the more you see a movie...

Post Reply New Topic

Ever have any movies where, the more you see it, the less you like it - ones that you liked or even loved when you first saw it?

That happened with me with A Few Good Men and Bicentennial Man.

Great stories, both but they don't stand up to repeated viewings with me.

Let me cite some examples of stuff that gnaw at me with A Few Good Men:

Why must everyone in that movie have to use their middle initial or full name?

They had Kevin Pollak in the scene where Tom Cruise's character put on the Jack Nicholson voice. Pollak is a known and talented impressionist and would have done it without embarrassing himself.

The "bailiff" (I guess) used the same tone and cadence every time he said, "all rise". It's like they looped the voice once and they used it every time.

A lot of the conversations flowed too smoothly to be natural. Ever see Clerks? What's coming out of their mouths are too long and involved and well thought out to be natural.

This happened to me with plays. I did a lot of theatre in high school and the more I rehearsed a play, the more I'd hate it. Rumors by Neil Simon was the worst. I just hated that play by the end, but at the beginning we couldn't stop laughing at how hilarious it was. There were a lot of plot holes, and the characters were just so stupid! We actually had to change one of my lines because I said a character's name it was impossible for me to know at that time in the play.

I do this with movies too. The only one I've seen enough times to really do this is V for Vendetta. I just know when all the cheesy lines are coming and I wince. It's still one of my favorite movies, but I definitely see a script's flaws when I am more familiar with it.

I can relate in a few ways:

1. Liking a movie as a child, seeing it again as an adult, and realizing it sucked and that I only liked it as a kid because I had no taste as a child. When I was a kid, Ghostbusters 2 was the greatest thing in the world. As an adult, it bores me to death and makes me wonder if everyone involved in its creation was on meth.

2. Liking a movie, watching it numerous times, and realizing that it's good enough for a few viewings but not good enough for a dozen. I was really into Highlander for awhile, and I watched it about half a dozen times. Then I just lost a lot of my affinity for it when I realized that it wasn't quite a masterpiece.

3. Liking a movie on the first viewing, watching it a second time and realizing that it sucks, and that I only liked it the first time because of hype. Spider-Man 2 is a lot less impressive when you're not anticipating it to be the greatest comic book movie ever made. It's not, not with such a boring middle section, pretentious speeches, and dialogue like, "You've stuck your webs in my business for the last time!"

The same thing recently happened to me with Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. The first two or three times I watched it, I loved it so much that it became my primary special interest. I couldn't understand all the bad reviews it was getting from both the critics and the public and I defended it on forums whenever I could.

But the more I watched the movie, the more I began to realize just how imperfect it really was, from the little details like minor historical inaccuracies (Jakarta wasn't called that in the 1800s and bonkers wasn't even a word back then, much less a British one), to more glaring ones such as the very anti-climactic Alice vs. Jabberwocky fight and the cringe-worthy cheesiness of the Mad Hatter's Futterwacken dance.

Now I wonder why I was ever obsessed with it in the first place...