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

WRT Chris Ware - "Lint" and that sci-fi story, both in the "Rusty Brown" cycle, are contenders. "Lint" will leave you breathless.

21th-C Classics:

Half-Life 2
Saints Row 3
GTA: San Andreas
Red Dead Redemption
Fez
Rez
Ico
Shadow of the Colossus
Journey
the Walking Dead
Civilization 4

i agree w/ exactly one of those

barcelona under guardiola

Wanted to float Jonathan Strange And Mr Norrell out there as a potential candidate.

hahaha what, that thing is so forgettable

I have forgotten essentially every detail about that book

you won't forget it when I drop it on yr head

adventure time
la mala educacion
scott pilgrim (film)
film socialisme
inland empire

i didnt really like pulphead but its v possible i was literally stoned everytime i tried to read it. theres some piece abt him going 2 a churchy bonaroo or s.thing? it's really not good iirc

omg i almost suggested scott pilgrim

y'all like some terrible shit

solitary etc.

y'all like some terrible shit

― let's go do some crimes (strongo hulkington's ghost dad

srsly, i mean david lynch, still, really?

sex house

The Road

Oh god yes to Sex House. Yet another wonderful comedy artifact that I can't seem to get anyone to take seriously and watch because of its medium.

More broadly, I'd love to think that things like The Onion and The Soup, while very of their time, will stand the test of time by virtue of a critical position that exists outside of their time. Like, anything that so perfectly captures the horrific absurdity of a particular period should be revered ad infinitum.

Know this doesn't equate to 60 hours but the quality is def there.

* Charlie's Angels (can't remember which exact one, been years) had so much energy and fun and excitement, record needs to be set straight on that.

agreed a masterpiece doesn't need to be 60hrs long.

Charlie's Angels II was weird and quite interesting (and v different from the first which I remember enjoying, hence going to the second). It was purely driven by costume and striking settings to what felt like quite an extreme degree.

It felt like something that was present particularly in the third Bourne movie and Quantum of Solace, but in a less obvious, slightly duplicitous way. The mechanics were just "how can we get these characters from this scenic place to this other scenic place".

it's a style where there is only plot (where characters go) and no story (why they go there). It might be argued that a LOT of films are like this, but actually there does tend to be at least some notional sense of motive and rational, and where I felt CA-II-FT was a pack leader was the complete absence of why, not even notional, or so absurd as to cast mocking doubt upon the whole notion of "why". <-- esp the case in QoS iirc. Impressionistic/loosely associated Last Year in Marienbads of tourism brochures (Bond) or pop videos (CAIIFT).

If this becomes a dominant, dream-like mechanism in Hollywood film, then maybe Full Throttle will be seen as a masterpiece.

if people are still wearing vote for Pedro tshirts in 2201 then Napoleon dynamite will have secured its place in canon.

I absolutely think NapDyn is a 21st C. classic (my theoretical kids will love it), but I'm not gonna reopen that can of worms.

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

― messiahwannabe, Friday, 25 January 2013 09:16 (2 days ago) Permalink

re: being groundbreaking or masterpieces or ambitious
Flight of the Navigator was the first feature to use specular reflection CGI (and really well done, too -- also great pee wee herman performance) but T2 gets all the canon props.

I kinda feel that people looking back at this era will be more interested in it for internet related stuff--the first this or that thing. Probably there'll be classes on the early days of podcasting and net series.

I think the idea that something from video games will be canonized makes sense -- it seems to me the place where people are really doing something new, so new that a person like me (who hasn't played games seriously since 1996 or so) doesn't even understand how video games can have the things that art has -- but I know it can because I see that people who have thought about them deeply talk about them in that light, in language I can't penetrate. (In other words, video games are basically the same as opera to me, or for that matter classical music generally -- I take it on faith that there is art there, and a distinction between good and bad, even if due to lack of training it's unavailable to me, because why would people lie?)

So given that 50 years from now games will be an establishment artform, scholars will retrospectively understand which contemporary game started making it that way, and that will be canon.

Also: it's funny, when I read about the current golden age of TV I always think "but people said that same thing about The Sopranos when it was on, that it was remaking the genre of TV and was a work of art that would be remembered for decades as such, and yet no one has spent a second thinking about the Sopranos since a week after it went off the air," but I stand corrected, I see that there are people in this thread who are still thinking about Sopranos!

I feel like the talk about the "golden age of tv" started around the time the Sopranos and Deadwood went off the air (or maybe when the Wire was ending), as in "this was a great age of tv and now it's over, hope you appreciated it." But then there was Mad Men, and Breaking Bad and the NBC thursday comedies and it just kept on going.

The thing about tv is, the exceptional stuff mainly comes around when a network has nothing to lose. HBO had to make a splash, so did AMC. Once they became as big as they wanted, they went from The Wire to True Blood, Mad Men to Walking Dead. Lost was a hail mary from an executive under pressure, nbc had nothing better to do than program community and 30 rock. It seems to me that the situation with the tv-networks has stabilized, so I think tv will be mainly adequate going forward.

However, the new net-services might be in the same situation as the cable-networks was fifteen years ago. I'd say the fourth season of Arrested Development has the most potential to be tv-as-art in 2013.

