I saw the Borat movie in the cinema. It was hilarious, people were nearly falling out of their seats with laughter. I saw it on DVD about 6 months later. I had more fun talking about the movie before we stuck on the DVD than actually watching it again. The shock value, the hilarity was much diminished on repeat viewing. What other films are like that, you’ve seen them once and liked them then saw them again and didn’t much like them any more?
Another film I’d put in that category is Fight Club. I think it’s partly a “The more now you are the more then you’ll be” syndrome. It was a cool film at the time and some of that “coolness” is jarring now.
I think Fight Club holds up to repeat viewings, it just didn’t age well. Give it another 5 years and it will be easier to watch again (I feel the same way about Pulp Fiction which I think is only just now old enough to be watchable again).
My pick is Momento. It’s a fun ride the first time you see it, but once you know the end (the beginning, whatever) it isn’t really a very interesting story.
Another way I look at this whole issue is involved with whether or not I would buy a DVD (or other hard copy) of the movie. When rentals and cable airings that allow for DVRing such things are easy alternatives for subsequent reviewings, we have a small DVD library and it’s been quite some time since I watched any of them.
Anything with a surprise is probably not going to get a repeat viewing unless there’s a lot more going on in the movie. In this category, I’ll see The Usual Suspects and American Beauty because Spacey is so great an actor (as are the others in those two). Old Hitchcocks are iffy, but stand a better chance than others in the genre.
Comedies like Blazing Saddles, Raising Arizona, Monty Python things and others with a lot going on will pull me back for another viewing.
But aside from these exceptions, surprise-driven or comedy movies are one-time-only things for me. Said another way, there has to be something in the movie to make the joke funny again or the surprise to work again.
That doesn’t mean I won’t watch one I’ve already seen if it’s the best choice for an otherwise dead time slot and I’m too bored or lazy to do something else – including sleep. But I don’t set aside time for watching an old movie unless it’s really special. Even “the classics” fall into that bunch.
The best recent example I can produce is The Bourne Ultimatum, which I thouroughly enjoyed and even appreciated the extras on the DVD for how hard they worked to get those amazing action sequences in those amazing locations. But once I had seen them and with the remainder of the movie basically filler, I couldn’t get past the first few minutes of a second attempt. Just wasn’t much holding the action sequences together. A notable counterpart would be Ronin that had some good story line and character interplay to go with the action.
Is that a quote from the movie? I had to read it a couple of times to figure out what the hell you meant, but I kind of like it.
For me, The Usual Suspects does not hold up, not because it has a twist ending but because it has a twist ending thatbasically invalidates the entire movie. All that stuff you just watched? I was lying. Pthbthhh.
Similarly No Way Out. Having the big reveal depend on keeping the audience in the dark about something the POV knows from the beginning (heck, it’s a central fact of his existence) isn’t clever writing, it’s cheating.
I was in LOVE with Forrest Gump when I first saw it in the theater. Remember CGI was pretty new and to find him popping up in all those old film reels was just too much fun!
When it came out on video, I eagerly watched it again. Borrrring! Yeah, yeah, he said “butt” to the president … No fun whatsoever. The whole thing just seemed stupidly unbelievable.
But then, I watched it again just a few weeks ago, after not seeing it essentially since it came out, and I was charmed all over again, mostly by Hanks’ sweetness. I saw Jenny as a product of abuse and not just a bitch to Forrest … So now I’ve decided it’s a better movie than the CGI made it for me on first viewing and not quite as schlocky as I’d thought on the second.
Independence Day wasn’t that good even the first time around, but it was a decent popcorn flick. We watched it again last week, and I had forgotten just how horrible it is. Incoherent, bad acting, horrible stereotypes, action scenes that didn’t make any sense, and such blatant attempts to manipulate emotions it was laughable.
Watching it again revised my rating of it from, “An acceptable lightweight popcorn flick” to “What a steaming load of crap.”
I had a similar experience with this film. I loved it when I saw it in the cinema, hated it a few years later and saw it on telly there recently and thought it held up alot better than I’d remembered. I never got the whole political slant of it before and that was interesting in and of itself.
I thought the movie was okay the first time around, but I caught a bit of the John Lennon scene a while back and found it jaw-droppingly horrible. The dubbing was incredibly bad and the whole scene was dumb, morbid and weird. Looking back at it I can’t believe it didn’t ruin the movie for everyone.
The Matrix- Seeing it the first time I was mostly caught up in the jaw-dropping action scenes and didn’t pay much attention to the depth of the story/mythology.
Surprise! There is no depth. Just a bunch of moronic pseudo babble that makes no sense but is written to sound incredibly intellectual. I try to watch it nowdays to enjoy the action but the dialog just nauseates the hell out of me I can’t stand to watch it.
The Dark Crystal- I loved this movie as a kid and watched it multiple times. Watching it nowdays reminds me of how much I hate the muppets in anything besides the Muppet Show and how they ruined Return of the Jedi. Just a bunch of cheesey puppets.
I hate to say this because it used to be among my top 5 favorite movies, but when I watched Annie Hall with my kid recently, it was flatter than the Florida panhandle. I was really stunned by how poorly it aged – when it first came out, I liked it so much I sat though it twice.
I remember having been very impressed by Billy Jack when it was first released in 1971. I saw part of it on TV recently, and it was just incredibly god-awful. The acting was amateurish, the cinematography stank, the writing was sophomoric and preachy. The only good thing about it was the song “One Tin Soldier.” How could I have loved this movie when I was young?
I share your pain. I think this one can be linked with any number of others that came in on the crest of a wave and were the “best available at the moment” for expressing what the wave was about. Sadly, virtually everything that came afterward that put another spin on “the wave” did so with much more style and skill, so that once the dust settled on “the wave” and you look back on the whole period to see the wave was mostly a mudpuddle you chastise yourself for having been sucked in at all.
Also, if my memory is worth a damn, it came before the martial arts movies showed how to do all the kicking and stuff.
My parallel experience was seeing reruns of the 50’s TV Western series starring Richard Boone as Paladin: Have Gun, Will Travel. Extreme schlock nowadays; cutting edge back then.
I watched some of Escape From NewYork the other day on TV and was left scratching my head wondering why I loved that movie as a kid. Boy was it bad.
I also loved Big Trouble in Little China as a kid and haven’t seen it since but I’m terrified that it’s going to be horrible should I attempt to watch it again.
Naw, it’s still great fun, and you’ll probably appreciate the snappy dialogue and sneaky genre-bending even more: it’s a very smart, very funny movie.
‘When some wild-eyed eight foot tall maniac grabs your neck, taps your favourite head up against the bar-room wall, looks you crooked in the eye and asks ya if ya paid ya dues, you just stare that big sucker in the eye and remember what old Jack Burton always says at a time like that. “Have you paid your dues, Jack?” “Yessir, the check is in the mail”.’
