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

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.

It's surprising to realize this, but I feel like Walter White is more of a monster than Tony Soprano at this point.

Schlump otm

I love The Wire, but it dropped the ball somewhat in the home stretch.

Do you mean because it deviates from strict realism with the craziness of some of the final events? To me there was sufficient credibility built up over the previous seasons to make all of that believable. It came across as just a singularly fucked up month in the history of Baltimore. Having cashed in on that credibility, though, it was a good time to end the series.

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

"white middle-class man has mid-life crisis"

ahahahahahahahahahahaha

but srsly ryan is onto something with the "is a monster" thing - i'm gonna ignore the complex class politics of Sopranos since Andrew obviously has - but let's take it further; 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

they're good t.v. characters. memorable. i actually kinda prefer hal from malcolm in the middle as a character though as far as midlife breakdowns go.

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.

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.

http://www.geekosystem.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/SMBC_Title.png

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.