Skip to main content

Old movies are better?

 Someone said some time back "I love older movies, they are so much better. They don't make movies like that anymore - older movies are so much better".

I promptly pointed out this reasoning is mistaken. The fact is that there are a LOT more older movies than newer movies. Like a lot lot more. If you classify newer movies as movies released in the last 5 years, there are like perhaps a 100 times more movies made from the dawn of cinema till 5 years ago. So even if say only 5% of older movies are good as compared to 10% of newer movies (which is the other side of the preposition) even then there would be 50 times more "good" older movies then newer movies. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

True Essence

My yoga teacher, who knows a lot about me and my story, recently asked me "what do you like about yourself, what is your true essence?". I gave the usual answer that I have been giving myself for most of my life - that I am kind, generous, helpful etc. etc. That was not the answer he was looking for. He said those things are in relation to other people i.e. these traits are what I think other people perceive me as. But what is really MY true essence and what do I like about MYSELF. He gave me a week to think about it. That did get me thinking. I talked to some friends about it over the week. I realised how much of my self-perception is dictated by other people. And it has been like that all my life. What I think of myself is really what I think others think of me. Or what I want others to think of me. But if I take other people out of the equation, what am I? What is my true essence? The more I thought, the more I realised that my true essence is creativity. Looking back...
1 comment
Read more

The limitation of language

Humans developed language as a means of communicating with other tribe members. Language is one of the most important, if not THE most important, reason humans are so successful as a species. It enables us not only to communicate immediate information (e.g. there is a lion in that direction, don't go there) but also form and communicate intricate ideas (e.g. myths, religions). Yuval Hariri in his massively interesting book "Sapiens" talks about how what he calls "fiction" (i.e. stories we humans tell each other) enabled homo sapiens to co-operate in massive numbers (much more than the Dunbar limit of 150) and made us such a successful species. Language was critical in all of that.  I believe the advent of language was what gave the biggest boost to cultural evolution in humans. Humans are the only species that significantly evolve culturally as well as naturally. Cultural evolution is exponentially faster than natural evolution - we homo sapiens effectively ...
1 comment
Read more