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

Say we're in the latter half of the century looking back - what novels/non-fiction/film/tv will be viewed as classics?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bZkp7q19f0

lock thread

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for me t.v. beats any book or movie or record. one episode of battlestar or whatever slays any movie i've seen in the 21st century. or any book i've read. i don't read a lot of 21st century books though. if there is a tolstoy out there lemme know.

Margaret

2666 came out in 2004

likewise if there is a renoir out there making movies lemme know.

see my post!

friday night lights kinda the tolstoy of the 21st century.

trying to really think hard about this and not simply list personal favorites and touchstones...and it's hard. not sure i can really tell what's gonna "stand the test of time" in way that classic is supposed to.

margaret? never heard of it. i just watched the trailer though. looks like a good cable movie. was it originally on the Lifetime network?

friday night lights kinda the tolstoy of the 21st century.

― scott seward, Thursday, January 24, 2013 9:55 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tolstoy wrote about pretty teenagers and their pretty teenage problems?

hey every century gets the tolstoy it deserves.

i haven't seen it yet, but this might make the cut:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn-ykHdl6PY

Super Troopers

Have you heard about this show The Wire?

Dickens of the 21st Century iirc

is the wire better than the corrections? yes, yes it is.

die hard 5 and world war z coming out this year though so we may see too instant classics emerge in one year.

friday night lights kinda the tolstoy of the 21st century.

― scott seward, Thursday, January 24, 2013 9:55 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tolstoy wrote about pretty teenagers and their pretty teenage problems?

― congratulations (n/a), Thursday, January 24, 2013 11:08 AM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

m/l

louis c.k. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> current novelists i've heard of and never read

UYD is the Shakespeare of 2006

Werckmeister Harmonies and Uncle Boonmee.

margaret, mulholland dr, some haneke, against the day, idk you guys take it from here

Don't understand why people can't seem to prefer tv without making the claim that other art forms are inferior. Are there a bunch of snobs telling you that Deadwood sucks compared to George Saunders or whatever?

i don't think other art forms are inferior. just saying i prefer t.v. in the 21st century to most movies i see/books i've read/records i've heard in the 21st century. maybe the people making t.v. now are people who would have made great movies/written great books/etc in the past. video game people probably think the same thing about video game makers. maybe the video game makers of today would have been great sculptors or something a hundred years ago.

i mean i totally give the win to books/movies/art in the 20th century over t.v. as much as i love 20th century t.v.

i probably give mel blanc the win overall in the 20th century though.

UYD is the Shakespeare of 2006

― President Keyes, Thursday, January 24, 2013 9:59 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

2006 4 Life, otm

the obvious stuff will probably attract the term "classic" in a decade or two: kanye west, pixar up until "brave", breaking bad...
otoh a lot of my more favorite current bands, tv shows, and movies ( say, wes anderson, mad men, kendrick lamar) will, despite critical acclaim at the time of their release, eventually disappear under the sands of time. when i mention them, my grandchildren will roll their eyes and say "what the hell is a madmen grandpaw?"

& yes, "gangham style" will drop to huge roars of approval at wxyc's annual "twothousand-teens" dance yearly from 2031-2040

I still maintain that Tree of Life will be much more highly regarded once arrive at a properly post-ironic point in time.

Absolutely agree with Breaking Bad as long as it doesn't devolve into Benny Hill-esque farce in its final episodes. And also hardcore cosign 21st C. Lynch. I think a ton of the music made so far this century will be forgotten soon enough.

Tree of Life just missed out on a spot in Sight & Sound's 100 Greatest Movies Ever Made poll, so I think it's p highly regarded already, regardless of any irony defecit/surplus.

If academic study/critical scrutiny is any guide to classic status, then Haneke's Hidden is already well on its way to being regarded as a classic. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Werckmeister Harmonies, and La Quattro Volte are all in w/ a shout, too, imho.

Attempts at this sort of canon-building are usually doomed to failure but Pixar is an absolute no-brainer. The people who build canons tend to have golden eras in their heads for the novel, for cinema, for pop music, whatever, and those always seem to be in the past, but there must be an emerging consensus we've been living through a golden age of animation for several years now?

Kung fu hustle, dimitar berbatov

The Shield

Pixar didn't exactly dominate the ILX poll for what that's worth.

Scientists suggest that no-one has ever watched The Shield.

this is hard to figure out i think because what seems to distinguish all the stuff that's swept under the rug of history (like, say all those other novels released around the time Moby Dick was being ignored) is that they are produced according to conventions that no longer really have the power to compel fascination or meaning. they dont connect with anything anymore.

take Moby Dick, I'd argue that one of the reasons it's a "classic" is precisely because of the ways that it's just still really weird. and at the same time somehow it's set in terms that so many novels after it came to adopt--it's like a wealth of formal/aesthetic possibilities which still have potential or meaning for new works. ditto the weirdness/fascination of Dante, The Book of Job, Homer, Shakespeare (the list is long obv).

