Quote Originally Posted by SlumpBuster
Two thoughs:

As to ground breaking movies and CGI, ect. ect. I saw "The Best Years of Our Lives" for the first time a couple of weeks ago on PBS. That movies 50 years old with no CGI and was groundbreaking in 1946 and still one of the most haunting movies I've ever seen. I'm still thinking about it weeks later. Similarly, The Shop Around the Corner almost as perfect a film making gets in is clarity and decieving simplicity. It is leaps and bounds better than You've Got Mail dispite the remake being in color with digital sound. You don't need technology to break gound.

As to being able to identify event or hallmark movies of this decade, that is really an impossible task. Would anyone have guessed in '80s that the Breakfast Club and Pretty In Pink and Ferris Bueller would still be a right of passage for teenagers today? Who is to say whether a movie like "The Notebook" (regardless of what you think of it now) won't hold unanticipated importance in 20 years?
Right on! Two of the greatest Science Fiction films, Fritz Lang's METROPOLIS (1927) and Jean Luc Godard's ALPHAVILLE (1965) stand the test of time as films that did not use so-called Special Effects and certainly nothing computer generated. METROPOLIS is one of the earlier pioneers of using scale models, but the majority of the films impact is simply it's creativity and ingenuity that is rarely found in filmmaking today. Both of these films will live on because of their ingenious display of raw expression.