Feeling pretty poor this evening, I’ve been laying in bed watching whatever is on TV. Wrath of Khan came on, and of course I watched it(still watching it technically). It didn’t occur to me it was happening that this is the first time I have watched it since Nimoy died. It really made Spock’s death and funeral scenes a major punch in the gut I wasn’t prepared for. 
Damn I hope there is a good funny movie coming up soon.
A lot of old movies, seen again, have the same punch they always did. And a lot of other movies just don’t.
I remember going to a movie theater in mid-1970’s to see a re-release of My Fair Lady (the movie, 1964). I saw it as a rather young child (age about 13) when it first came out: Much anticipated movie, heavily hyped, solidly packed movie theater (Grauman’s Chinese, in fact), entire audience ROTFL numerous times throughout.
The 1970’s re-release? Meh. Near empty theater. Major ROTFL scenes were mostly now yawn. Nobody ROTFL that I noticed. It just all seemed so … dated. Which seems a bit odd, since the movie was never set in “modern” (i.e. 1960’s) times in the first place.
Well… in my late teens I belonged to a cinema society that got one movie a week, and had two or three showings so you could watch it more than once. Very heavy on French movies and Indian movies. So I saw The 400 Blows, which I considered a great movie, and I had a lot of sympathy for the protagonist.
A couple of decades pass, and I have a teenaged son who is taking French, and the opportunity arises to see The 400 Blows. And suddenly I have no sympathy AT ALL for that spoiled juvenile delinquent. But his poor parents and teachers!
My son, though…
I still loved the restored re-releases of Lawrence of Arabia and Spartacus (now both many years ago), and they managed to fill the theaters they were in. Heck, I saw *Young Frankenstein[/I at a heater on Halloween, and IT still managed to draw a crowd. Some films seem to last.
Some films don’t age well. For the longest time I thought Woody Allen’s What’s up, Tiger Lily? was a hoot, but I showed it to Pepper Mill, who was underwhelmed. It wasn;t the MST3K-ing of the movie, or the goofy things like running the film backwards – it’s that a lot of the jokes are past their prime, and don’t sit well with modern sensibilities.
I will say that watching World’s Greatest Dad now that Robin Williams is dead changes the movie and makes it hit very hard.
It isn’t even Williams who commits suicide in the movie. However, the scene where he finds his son(who dies very early in the movie) hanging in the closet is so painful to watch, knowing that in real life, someone found Williams hanging. Very, very different circumstances, but the movie is changed entirely for me now.
It’s funny, watching a Truly Great Movie for the first time as an adult, because on the one hand how did I never see this before, and on the other hand you’re so glad you didn’t have it ruined by your dumb adolescent self. But on the third hand there’s what Hilarity N. Suze points out about having a different viewpoint on things, which are both meaningful - I reread the Little House on the Prairie books recently and holy crap are they different for adults.
So not really on target for this thread, but I recently saw both La Dolce Vita and Treasure of the Sierra Madre for the first time and was blown away by both of them.
Animal House. The older I get, the more sympathy I have for Dean Wormer.
The move Logan’s Run came out when I was in elementary school. I did not see the movie, but I read the book when I was in junior high school. Most of the characters were older than I was, so the society seemed to be a pretty generic Rebellion Against The Evil Empire story.
The book sat on the shelf for years. When I was 22, I decided to read it again. In the book, Lastday is at age 21. Now all of the characters (except Ballard, of course) were younger than me. The police, the doctors, the psychotic killers, were all children. And I was older than was legally allowed, in the book’s society. It was a jarring shift in perspective.
Seeing Rear Window my first time was on TV, years and years ago, and I was stunned by its (imho) visual perfection. Seeing it in a theater a few months(?) ago… By this time, I had seen many, many well done movies, in theater and on TV or video, had lots of life experience with frustrations and minor mysteries, and even worked in a couple of filmed projects… Well, I wasn’t stunned this time. I wanted to praise the glory that is Hitchcock throughout all of space and time. ymmv
I’d always heard of Lawrence of Arabia and about 20 years ago finally read Thomas’ book The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and was blown away. Then I saw the movie and loved it.
The movie has hints of things in the book that are sort of shown but not explained. Such as why he personally had to shoot one of two twin brothers who he had “adopted” to be servants. And in the movie there is a shot of a hand reaching out of a train car after his rebels have bombed a train. The book described this as one of many trains but this time they found a locked cattle car filled with people with (yellow fever?). Lawrence’s small band can’t feed them, can’t cure them, or take them across the desert so they’re left locked inside the wrecked train to die. True story per Lawrence. It was instructive to read how everything about the Arab experience was about personal survival in the harsh desert.
But recently the movie was on PBS and I thought it was long and ho-hum. Need to read the book again!
I love watching old movies with closed captioning , I get a lot of new
reactions being able to read what I can’t understand or hear . And being older
I get the adult stuff that went over my head as a kid.
I remember watching Marx Bros. movies when I was in high school and laughing so hard I literally fell out of bed.
I watch them now, and while they still have their moments, there are long gaps where I just don’t find anything funny. Dumb, yes. But not funny.
When it comes to My Fair Lady, I don’t think it was ever intended to be “ROTFL” funny. Pygmalion certainly wasn’t. Shaw’s humor is far more subtle and sophisticated for that.
For a long time, while I really appreciated its visuals and how it created a look everyone else stole, I thought Blade Runner was boring (heresy, I know). One day, for some reason, I had decided to rewatch it (it might have been after I had gotten a new TV and I wanted to see a visually impressive movie on it) and that time the movie just gelled for me. I really enjoyed it and still do to this day.
I had a similar epiphany for the first Superman movie.
I know, right? Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.
This may be a played out choice but for years as a child I would watch my grandfather, a second generation Italian-American who was very big on the importance of family, break down into tears at the final scene of The Godfather Part II. Recently, as my generation of our family has drifted apart as well, the film has begun to have the same effect on me. Also, having watched the original Solaris the other day, it’s become increasingly clear to me that there is a sincerity and fervor in acting that is lost today in favor of style and aethestic.