Assayas' Summer Hours and Carlos sure look like classics to me.

Catfish (2010)

david lynch doesn't count and neither does malick they are already canon library of congress fodder. have been for centuries.

i don't know what was supposed to be so amazing about catfish.

Breaking Bad.

Deadwood

The Shield is the Shakespeare of the 21st century.

CYE is the new jane austen.

Margaret

― ryan, Thursday, January 24, 2013 10:52 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Deadwood

― standard disclaimer applies (darraghmac), Friday, January 25, 2013 9:47 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Scientists suggest that no-one has ever watched The Shield.

― Andrew Farrell, Friday, 25 January 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Bach was ignored for 200 years after he died etc

but there must be an emerging consensus we've been living through a golden age of animation for several years now?

between pixar and miyazaki you'd think so

tony soprano is one of my favorite characters ever. something so compelling to me about someone who is essentially a sociopath who is trying, and utterly failing, to find self-knowledge and spiritual transcendence. tony is an extreme case but there's something so final about that show's view of the possibility of those things that seems to apply to everyone.

yeah, that's why i think it's a critique of the society that creates a Tony in the end - so much of what he does feels like he has moral agency to do otherwise but he ends up compelled to be who he is expected to be

nicely put

also, the sopranos is unparalleled in its depiction of american conspicuous (over)consumption.

as for the other two white mid life crisis shows, i dont really know if i have a handle on what mad men is really try to do yet. it does have this lovely and purposeful oddness of tone that i've remarked on a few times around here.

breaking bad almost seems like a superhero origin story in reverse--and maybe im just messed up but i know a part of my lizard brain still "roots" for walter, sympathizes with him (if only because of the narrative mechanics), and im really curious if the show will actually succeed in getting people to turn against him, to actually root for him to fail/die/whatever. i could never root against tony 100% because his struggle is MY struggle too. walter seems less complex so far, but that would be an achievement of some sort.

Yeah, he's a compelling audience identification figure, in the way that white middle-class men just seem so much better at for some reason.

Oh idk some of them manage to be otherwise

its all shakespeare and all that, right? the sopranos, i mean. all hubris and hamlet and sons of anarchy. age-old tales. it fits in any era.

still think people here are being kinda, uh, rockist. though i never use that word. like can't one single perfect episode of the wire be a work of art comparable to a poem or a painting without dragging in the whole long-ass series? that's how i think, anyway. moses gunn episode of homicide will always be up there with whatever fancy art i liked in the 90's. to give one example. could be the pine barrens episode of sopranos for some or a perfectly perfect episode of 30 rock even. just the craft of a perfect episode. i love that stuff.

The only real flaw I saw in the last season is that Marlo is not an interesting character.

I think that's what makes him an interesting character! Not in the sense of "Hey, it's Marlo!" but the contrast with Stringer or Avon, that all he is is a blank canvas to pour power into - he doesn't seem to want anything else (which is why he's unhappy when he lucks into getting everything that Stringer wanted but couldn't have).

it isn't just that Tony Soprano or Walter White are monsters, there's the very obvious sense that they're made monstrous by their fear of death, and specifically by the way that fear is formed by the monstrous worlds they inhabit

And then go on and contrast these two w/Hank who both face crisis and death but have completely diff ways of dealing with it.

re: Walter, despite being a monster you'd rather spend time w/him than Hank anyday of the week. Re-wires the word decent in your head.

I don't know whether I'd really say Walter White is afraid of death. In a way, he is almost set free by his death sentence. He is afraid of losing control, afraid of uncertainty, and yeah, cancer is therefore terrifying, but he also seems to have a death-wish. Like, he wants to survive, but he would rather die in a storm of bullets than in a hospital bed.

To me, Mad Men is more about change and history and society than about Don Draper. The last three seasons have been amazing at actually showing and discussing how some things change and other things don't.

Breaking bad seems to me to be about work
And how taking a difficult job brings out parts of your personality that you previously ignored or didnt know existed

nice point!

i thought the great feat of the sopranos was making an audience love every mob cliche again and again even though they were old hat for decades. but, again, those cliches just make for good drama/t.v. they are comforting to people. like zombies and brains! they always want to eat them and people will watch them eat them forever.

i agree with this, but to a larger extent i think the mafia is like high school or the aristocracies of the past--it's a fertile setting for creating heightened stakes, a kind of funhouse mirror for ordinary life.

like, the Godfather could be boiled down to "shall i take over dad's business or be my own man?"

Ugh but still a man

you guys still haven't told me if you agree that one episode of a t.v. show can be a considered a single work of art like a poem. and be divorced from the series as a whole. there are louie episodes that are better than a lot of recent movies i've seen.

