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

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

@dril

since there isn't going to be a 22nd century, the question is moot

im sure theres a thread for amateur scifi somewhere

Breaking Bad won't make it. There hasn't been any surprises since season 3, and it won't hold up on a revisit, once you know how they make it out of their latest problem. Mad Men and Rubicon will be seen as the great AMC-series.

ya mad men is full of surprises

I wonder if don draper is gonna cheat on his wife

Peep Show, Spaced, League of gentlemen and The Office are some of the finest comedies ever made

Tree of Life just missed out on a spot in Sight & Sound's 100 Greatest Movies Ever Made poll

This is maybe an interesting place to start. Here are the 21st-century films in the S&S critics' top 250:

In the Mood for Love
Mulholland Drive
The Tree of Life
Tropical Malady
Hidden (Cache)
The Werckmeister Harmonies
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu
There Will Be Blood
WALL-E
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
West of the Tracks
Russian Ark
Spirited Away
Melancholia

s&s 100 is a good place to start pooping on

some of those movies are p cool tho

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

I dunno, I couldn't get through The Wire but did get through The Corrections, though I probably spent as much time watching the Wire as I did reading The Corrections (maybe 7 hours?)

OH NO WAIT, I'm thinking of Freedom, not The Corrections. The Corrections was better than the Wire. I was going to say "But the Corrections didn't come out in the 21st century" but I looked it up, and no, it did. It seems like ages ago.

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

have you read sam lipsyte? he really goes deep in a way that louis ck tends to shy back from, and, unlike ck, he's funny

i have no opinion of deadwood vs george saunders, though, both have flaws but also virtuosic high points

Oh, the thick of it, obv

lol the corrections is no classic and shouldnt be mentioned i the same breath as the wire, lipsyte and Saunders are cool but from what I've read neither of them have produced anything nearly classical, saunders worldview is p limited, lipsyte seems p trapped in the same bougie fear cycle as franzen et al tho obvs hes a much better writer

Some posts itt putting the chall in challops.

lol stfu

Forbrydelsen!

It will in Denmark, at least...

I wonder if don draper is gonna cheat on his wife

― iatee, 25. januar 2013 17:09 (23 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He hasn't done that for a looong time. But walther white still uses chemistry to get out of a tight spot every third episode.

I was agreeing with you in part, lagoon. Corrections will sink like a stone in the ocean of time.

hah sry

I'd second There Will Be Blood, which will look more definitive the further we get from fossil fuels.

mullholand dr is prob the most no brainier of anything itt

In the Mood for Love - need to see
Mulholland Drive - yes!
The Tree of Life - nah
Tropical Malady - need to see
Hidden (Cache) - pfft
The Werckmeister Harmonies - need to see
The Death of Mr. Lazarescu - need to see
There Will Be Blood - hell yeah!
WALL-E - Ratatouille, The Incredibles and Up are better, but ok
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives - need to see
West of the Tracks - what's this?
Russian Ark - need to see
Spirited Away - i guess...
Melancholia - fuck no.

But walther white still uses chemistry to get out of a tight spot every third episode.

and when he ran over those drugs dealers and then proceeded to shoot one of them cold. Yeah I guess there is chemistry in those bullets.

phantom menace 70-minute review
marvel vs. capcom 3

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" and the better stuff probably didn't get reviewed in the NYT. With TV it's pretty easy to locate the good stuff.

franzen is just awful

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'