[cchooper]

These days, the commonly accepted wisdom is that movies were always as bad as they are now, and anyone who says otherwise is just idealizing the past. I offer the following evidence that the quality of movies is not constant over time:

1939: Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Gone With The Wind, The Wizard Of Oz, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights

1940: Rebecca, Fantasia, His Girl Friday, The Grapes of Wrath, The Philadelphia Story, The Great Dictator

1941: Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels

Rather than relying on personal taste, I took these from various 'top 100' lists. I haven't seen all of them myself, but the ones I have seen are a mile apart from anything released this year, or any recent year.

[NikkiA]

IMDB reports that 2322 movies were released in 1939 alone, is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?

1980 for comparision, IMDB lists 6007 movies (8000+ if you include TV movies), and contains modern (popular) classics such as Stir Crazy, Superman II, Empire Strikes Back, Airplane!, The Blue Lagoon, Ordinary People, Urban Cowboy. The Shining, Caddyshack, Raging Bull, Friday The 13th, The Fog, The Blues Brothers.

Hmm, looks like 1980 was a much more 'classic' era than the 40s for hollywood, but you wouldn't have heard that from film buffs in the 80s.

Hollywood has always been a great abuser of the 'sling lots of shit at the wall and see what sticks' approach to 'greatness', they're just slinging a lot more shit these days.

Even if we take a really contemporary year and do the same study, we see a pattern of greats no matter what year, take 2005 at random:

Batman Begins, Sin City, V for Vendetta, Revenge of the Sith, King Kong, Brokeback Mountain, Harry Potter/Goblet of Fire, Serenity, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Mr & Mrs Smith, Wedding Crashers, Munich, Saw 2, Hostel, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Madagascar, Pride & Prejudice, Land of the Dead.

Ah, but the movie buff will point out that they're not established classics like Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz. Not yet, anyway.

Edit: Btw, for 2005, the number of movies was 28,000+. Is it any wonder that there is a lot of formulaic stuff in there as well?

[cchooper]

There is not a single great movie in your 2005 list. In fact Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of the worst movies I've ever seen.

As for the 1980s, this was indeed a much better decade than the current one. The 70s were even better, much better than the 40s.

> is it really surprising that there were a handful of good movies among them?

Not good movies, great movies.

[roc]

I guess it depends on who you're talking to. I still keep hearing 'movies used to be better'.

And I never argued that quality was constant. I believe it's essentially random. So the existence of an aberrant concentration of quality isn't surprising to me. I'm sure you could find clusters of a few years where nothing of note came out as well.