I’m sure many of you are like me, each year you see, 30, 40 or more new movies in the theater. They all can’t be winners, or for that matter, memorable.
Today, while flipping around on TV I stopped on one of the Encore stations and it was playing a movie called Vantage Point. I thought the title was vaguely familiar, though it sounds like a very generic title. As I’m watching, I see it has a decent cast (Dennis Quaid, Matthew Fox, Forrest Whitaker, William Hurt) and then it dawns on me… Oh yeah, I saw this in the theater when it was released. I’d forgotten all about it.
And it’s only about 8 years old (released in 2008)
A few year back. Random channel surfing with the now EX. Huh, the Posieden Adventure. That will work. Not particularly paying much attention to the movie. More worried about the recent red curry/green curry debate on the SDMB.
Anyway…man…this movie is way worse than remember…and the special effects worse than I remember…Wait, wasn’t actor so and so in that movie? That doesn’t look like him or her…
Wait…this a supper shitty remake made 20 years later:smack:
I keep track of every movie my wife and I watch, some 300 over the past 3 years.
I occasionally go down the list and am stunned to find I have no idea what the movie is. I can usually remember when I look them up, but it takes some effort.
Or the corollary, you see a movie you know you’ve seen, and it looks like almost a different movie than you remember.
Yes. I’ve done it both ways. Saw the movie, and forgot until I saw it again; Saw the movie, and remembered things that did not happen in that movie, or they happened to different characters.
(Most recently: I thought at the end of Hannah and Her Sisters, when the hypochondriac found out his wife was pregnant when he had been medically proven to be shooting blanks, he said, “It’s a miracle.” But in the most recently seen version he did not say that.)
Think “That’s the beauty of it, it doesn’t do anything.”
I rented the movie “Doubt” once and while I was watching it I knew I’d seen it before. I didn’t remember the act of watching it but I knew I’d seen it already (huge Philip Seymour Hoffman fan). And now that I think of it I can’t remember any of the finer points of the movie, just that PSH was in it and it was about the Catholic Church.
Jeepers! I don’t know if I’ve seen 30 movies in a cinema for the past five years combined.
I don’t forget if I’ve seen a movie ever, but if I was to think back on which movies I saw in 2016, I most likely would miss a few out, having completely forgotten about them.
The newspaper reviewer raved about a “new” film at the arthouse theater. The Last Seduction. So we went to see it.
I had seen it before.
On cable TV.
And hated it.
Now I got to hate it again.
It went nearly straight to video, got some buzz and the studio decided to put it back in theaters. No warning in the review that it had already played on cable. Nor that it was actually a ridiculously bad movie.
(Even with Rotten Tomatoes, it’s surprising how often we get burned seeing a supposedly great movie that’s really crappy.)
I’ve an opposite story. When I was a kid my parents left me alone when they went out on a Saturday night. We had just gotten HBO (early '80s) and I was watching Halloween. Absolutely terrified. I called up my sister, 11 yeas older than me, and watched it over the phone describing each murder in gruesome detail.
Fast forward years later. She’s watching this movie on tv with friends, and she knows that she’s never seen this movie before, but she can predict what happens next time and time again. Completely confused and wonders if she actually did see it before. Of course, it’s Halloween and she had these vague memories of when I had told her about it.
My wife would always tell me that we had already seen a picture, but I couldn’t remember, so I watched it on cable. About an hour into the film, there would be a scene or a line, and I’s smack my forehead, and realize she was right, we had seen the picture before, but nothing even rang a bell.
One night we sat up ate and watched three movies on cable. When we went to bed, I said “I can’r remember what the fist movie was”. She laughed and said “Neither can I”. We spent two or three minutes trying to remember what movie we had sat and watched together four hours ago. No, we do not drink nor do drugs. We were both perfectly lucid and cogent the whole time.
Whenever I look over my “viewing activity” list on the Netflix website, I find myself thinking, What the hell was THAT about? I don’t remember watching it! (Nobody else has access to my Netflix account, if that’s what you’re thinking.) The movies I can remember tend to be bizarre things like Anomalisa or Snowpiercer.
This is another demonstration of Sturgeon’s Law. Most movies simply aren’t very memorable.
A couple years ago, I read about a PBS documentary called “A Healthy Baby Girl” and when I couldn’t find it on Netflix or streamed online, decided to see if the library had it. I was able to acquire a DVD through interlibrary loan, and halfway through it, I realized that I had already seen it, when it originally aired in the late 1990s.
I finished it anyway, because it was still interesting. The filmmaker was a DES daughter and this is what it was about.
The exact moment was when the filmmaker talked about when her parents spoke before a Congressional subcommittee, and she said, “Dad said ‘vagina’ in front of the president??!!!???”
My favorite story about this is my parents, sitting at home, watching The Sixth Sense. Dad suddenly gets very excited because he’s figured out the twist, and begins crowing about how OMG, Bruce Willis has been dead this whole time.
Mom turns to him and says “We saw this in the theater, you idiot.”
I watch a lot of terrible horror movies from Netflix while I’m working on various projects around the house. Many of them have no appreciably memorable parts. Many times, I have picked something out of the suggestions only to realize about twenty minutes in that I’ve definitely seen it. I can’t remember what happens, who lives, who dies, or sometimes even what the monster is, but I know I’ve listened to that particular gruesomely bloody, squishy death before.
About a year ago, I saw the True Grit remake (2010). When I went to give it a rating on IMDb, I discovered that I already rated it in 2011 and had even gave it a fairly decent rating (7/10). I had no memory of seeing the remake, though I remembered the original (1969) well enough. I gave the original 8/10 when I saw it in 2010.
I always found it funny how in the '69 original True Grit John Wayne wears the eye patch over his left eye while in the '10 version Jeff Bridges wears it over his right eye.
I do this all the time with books movies games ect (ok my disability and other physical aspects might play into it ) ill watch/read/play something I think I haven’t done before and get about half way in and something from it will trigger my memory and then ill be like … oh yeahhh… that’s right …