i mean

lol sorry right the first time

well now breaking bad is spoiled i don't need to see it :)

nobody gonna second 'against the day'? currently 917 pages in, last 300 stay this good and we're in masterpiece county

I love AtD but I've got all sorts of daft stuff going on in my head when playing the masterpiece game, in order to try and make it a little more meaningful and AtD doesn't feel like "masterpiece" material (it's still great - I like it plenty more than a lot of masterpieces). It's a bit of a wodge - and feels more like people will say "TP was a great writer of the late 20th/early 20th C" and within that won't necessarily point to AtD as TP's masterpiece.

I'd like to say something like Remainder, say, which feels like it augurs stuff, packs the attention grabbing punch of a single idea well executed, and is memorable, has enough of a mid to late 20thC European theoretical sensibility to feel it might in someway be representative of the modern.

Think I'm probably with Scott tho - people will maybe point to the great US TV from the last decade and a bit. They certainly should - it seems to have the same grand ambitions and energy to achieve them of much that tends to be put in the masterpiece category. Easily outranks film in that respect.

I feel also the likely shift in economic power is going to mean masterpieces are likely to be found from material not in the Western cultural production market. That's maybe not in the scope of this particular question, but idk, maybe Sha Dingding (thanks _Rudipherous_) will produce something, or there'll be something Korean (I rate the Infernal Affairs trilogy very high, if not quite at masterpiece level).

there aren't enough things like remainder

true.

the trouble with judging the state of literature is that the stuff that gets hyped (Franzen) is already looking as stale as 20th century event novels like "Bonfire of the Vanities"

bonfire of the vanities is seen as 'stale'?

I feel like remainder could go either way, either a) canonically remembered as the most interesting novel of otherwise dim early C21 British literary world or b) drifting into semi-obscurity, enthused over by ageing bookish sorts (ie us) & occasionally rediscovered by young turks. Maybe I'm saying it's a 'minor classic'. Sort of depends where McCarthy goes, I guess. But it's certainly the first book that came into my head when thinking about this in relation to British novels.

Fizzles otm as per. Agree about Against The Day.

And general agreement with the TV line in this thread - it seems to me the medium most obviously going through a golden age (US TV, that is).

the new yes minister

oh god what's it like? I'd forgotten about that.

it is exactly

Think I'm probably with Scott tho - people will maybe point to the great US TV from the last decade and a bit. They certainly should - it seems to have the same grand ambitions and energy to achieve them of much that tends to be put in the masterpiece category. Easily outranks film in that respect.

Even if I like what I've seen I find that kind of talk insufferable really.

Don't know why it has to be compared to film at all. Apples and Oranges.

this sort of talk was maaaybe legitimized in a single instance by the extraordinary density and blackness of the sopranos but there is nothing else close to it

apples are shinier than oranges. oranges are less red than apples. you can compare anything to anything. saying that one art form or branch of the arts or one medium speaks to you more than another isn't really that unfair at all. television has inspired me in recent years! moreso than dance or painting or the musical theatre.or books. or rock records. or whatever. what's hard to understand about that?

x-post

and nobody has really come up with a looooong list of books or movies or recordings that are "epic" "masterpieces" from the 21st that they think will outlive us all. but people have said a lot of nice things about cable television. so its not just me...

agree that the sopranos is really the only tv show that warrants masterpiece talk (a masterpiece of television, it should be said).

mad men seems significant in the big scheme if only because it seems to buck the tendency for a constantly forward-moving dramatic arc. seen week to week it's almost like entering this slightly weird "otherness of the past" kind space.

Lots of people do that the TV > film as if wanting to bury film. Whereas all they do is show up an anxiety for TV to be accepted as film now is into some form of accpetability by I don't even who anymore. That's before getting to the notion that a lot of people who say this kind of thing (at least in this coutry) hate TV, and love that this stuff is available as box sets so they can switch it off and go on a fkn 10 hour marathon w/it.

So sorry should've said I'm not getting at you Scott, understand your angle. xxp

oh, doh, Cloud Atlas, I guess that is/will become the consensus British novel of last ten years.

feel like the tv drama boxset is a fairly new-ish form (or maybe that the proliferation of the form is now pushing it to the fore as something that can now be compared with movies etc etc). also feel that as a form it now draws more star power and better scripting than movies at present, which is surely a new and significant development.

Come Dine With Me is better than Franzen

you say like you don't mean it but its true!

I mean it!

also, here's the thing with me, i'm not even talking about entire series runs when i talk about t.v. i think one great hour or half hour of t.v. is comparable to a great poem/song/short story/novel/movie. they often take more work to make than a lot of poems and paintings too. they can be great art to me. but i really love t.v. so there is that.

good chief!

like, for instance, there are single episodes of trailer park boys that to me are better than some ken loach movies i've seen. or better than the work of some poverty-porn documentary photographers i've seen in recent years. (TPB also funny and also kinda effortlessly could get to the heart of a lot of questions/ideas about social status/ills/problems without even trying to.)

i'll stop about t.v. now though. got work to do. i still love movies. and books and all that. (got stoned and watched blade runner last night though so i can be kinda lazy...)

at the very least franzen would be improved by text having marginal comments intended to be spoken by CDWM voiceover guy.

Sort of off-topic but I feel like a lot of the people who are making looooong draggy hollywood movies should really be making tv instead. Like the last batman film was 4 hours long & half the characters were still really underdeveloped but they got away with it because ppl wanted to spend more time in that world (ditto the hobbit). Whereas a TV show can have 13hrs to unfold so they can spend whole episodes focusing on peripheral characters w/o fucking up the pacing of individual segments.

Anyway this has nothing to do with "classics" really except as a possible reason why the classics of the 21st century won't come from (mainstream US) cinema