Recently, I went to a local Mexican food establishment to pick up dinner with a friend.  This restaurant has a TV mounted to the wall, which is usually tuned to the Mexican Futbol team’s latest heartbreaking defeat, despite being two-goal favorites.  This time, however, it was the classic movie-redub hour, and the classic movie was Mr. Nanny, starring Hulk Hogan.  Being the film geeks that we are, we decided to discuss the dated look of the film by today’s standards.  Meanwhile, one of the vatos next to us commented on how “this is a funny movie” to his friend, making us look like total goobers.

It might seem petty to discuss cinematic questions over the Univision Pelicula de Sabado, especially if said movie starred Hulk Hogan’s gleaming pectorals and bleached blonde mullet.  However, using Zen philosophies, one could justify this as discussing the movie based on what it is not.  Regardless, it did raise an interesting idea.  Watch any movie from your childhood and try to make the argument that it doesn’t look like it is from a certain era.

In fact, this is one of the most crucial arguments behind the philosophy of The Bigger Picture:  A film’s potential for greatness is often related to its ability to cast aside the constraints of its time.  This is not to say that a movie can embody the spirit of an era and not attain greatness in the long run.  One example of a film like this is The Graduate — that movie had an absolutely huge cultural impact, and may not have been such a hit in today’s climate.  However, films such as this one have a certain timeless quality to them that is difficult to define.

Yet, for all its strength to avoid aging, The Graduate still appears old from a purely visual standpoint.  Mr. Nanny looks old now, though for a lot of us the 1990s were a formative decade.  To start with, both of these movies were set in their own time period.  The costumes and sets are all decorated using the styles of the time in which they were made.  Hulk Hogan’s hairstyle is one that you would only have seen in a movie from 1993 (thank the Lord).  Cars are especially important set dressing.  You could have a modern building behind old cars and still fool audiences into believing the film is set in a non-contemporary time period. (more…)