Thor was also better than I expected. And going in a completely different director, so was Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.
PootieTang- my first experience of Wanda Sykes sealed the deal, but I thought the whole conceit of a hip-hop artist who spoke a gibberish that everyone understood was hilarious.
I think we are in agreement - perhaps my use of the term “fanboy” was unwarranted. Like you, I was expecting to see fantasy dreck, and instead saw a well-crafted movie that was true to the original work and a beautiful example of the genre.
Robocop. My brother and I saw it in a pre-release screening and went in thinking it was, based on the title, be some kind of kiddie movie. Boy were we wrong.
Easy A - the recent high school flick with Emma Stone. We caught it at the local dollar theater on a weekend when we had nothing better to do. It was my wife’s turn to pick a movie and I went in expecting it to be your standard teenybopper fare.
But it’s a quite clever, quite hilarious sendup of high school cliquishness.
Several movies pleasantly surprised me:
The Terminator – based on the ads, I thought it would be a movie with people in rubber masks running around LA shooting each other up, with Hollywood’s usual disdain for good SF. Boy, was I wrong. It was darkly witty (the film is filled with cynical little dark jokes), obviously very familiar with good written SF, and made the most of its limited budget.
Robocop – I didn’t think it was going to be a kiddie movie (as Scumpup did), but the previews made it look puerile – another “Hollywood” SF film. Again, I was surprised. Even more openly satirical and dark than Terminator (the movie gives new meaning to the banality of evil), but still informed and knowledgeable about classic SF. (It quotes C.M. Kornbluth’s The Marching Morons – with inflation). Again, good effects (like [ii]Terminator*, it makes good use, in that pre-CGI era, of some judiciously-applied animation), and a wonderful twist at the end. The sequels were awful.
The Adventures of Mark Twain – I’m a big fan of Will Vinton’s animation, and of Mark Twain, but I wasn’t expecting much from this effort, which looked to be directed at kids. But the story took excerpts from several of Twain’s works and put them on-screen, which was a blast – I’d been expecting some half-assed original story. It included something from The Mysterious Stranger, which freaked some people out, but to me is quintessential Twain – show 'em something with some intellectual oomph behind it that’s a bit disturbing!
Time After Time. The story sounds so stupid–Jack the Ripper uses H.G. Wells’s time machine to go to the present day and Wells follows him.
Superb movie.
I saw a making-of documentary on AMC once, and they mentioned that the cast hated the title and it was assumed that it would be renamed at some point. But apparently no one could come up with a better title, so they just stuck with it.
Courage Under Fire. I expected a formulaic movie and in some respects it was, but Denzel was great, and I teared up when Meg Ryan died a hero.
Snooty me was completely convinced I’d watch about 10 minutes of There’s Something About Mary and Dodgeball and get up in a highbrow huff. WRONG. I laughed like a loon through both of them! “If you can dodge a wrench you can dodge a ball!” Har har har! 
The Runaways. Caught it on cable recently. Very surprised by Kristen Stewart’s performance as Joan Jett. I had assumed she was a generic actor (like co-star Dakota Fanning), but she did a really good job. Really bumped up the quality of the movie quite a bit. (Interesting to see Riley Keough follow in her grandpa’s footsteps appearing in musical movies.) Story-wise it had issues though. E.g., band members like Lita Ford were given hardly any attention at all.
As to the afore-mentioned Easy A. Not too surprised in toto, I knew it was supposed to be good despite the topic. But I was surprised by what was good about it. Very well made, some really top notch actors, etc. Just a second rate plot. In particular …
If all these guys knew she wasn’t really doing anything for the gift cards, how did this “secret” not leak out to everyone?
I enjoyed this film more than I thought I would too. As far your spoiler question:
I assume the secret of what she was doing was passed around only to people who would have a use for it - the less popular people in the school. All those who would need to make use of her ‘services’ - and those who had used it successfully - had a definitive reason NOT to tell any of the ‘popular’ kids what was going on. Why would they, spoiling what they had gained?
Yeah, I got hooked on that when it was shown in heavy rotation on HBO back in the early Eighties. I should see it again sometime.
I never liked Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, so I passed on the Disney movie when it appeared in the theatres. That was a mistaken. After discovering this movie on LaserDisc (hah!), I was floored. It instantly became my favorite movie of all time.
Lars and the Real Girl had the potential to be a sick comedy, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was a heartfelt drama.
Back again …
Watched Scott Pilgrim vs. The World last night. I knew ahead of time that it had some nerdish fans and a little bit about the plot. Guy fighting the girl’s old boyfriends.
But I was amazed and surprised. Did not know about the whole comic book/video game homage stuff. Very nicely done. Almost a great movie. (The last couple of “battles” were getting stale.)
Why hadn’t I known that this was a film for “me”? I thought maybe I had been misled by Ebert’s review. (He’s my goto guy for reviews. I adjust for differences in taste.) Turns out he hadn’t reviewed it at all since he was taking a month off at the time.
All of which brings up the age old issue: How does one find out if a movie is something one would like? All too often we have read reviews/heard from friends/read on message boards stuff about movies that make them seem the right thing to watch and found them duds.
(Cf. the current Clerks thread. I like it a lot. But clearly not for everyone.)
Apparently, she wanted nothing to do with it. Perhaps with good reason. A quick google search yields various explanations.
I thought Armageddon would really, really, really suck.
When I found it was just lame, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would.
I would have assumed Galaxy Quest would be barely watchable because… well, comedy starring Tim Allen about TV actors confused with real space heroes by aliens. What more has to be said?
Great flick.
Avatar. I had read people slamming it here and elsewhere and I ended up really enjoyed the 3-D version, contrived plotline or no. It is everything I wanted a 3-D movie to be. It remains the most visually stunning spectacle I have ever had the pleasure to watch on the big screen. And I don’t care if other people didn’t like it.