In my latest Film Data Scientist video, I’m going deep on “The Greatest Movies Ever Made”©®™ to understand what makes a movie great and why that classification may slip over time.
I am uploading new video essays every couple of weeks, so make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube to get notified when another drops (also, subscribing will really help me out with the Algorithm Gods, so it would mean a lot to me - thank you!).
And to help explain the channel, I also created a short channel trailer:
There is no room for masterpieces anymore. Let's start there. First of all, they are too expensive to make. They're complicated, and the movie business isn't in the business of making them. They were made at a time when movies didn't have to compete with an abundance of other options, when culture wasn't stuck in nostalgia mode, and when we weren't flying with hypersonic speed toward a 24/7 insane asylum of AI-manufactured digital images. So, looking back at what we call masterpieces, they lack an immediacy this generation has been conditioned to- the immediacy that movies in the last 25 years are sold on. An impermanence that has made the rhythm of every movie the same as the last one. In that world, yes, most of the so-called masterpieces have lost their luster; we just don't live there anymore. A masterpiece, today, is what appeals to us in the moment. And maybe it's always been that way.
This is a very nuanced analysis (with the occasionally amusing joke) on a topic that's been on my mind a lot. Especially the IMDB Top 250 List- back in 2016, it had a lot of good films mixed with the modern stuff, that's how I got introduced to a lot of Hitchcock, Fellini, Kurosawa, and Bergman films. Today's list is stuffed to the gills with the latest mainstream offerings, which I blame on recency bias.
Also, love the visuals of the posters changing and shifting as it moves through the years!