While I’ll agree that The Getaway is weaker than my fond memories, it’s hardly the fault of the original when its elements get over-used. That’s like the high school student complaining about having to study Shakespeare because it nothing but cliches strung together.
To use another McQueen movie as an example, Bullitt. Pretty dumb movie for the most part, then comes the car-chase. After that, every cop-film for the next decade has a long, involved car-chase, diluting its impact, but that doesn’t mean Bullitt’s wasn’t fresh when it was seen the first time. Why derate the movie because it has one?
I love horror movies but there are quite a few that I don’t think have worn well over the years.
Off the top of my head.
Nightmare on Elm Street (the rest of the series was always dreck)
Friday the 13th pts. 1 & 2 (again the rest of series isn’t worth mentioning).
Halloween II
Scream (other two don’t count)
Candyman
Manitou
I’d downgrade all of these by at least 2 stars whereas I would have probably given them 4 stars on first viewing.
When I first saw them, I thought they were genuinely scary and/or creepy. Now, I just notice the bad special effects, acting and overall campiness of some of them (I’m looking at you, Manitou).
Oh yes, I think Saturday Night Fever got better with age. I was expecting it to be (on recent viewing) pretty much a campy musical, but I was surprised at how dark a lot of it was, the desperate way many of the characters wanted a life that was different or better, but lacking the ability or vision to act on it, or at least, act on it well. Even when it’s overplayed, it feels very compelling to me.
My oddest choice for “movie that’s even better now” is the original Bad News Bears, which I know sounds crazy. As a kid, I thought this was the be all and end all of comedy on film. And it’s still pretty funny. At the same time, it’s impressively gritty, and the acting is great. When Tatum O’Neill snaps out “I know an 11 year old girl on the Pill” and Walter Matthau recoils from this, it perfectly captures that 1970s unease with social and sexual upheavals. The late, great Vic Morrow beating up on his kid on the pitcher’s mound is presented for what it is - unsettling and nasty and realistic - and no one moralizes about it after, the scene is the message on its own. I realize that in a movie with a lot of kids, the acting ability of the kids is going to be uneven, and that’s true here, but a lot of them are decent and I like how it’s a movie about misfit kids where the kids actually look like outcasts, not cute little kids acting like misfits. Watching it makes me a little sad, because Tatum O’Neill ended up such a mess, and she’s really talented.
The second time I watched “The Princess Bride,” I was shocked at how cheap and shoddy the movie was. It looked - and really sounded - like a movie made on a really tight budget by someone not creative enough to work aorund that.
The movie could use a remake, but where would you find a new giant?
Loses a star - Terminator 1, great idea, but the 80’s style and the SFX do not hold up. Arnold and Linda Hamilton’s haircuts are very distracting.
Gains a star - King of Comedy, dark comedies are mainstream now a days.
Zoolander - When you pay money to see this a theatre it’s painful, when it’s free on TV, it’s great fun.
I understand the point of view that for an objective all-time rating the movie needs to be considered against the backdrop of its time. But the way things tend to happen at IMDB and other such sites is that viewers rate the movies at the times they see them and may not even have a sense of the times when the movie came out.
My objective for this thread was less a matter of an all-time evaluation and more a matter of comparing how you felt about a movie ten years ago with how you feel about it now, for whatever reason(s).
FWIW, Bullitt may have gained a star for me and not just for its trailblazing car chase. I appreciate the sparse dialog even more now than I did then.
Just about any John Hughes movie loses a star or two. Seeing The Breakfast Club as a suburban teenager in the mid-1980s, I was entertained to see realistic caricatures of the people around me. Seeing the same film as an urban adult 20 years later, I was put off by how unrealistic and unlikeable all of the kids were.
It’s amazing to me how much influence the soundtrack has over the experience of a movie.
One that loses a star from me is Scarface. The soundtrack gives the impression of having been put together by the director’s nephew – you know, the 17-year-old kid who just bought one of those new-fangled “synthesizers” everyone’s been talking about. Ugh.
I agree. In 1977 I thought The Spy Who Loved Me was easily Roger Moore’s best Bond film, and in the top 3 of all Bonds. I caught it during the most recent Spike TV let’s-run-all-the-Bond-movies-over-and-over-to-cash-in-on-the-latest-release weeks and found Bill Conti’s disco score to be extremely cheesy and annoying and made the whole movie just scream 1977!!! (The opening ski jump stunt is still awesome, though. Who needs CGI?)
Speaking of Bond, for me many of the old Bond movies have lost a lot of stars. I remember being blown away by Octopussy when it came out. Now it just seems cheap and formulaic.
The Exorcist was actually very faithful to the book. The only major difference was the omission of the subplot involving Karl’s herion-addicted daughter, and even that wasn’t a huge part of the book.
I am in the process of rating every movie I can recall on IMDB to help offset the recency bias there. So last week when I saw Zodiac I went to IMDB to rate it and decided to check that I had rated all Brian Cox’s movies.
As I pick each movie in his history I have a number in mind. Some I have already rated via other actors and more than 90% of the time the number I have in mind is the same one given whenever I originally rated the movie.
However in keeping with the OP I love introducing my sons and nephews to movies they haven’t seen because of their ages (about 16 - 25) and have a great record of picking things they missed as kids. When I saw Peter Sellers in The Party was available on DVD I eagerly grabbed it to show them. I remembered it as being hysterically funny and although I loved the first two minutes I was mortified by the rest. It was like telling someone how great The Beatles were and then trying to prove it by playing Paul McCartney’s latest.
My original IMDB rating was 8 (its mean score) but the number I had in mind after reseeing it was 2 so I changed my rating to 5.
It’s been too long ago that I read the book for me to argue with your assessment of the movie’s faithfulness. All I can remember is that the book was much more frightening and maybe I was too close to the reading when I saw the movie. It was on TV this past week and I rewatched most of it (dozed off about midway but woke back up near the end) and it does hold up well. I still like it better now than I did then, for whatever reason(s).
When I saw “Legend of the Lone Ranger” in 1981, I thought it was one of the best movies ever made. I saw it again a few years ago and, no longer being 11, was shocked at what a horrible piece of crap it was.
The Taking of Pelham 123: Went up in my view. It was one of those movies that when I was young I just thought they were dull and ‘typical’ of 70’s era movies. If they weren’t constantly shooting at each other on the screen I thought it was dull. Now I can see these movies as intense thrillers with excellent cinemetography. It helps that I see these movies remastered and on large TV screens, they really suffer on dark 12" TV screens with TV editing.
The Seven Ups Same issue. The car chase puts Bullit’s chase to shame, IMHO.
Gone Down:
Independence Day I thought, for all its plot flaws, that this was a really cool movie when it came out. Now its just early in a string of all-effects-no-plot summer blockbusters.
Godzilla/Gamera movies How the hell did I manage to sit through whole showings of these crapfests as a kid? I can’t even stand them now with a MST3K riffing on them. Ugh.
Recognize that it is an etude in filmmaking: the assignment was to construct a film using absolutely nothing but homages to other films of the same genre.
Well, I’m not sure if we’re allowed to go into the negitives with stars, but the first time I saw Caveman I thought it was the funniest thing ever (I think I was about 8 or 10). Feeling nostalgic I rented it a couple of years ago. It’s…awful. Like total crap. I had to turn it off about 30 minutes in. It lost ALL of its stars.
Conversely, the first time I saw Dusk till Dawn in the theatre I was horrified. I thought it was rotten. About 4 months ago they aired it on CityTV which doesn’t edit out ANYTHING and I laughed my ass off. I guess I finally got it or something. Anyhow, plus a bunch of stars.
){kind=link}