I enjoyed this video and your insight on the "relevancy" of movies. Keep up the good work.

Leon your renegade cuts are becoming my favorite videos on the site

*holds chin and nods slowly, puts on Cinema Snob accent* I'm definitely starting to like your work, Leon. Keep it up.

Hi Leon,
Love the analysis on films and public opinion.
Maybe the speech in the Great Dictator was memerable but the speech in itself was not the message of Chaplin.
Chaplin was against the use of sound in movies and ridiculed it in previous movies. The speech was the first time that we actually heard him speak for a long time. If you compare how the hero and the villain speech the speak in the same way and in the same tone. Yet they both get cheared on by the crowd.
The message of Chaplin was that the message didn't matter, it was how you conveyed the message to the public. He was critisizing the public for taking in pretty much anything if it was presented right.
Chaplin refused to speak even when evreyone else was doing it in Holywood. Onley when he thought it was nessesary. He often riddicules speaking movies. The Great Dictator is the same. Check al his movies and compare how he uses sound and speech.Esspacialy the movies in the talkies era.

Thats not entirely accurate. Yes Chaplin ridiculed the speech in film in his earlier movies and said "If the tramp speaks he dies.", but he also said "If the tramp has to die I want him to say someting that I truly believe in."
He also said that it wasn´t the barber speaking but himself.

That may be true, but it's the crowd reaction that says it al. Allthough his message was heartfelt they reacted the same as they did to the dictator. That's strange right?

hell it was like his movie

I dont get it you are saying they speak the same but its the way the message is given that matters, and if you ment they spoke differently you prove it doesnt matter cuz you say they both cheer...

Having followed your videogame related videos before you did renegade cut, i have to say that while i liked them, i really love renegade cut and i think it's just about the most unique series in the internet reviewer landscape not just here on or similar smaller sites, but just about anywhere my browser took me until today.

I hope this series has at least a few good years ahead of it and that whatever you want to bring to our attention will be as thoughtprovoking as your past videos have been for me.

Keep up the good work!

Hey Leon

Thank you for this wounder full episode, I even set out to watch Chaplins speech. (I know I should be ashamed for not watching it sooner.
Hope life becomes will give you more creative space soon, so that you can show the world more of this then your able now.
Thank you for everything you made, did, will make and will do in the future.

Niek/Ardawen

Truly good ideas are timeless; they only become outdated when a population of people can no longer appreciate good ideas. It's in those cases that the good ideas actually become even more relevant rather than less because the good ideas are needed all the more to counteract the bad ideas that have led to the perceived irrelevancy.

For example, if people think that Mr. Smith's stand or Chaplain's speech is irrelevant, it is because they have become so cynical of the ideals that both of these represent and need to be reminded that there are some things worth speaking up for, worth taking a stand for, worth fighting for, even when it means losing everything else. There are things that really do matter, and when the world no longer considers them "relevant", then the world needs a good kick in the pants to remind it that they do truly matter.

I really like this series

What I would add up is that a good movie doesen't need to be "relevant", even a political one. One of my favourite movies One, Two, Three by Billie Wilder, a comedy about the cold war, is by no means a relevant movie dealing with some universal ideas.
Still, if you are informed about the time period, you are able to get good laughs out of it. It also functions as a window to the past.

It's always great to hear things in perspective from any creative angle in movies :)

I love this show, can't wait for more!

Both Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the Great Dictator are two of my favorite films, so listening to you speak about them and how poignant their messages still are today was a real treat. These videos are awesome, Leon, keep up the good work.

When it first came out, wasn't the great dictator banned from showing in theaters in Great Britain because it would come over as offensive to the German Nazi regime. The idea that countries would do that sort of stuff alone is a great counterbalance to the almost caricature way Nazi's and Nazi Germany is presented in the media as we see it now. If a regime like that will rise again, it won't be super obvious to everyone and confict avoidance will be a common reaction. This is important to realise.

Same thing for social justice movies really. To see that people needed to make arguments for the ability to ride in the same part of a bus, to vote and to marry the people they love, things we often take so for granted that we can't even imagine it being any other way. Yet people in those times weren't all evil human hating assholes, they're people like you and me. It makes you realise that what you take for granted isn't super obvious and that there might be things you take for granted as true that are actually very harmful.

All of this is seperate from the discussion of inteded meaning vs understood meaning, with the second being able to change so much over time that we can't really say any movie is irrelevant, as it all depends on the eye of the beholder.

All of this seemed rather obvious to me. Is that because it's obvious or is it because most people don't see things this way?

People say movies are "dated" and "quaint" in the pejorative sense all the time. Hence my desire to make this episode.

I will disagree and say that your argument only applies to GOOD movies. Something like Demolition Man is dated, and irrelevant because it's' not just an inaccurate depiction of the 21st century, but it's a BAD MOVIE.

There are people who don't like Demolition Man? I am flabberghasted. My ghast is flabbered.

