One afternoon in college, I settled down in my dorm room to watch the campus-sponsored movie channel’s showing of American History X with Edward Norton. I was so befuddled by the plot and kept waiting for the white supremacists to show up.
When I met up with some friends later in the lunchroom, I just kept blathering on about how the movie wasn’t how I expected it to be at all! “And what in the hell was with all the zoot suits?” That’s when it must have clicked for my friends, who gently explained to me that I was watching X (the biopic of Malcolm X starring Denzel Washington)…not quite the same. How I never realized this through the WHOLE movie, I’ll never know. I will state that I was pretty sleep deprived at the time.
I rented The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy from Netflix. Took me a while to realize I was watching the BBC one from the 80’s. I remember popping it in and thinking “wow - this is some seriuosly old school credit sequence”…followed by “these F/X are terrible…”
Finally dawned on me, and I actually really enjoyed it. Then I rented the rest of the miniseries, enjoyed all of them, and hated the remake when I finally got around to it.
I was at my grandmother’s house once, when I was a kid. I was looking through the TV guide for something to watch, and saw that Meatballs had started about fifteen minutes ago. I hadn’t seen it, but heard it was funny, and I really liked Bill Murray, so I switched over to it. Bunch of teenagers at a summer camp. No sign of Bill Murray. It’s not very funny, either. Hey, cool, she’s taking off her shirt - I love cable TV, and HOLY SHIT, THEY JUST TOTALLY KILLED THAT GIRL!
Turned out TV Guide had misprinted the schedule, and I was watching Friday the 13th.
When Galaxy Quest hit the theaters, I went to see it with one of my sisters and her boys. We got separated in the multiplex and I forgot which way to go so I went looking for the right marquee card and found it. Or so I thougt. The movie had just started when I went inside and looked around the audience for them. Didn’t see 'em but it was pretty packed in there so I figured we’d meet up at the end. So I found one of the few empty seats and settled in for the show.
And watched some search party tromping around a field. Then I heard some names that I recognized from a book I had read.
Not exactly on-topic, but for my 8th birthday, in 1976, my Mom took me and a bunch of my friends, all little suburban girls, to the matinee. She didn’t check in advance what the film was, but assumed it was something like Bambi. She had not asked any of the other mothers to help supervise, but was watching us all, eight or so, herself. So we get to the theatre, and the matinee isn’t Bambi. It’s Jaws.
My college girlfriend’s mother really liked Nicholas Cage in Honeymoon in Vegas, so she was really excited to go see him in the sequel, Leaving Las Vegas.
I went to see A History of Violence on a whim; I’d read very little about it (on purpose, as usual), read that it was worth seeing but didn’t really remember exactly what it was about before I got to the theatre.
At some point I had decided that, though it wasn’t a documentary, it was going to be something along the the lines of . . . . a history of violence.
It was and it wasn’t but definitely not in the way I was anticipating.
A similar thing happened to me as an eight-year old kid. I got told the whole family was going to see a movie one summer. We’d seen another movie the week before (Orca, IIRC), and it had a bunch of boring previews, including one about Hollywood stars or something.
So that being said, when I was told what movie everyone was going to see, I promptly replied that I didn’t want to go.
“You’ll love it!,” I was told. “It has space ships and stuff!”
So I went, reluctantly, to see Star Wars for the first time.
I remember shortly after reading Lord of the Rings for the first time, talking about it with some casual acquaintance. “Oh yes I loved that book!” she said “… and that poor little Piggy!” … cue to me franticly trawling through my memory of the hundreds of characters and animals in LotR - orcs, wolves, worgs, eagles … nope, not coming up with any pigs. After a very confusing conversation it turned out she’d actually read Lord of the Flies.
:smack: Damned if I know…although I doubt it was Liv Ullman. I have no idea why I thought George C Scott was in it. Except for that one time, and I only watched it long enough to realize I wasn’t watching the original I’ve never seen the musical version…but I’ve heard it was truly wretched.