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scott: i think it's a great point and one too often passed over. it's hard to make those judgments with stuff that has these long multi-season narrative arcs perhaps. but i think there's an interesting tension to doing an episodic narrative--something that mad men, in particular, seems to push to its limits.

oh is this sopranos vs. breaking bad now?

Sopranos is faust, basically. Tony is the devil. Melfi is a standin for the audience. Everyone else is consumed or destroyed by Tony's monstrosity.

Breaking Bad is much thinner thematically imho - as I said at the end of Season 4: Feel like this show is about one thing and one thing only, really: being addicted to the tension that comes from high risk behavior. The rest is just mechanics, action movie shit.

you guys still haven't told me if you agree that one episode of a t.v. show can be a considered a single work of art like a poem

absolutely agree with this

Faust! I like it. Tony sorta seems like Faust and Mephistopheles.

agree that BB is thinner. which is why, as much as I love it, im not sure it's something i'll ever return to when it's over. but of course who knows.

like that episode of breaking bad where jesse parties for days with hobos in his house. that was a better drug movie in 44 minutes than any drug movie i can think of in recent memory. not saying it was a deathless epic masterpiece but you didn't really have to watch every episode to get that episode. it stands on its own.

you guys still haven't told me if you agree that one episode of a t.v. show can be a considered a single work of art like a poem. and be divorced from the series as a whole. there are louie episodes that are better than a lot of recent movies i've seen.

― scott seward, Monday, January 28, 2013 10:42 AM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think you are otm here, especially about Pine Barrens, which I am rewatching right now since you mentioned it

In the case of The Wire, I'd say that the basic units are the individual seasons. That's the level on which you see the most formal unity. Focusing on episodes makes a lot of sense in Community, where episodes can vary a lot stylistically and in terms of quality. Same with Seinfeld.

Pine Barrens is an obvious one. University. College. maybe a few others.

An old, but valid, definition of a classic is a work of art that is still sought out and appreciated, one that still has a wide audience or readership, a century after it first appeared. This gives the work five or more generations to settle into the culture, and lets the tatses of the original audience to be erased by several new waves of enthusiasm and the reactions aginst them.

Easily 99.5% of art and lit gets washed away in those tides. What's left after all that time has to compete with whatever is new and vital in the current culture and hold its own. Under the circumstances, it's a pretty safe bet that most of what has been touted here is wrong, but I endorse the general sense of the thread that films will outperform books by a wide margin. I would add to that my hunch that a majority of the classic books written since 2000 will be non-fiction.

Just catching up, the ones I like are:

• animation
• big telly box sets
• grand theft auto

• r&b
• skyscrapers

more important question: after the global warming holocaust, what will extraterrestrials want to watch when they retrieve our artifacts and take them back to their space museums?

girls gone wild

that reminds me, im pretty confident about A.I. fitting the bill. (not to rehash that debate yet again...)

Aliens might start with Planet Earth.

i'm more of a bicentennial man myself.

than an A.I. man.

same movie really.

Re: treating TV episodes as discrete works of art, I think it's totally valid but I seem to have more trouble with doing so myself the less an individual episode stands on its own as an independent work. Long-form narrative just sorta becomes a single, blurred single unit in my head, and there are moments that stand out but rarely single episodes. I personally tend to revere single episodes of, like, sitcoms and more procedural-y shows (like choice ST:TNG eps, or that first season Homicide ep with the araber). But I would by no means balk if someone with a brain capable of remembering single episodes were to champion a small piece of the larger pie.

This is probably because, since the advent of the season-long DVD box set, watching six straight episodes of a show has become my preferred method of watching TV by a country mile. Similar, I guess, to how I prefer to not just dip into a novel for an hour here and there.

i hope the aliens like party down. any one episode of that show is a treat. any single episode better than the hangover or a zillion other recent comedy movies too.

I often wonder if there is some distant planet that is home to some technologically superior aliens that have been watching us for years and they love our movies but think Drive Angry 2>>>>Citizen Kane.

i'm glad that after much disgreement with scott seward itt the two of us can bro up over our love for party down

i still think about the sopranos all the time. one big difference between the sopranos and shows like breaking bad and sons of anarchy is that i think david chase hated the soprano family from the beginning.

p sure that in the future major film studios will each only release one multibillion dollar budgeted film a year and that everything else will be on-demand or w/e for the various smaller screens, making the delineation between tv and movies really fuzzy/irrelevant, esp as things like commercial breaks get phased out.

does danny mcbride hate kenny powers?

killer ryan posts itt fwiw

doubt it, especially given the way the character was softened/redeemed in the last season (xp)

did they really do that? i disapprove! stricken from the halls of classics now!

yeah i wasn't happy about it either

this is a good other thread to mention deus ex in

wolf hall trilogy is obvs a major masterpiece

Oasis 2006 compilation album 'stop the clocks'