I like to know what's the name of the opening theme song in the video?? I like that beat. It's pretty tight.

"The Ends" by Basement Jaxx.

/The Manchurian Candidate/ is just a troubled film. Here is a film that accuses McCarthy of being a buffoon yet fully believes in his Communist boogeyman.

Science fiction is a whole other thing. Some sci-fi is specifically meant to give us a fantastic vision of the future. So what if things didn't turn out that way? The stories wouldn't have been the same kind of wonderful if they hadn't been willing to dream.

By the way, ugly scaling artifact half way through the frame.

There are some films, though, that do date badly. Some films in the 1950s depicted characters who were so sanitized they ceased to be people, because studios didn't have the balls to show people the way they really were. I'm thinking of teen shmaltz, that sort of thing. Consider, also, an older example like /College/ (starring Buster Keaton.) A young woman will be expelled if a man is found in her room. For me, a situation like this has to inspire rage. Who in God's name do these pompous asses think they are to police another person's sexual rights? What business is it of theirs? For your video, you chose serious films made for intelligent, mature audiences. Casablanca may not have shown everything or said everything explicitly, but for the perceptive viewer, the adult world was there. Same goes for most of the films you picked. But there are other films that can't transcend their time periods due to their commitment to a dishonest portrayal of humanity and the world. To the more intelligent viewers of their day, they were probably bad then, and they're sure bad now, and yes, dated.

Thank you, I need to show a few people I know this video. My favorite movie is Blade Runner, and whenever I mention it, there is always some jackass who says "2019 is coming up, how soon until we get some replicants and flying cars?"

Renegade Cuts is my favorite segment on this channel. Short, concise, informative, and interesting.

Oh, and did I notice the use of the song "Strobe" by deadmau5? Or perhaps deadmau5 sampled another song. You can never quite tell when it comes to electronic music. :P

Renegade Cut is littered with deadmau5. I thought to go with dance/electronic/hip hop music for my show after watching Attack the Block and listening to the soundtrack. I'm not a big expert on that kind of music, but my wife knows about this sort of thing and recommended deadmau5 and a few others.

very nice
and the exact reason i try to get people to watch more black and whites
i know too many people who like to shrug movies off b/c they want to live in the now and they think the now movie is the only way to do that
heck
i have a friend that won't watch the batman movies b/c the Nolan films are what he sees as the "his" trilogy
it really bugs me
every movie has something to say and a way of saying it and what is said will always be said
it doesn't go away with age:)

Another great video. I finally got to see The Great Dictator with my younger sister this past summer. We both loved it. I was surprised my sister enjoyed it so much (she found Psycho boring, when I watched that with her). I also really loved the female lead in that picture. She was ahead of her time, in that she was a very strong female character not normally seen in films of that time. This film made me admire Chaplin even more.
I think the reason some people today would call such films dated, is simply because they are old. I know that there are people in my generation who think that an old movie will be boring because it isn't like movies we have today. They might even go as far to say it won't look as good because they didn't have the technology we have. Of course, I don't agree, but I do know that some people around my age and especially younger feel that way. For me, old films can still be relevant because we have to learn from our past; otherwise, we will continue to make the same mistakes. We can look to our past to figure out solutions to problems we have today. That's my take on it.

Here's my take which is different, but shares the same sentiment -

A film, ANY film, will become irrelevant when the forces that drive that film are proven to be FAILURES. And by "forces", I don't mean "the guy who made it sucks now".

But the reason why The Great Dictator works is because Hitler LOST. And not just that he lost, but that he was DOOMED to lose. Because the ideals he carried are ideas that simply fail. So if you make a film that's a love-letter to Hitler (Springtime for Hitler?), you end up making a film that is "dated", because nobody "loves" Hitler. And nobody SHOULD love him, he was a terrible person.

What I'm saying is not that Nazi propaganda films are "dated" as a result of Germany losing the war. What I'm saying is that the kind of ideology that goes into Nazi Propaganda is an ideology that is morally, objectively WRONG. And because Nazi Propaganda is WRONG, and because human perception generally sees the Third Reich as a terrible thing, nazi propaganda is "dated" because the point it was trying to make has been demonstrated to be wrong.

It's like if someone makes a pro-creationist film. When creationism dies, people will say that it's dated because it's ideas just aren't correct.

Dr. Strangelove is still true regardless of if we're talking about the cold war - the people who run the war are screw-ups. Unless every government ever suddenly became flawless, Strangelove will be true forever.

2001 will be true forever because mankind is meant to evolve, and our ties to technology will eventually prevent us from doing so, and we'll have to leave technology behind. 2001 will be "dated" when that idea is proven wrong.

Also, kudos for a double Kubrick reference. When it comes to ideas presented in film, Kubrick had the most, Kubrick had the best, and Kubrick had the most timeless. Not one film he has made doesn't still ring true today in some capacity.