More broadly, great art happens when people aren't comfortable and complacent and trying to follow a formula to perpetuate wealth/success/fame that already exists. They say you gotta stay hungry.

Of the TV stuff to date, I think The Wire has the best claim to classic. I won't be surprised if it becomes the Citizen Kane of TV drama, topping Best-Ever polls for decades out.

Fiction-wise, I haven't read most of the big hypes, and this is more a hope than a prediction, but I think Train Dreams could/should be called a classic. (I have a bias for novellas, tho.)

I love The Wire, but it dropped the ball somewhat in the home stretch. Same with The Sopranos (Chase should've turned down that extra half season rather than needlessly padding out the narrative). Deadwood is masterful but feels unresolved (to me...I know others disagree). Breaking Bad is really the only recent drama series that holds its own as a stunningly accomplished work when looked at as a whole.

"So given that 50 years from now games will be an establishment artform"
video games are in a weird state right now where it's close enough to film to think of them under that lens but as the peripherals and platforms become more specialized, they'll start to revert to the same cultural place as board games or sports, so unless Settlers of Catan and Ultimate Fighting become national institutions, and there is a statue of Gary Gygax in every township, the future doesn't look very Katamari.

angry birds sold as much copies as the beatles sold records

It's funny cos the more 'artsy' they get, it also seems like they just want to be movies more and more. Cutscenes taking up hours and hours or play. It's cool that using an in-game engine you can orchestrate a sweeping cinematic but i think they have alot more going for them than simply copying movies. Movies are about a visual/aural experience. Games are about the interaction. In another 10 years mainstream videogames may be visually and sonically indistinguishable from Pixar movies, and the most successful will be about how to offer the most entertaining and interesting interaction with that presentation.

Games are already in art gallery and have been for years. Who knows maybe there will be a game that is considered the "2001" or "Sgt. Pepper" of videogames. It's really hard to imagine what will happen in the future as games have been becoming more and more integrated into our lives. First you had to have access to a Timeshare machine, then to an arcade game, then to home consoles, then to your Gameboy, and now it's on everyone's phones. People are walking around with videogames 24/7 literally in their pockets. I guess the logical endpoint is some kind of VR contact lens or brain implant or otherwise immersive experience. Who knows what kind of games will be around then? We probably won't even call them games, they will simply be The Way Things Are and VR galaxy hopping or whatever will be something you do on the bus ride to work.

i disagree; it's totally easy to see where video games will end up: flash mob lazer tag grindr

which is the codename for playstation 5

lovepillow

I'm a little shocked at the longevity of magic the gathering, but that's kind of a last century thing, but so was sopranos?

One season in the last century, six in this one

http://webtoolfeed.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/906700710_rg8ms-l-21.jpg?

undecided, but possibly

Helen Dewitt's The Last Samurai, maybe. It's one I figure I'll be rereading.

Film-wise, I might go with Russian Ark.

yo who are you/do we know each other IRL?
― fiscal cliff racer (bernard snowy)

possibly! i don't want to reveal my government name here and stuff, but if you're friends with the zen frisbee/pipe/new romans crowd, i'm the guy that used to hang with all those folks, then moved to indonesia. also i could be the only person to ever be fired from wxyc (circa 89) though really that seems impossible - surely many people have been let go over the years for the same reasons as i

The Onion's "firing on all cylinders" days are in the 20th century though - if it's eligible then so is the Simpsons, and then we can all go home.

I am seriously against the Sopranos - more or less for the sake of my sanity I have to hope that the lure of "white middle-class man has mid-life crisis" will fade over time.

It's been popular for a while
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e6/Babbit.jpg

to say nothing of
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/69/Cervantes_Don_Quixote_1605.gif/200px-Cervantes_Don_Quixote_1605.gif

I am aware that it has form.

Tho to be honest my views on this are a) Morbs otm re: lololol future generations and b) The whole idea of a canon of classics in the sense of "this is what you need to watch" seems to be crumbling pretty fast - if you want a picture of the future, imagine the IMDB top #100 and then c) fuck the Sopranos

If this becomes a dominant, dream-like mechanism in Hollywood film, then maybe Full Throttle will be seen as a masterpiece.

In some ways 'dream-like mechanism' is much of what US film is good at, and 'full throttle' seemed to give it a new twist to this. Will re-check next time its on.

Thread was worth posting, after all.

fwiw i think the sopranos does more to swim against the tide of "white middle class man has mide life crisis" than mad men or breaking bad do. you could argue that trope is something it holds up for criticism. (ie, the fact that the white middle class dude is basically a monster)

though of course all three seem to have a conflicted relationship to that idea--but id argue it's the most complex in sopranos.

kinda blowing my mind that enjoyably staid 3d walkaround of the male characters of 60s american novels Mad Men is being pushed as a classic. i can see how it's appreciated & how it's an interesting way for people now to be relating to recent history, all sharply drawn morals, but idg what's perceived as unusual or excellent about it,the way you can make those arguments for the sopranos or the wire. even if it's really engrossing it doesn't seem like anything more significant or reflective to me.