http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbc ... 59966/1023


Roger Ebert is correct.

Very correct.

(I know who's coming to dinner...)

Wow. I watched that exact line-up on TCM.

Nothing more relaxing than plopping on the couch to watch a B&W on TCM.

Chris Kelley's friends are idiots.

His friends must not like Raging Bull either........

I told my son that years ago, remembering this strip. He was buying it for a while, them mom came and ruined it all by yelling at me.

I LOVE black & white movies.

Well, Calvins father has to get some revenge on him, right?

I love black & white. You can do things with it that you just can't do the same with color. I've found that out in my still photography.

One thing I've learned from watching TCM is that b&w remained an option for film makers farther into the 1960s than I realized. It was only near the end of the decade that it came to be considered too commercially unviable for studios to support. I'm glad that there've been occasional exceptions since then.

That said, I like early color photography and cinematography too. It's fascinating to see people and places of that far back in color. It's also interesting to catch a glimpse of those early two-color processes.

Back in the '80s, I saw a colorized version of Casablanca.

The colorization itself wasn't bad, but the whole dark noir feel and look of the film was gone. It didn't have the same air about it.

I say, leave the b&w movies that way. And b&w movies are cool.

No preference for black and white, but it's never stopped me before. A good movie's a good movie.

Years ago, I used to like to turn off the color on my TV and watch a movie in black and white. Rocky feels even more like a classic in B&W.

My color vision's a bit dodgy, so I'm not bothered by B&W in any way.

I wish my (former) students agreed, though. It was murder getting them to sit through CITIZEN KANE and PSYCHO. Black and white = "old and lame" to a lot of folks, apparently.

The poor, misguided fuckers.

It's not just black and white-- the way the films are put together, with far fewer close-ups and shot changes and the overall pacing of the films have a lot to do with this. We're used to our movies working harder to hold our attention, so with old movies having something of a "point and shoot" quality to them, I cans ee why the unmotivated would want to challenge their own expectations with something different from what they're used to.

Orson Welles called B&W "The Actor's Friend" and once opined that only in B&W could an actor have a truly powerful performance.

My soon to be 13 year old daughter will watch black & white Hitchcock films with me. She likes Hitchcock.

It's difficult at times to get my wife to watch an old movie, especially black and white. It signifies to her that the movie is likely to have everything she dislikes about old movies.

One of the big problems with colorized movies is they do research.

It's like when The Munsters went to color and the characters went from pale white to bright green. It looks wrong, even if that's the color the characters have always been.

So, when they find out what color such-and-such's dress was and colorize it correctly, they often screw up the composition of the shot. Those banana yellow outfits everyone wore in Casablanca might have been technically accurate, but they came across as too bright in the finished product. I think most people looked at the original and saw pale khaki.

And it's really their loss--because the better older movies are very enjoyable to a viewer who accepts them on their own terms and lets them do their work on the eyes and emotions. You see the medium performing without most of the surface flash. More recent movies are so filled with flash that that's all many know to look for. They're like readers who see an older comic drawn in a six- or eight-panel grid as hopelessly stodgy and don't realize that some of these were actually very good comics.

I doubt they feel it as a loss; I think the majority of people aren't as "into" their entertainment as we are here on the 'WAN. Most people watch a movie once or twice as a diversion or to do something with friends and leave it at that. Not many people care to learn about the history of cinema or their favorite characters, they just want to have two hours of fun and then forget it. In fact, most of the people I know have pretty small DVD collections overall, usually only purchasing their absolute favorite films.

A lot of the acting, music, sets, pacing back then-no good. There's an artificiality to a lot of it. You're often aware that they are acting. Modern life is faster and that makes some of them seem a little dull too.

That's the problem.

Gone With the Wind-Great film, but Vivian Leigh is an overactor. A lot of the women are.

Also, there's very little characterization in many movies from back then. Even minor things are not given to give the character a little more depth. One dimensional, similar to many pre-Marvel comics.


and then some of the people are harder to relate to. I'm 31, but a 30 ish character in movies back then, they seem like my grandpa acts. Because people have changed, it can be a little more difficult to relate.