Posted 9:38 AM by Gene

The SONS OF -- NEUHARTH start what threatens to be another new regular sales pitch -- INSTANT CLASSIC MOVIES OF THE YEAR! Almost every film on our cri-TIC's list is an AHThouse flick, including one for television, meaning more of the usual. But in a sidebar he whines about the difficulties of determining classic movies with his super-smooth ease:

•Film history is often in the hands of outside forces. In the late 1950s, the now universally beloved Casablanca (1943 Oscar winner) was sometimes called "the best bad movie ever made." But as decades passed, World War II became more romanticized, leads Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman retained their monumental currency in moviegoer memories, and the film came to be seen as the No. 1 advertisement for the "Warner Bros. style." This is why you hear strains of As Time Goes By over the Warner opening logo.

Pardon me, but the last time I saw Casablanca I heard the strains of Max Steiner's Warner fanfare -- unless I was hallucinating.

•The Roger Maris factor. Though John Ford's The Searchers and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho were huge box office hits at the time, the critics patronized them, just as they did to Maris when he broke Babe Ruth's 34-year seasonal home run record in 1961 while hitting only .269 against depleted quality pitching. But guess what? Nobody matched Maris's feat for almost four decades (and the only foreign substance he'd ingested was Wheaties). Sometimes, it takes us a while to appreciate what we've seen.

WHICH IS WHY TODAY'S MOVIE AD-BLURBISTS ANOINT INSTANT CLASSICS. (We won't say what foreign substances most blurbists ingested while ingesting their B. A.s in English and film theory, their textbooks excluded.)

[SIC] Sages have gotten more squirrelly. Though I love the message board on the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com), it weds smart, even brilliant, opining with imbecilic rants. An underseen masterpiece like Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole rates five pages of chatter, which doesn't sound out of line. But then you see that last year's Beerfest gets 10, American Pie Presents Band Camp gets 11 and The Break-Up (Jen and Vince anticipating true-life history), 37.

You know, at times there really isn't much difference between smart, even brilliant, opining (hint hint) and imbecilic rants -- especially given what's in the next graf:

[SIC] Some new movies are like new cars: Drive them out of the showroom, and there goes the sticker price. This is another way of saying that the Oscar-hyped Dreamgirls — with its mediocre score and distantly photographed musical numbers too often chopped up by cutting — will soon have a blue book value similar to the entire musical oeuvre of Vincente Minnelli. [Which, if I read this correctly, means Our Generation's Singin' in the Rain will still be worth vastly more than, say, An American in Paris -- because Minnelli directed all or part of sixteen musicals.]

And most movie ad-blurbists are USED-CAR DEALERS!

A NEUHARTHISM OF THE WEEK AWARD to MIKE!