First impressions: The movies I should try again
In the fourth episode of How I Met Your Mother, Ted tries on a shirt in his closet that he never wears, and suddenly realizes it looks better than he remembered. It made him realize he might be wise to rethink some of the conclusions he had made before, which leads him to rekindling an old relationship with a woman played by Anne Dudek.
It (unsurprisingly, considering this was the fourth episode of a show that lasted nine years) does not end with a happily ever after, with Dudek’s character Natalie going all Krav Maga on Ted’s butt and destroying the shirt that started his whole “revisit” quest to begin with.
(Unrelated to the point I’m making: Anne Dudek played Natalie, a girl who gets dumped on her birthday. The episode aired in 2005. Two years earlier, in the 10th-season debut of Friends, “The One After Joey and Rachel Kiss,” Anne Dudek played Precious, a girl who gets dumped on her birthday, this time by Mike. That’s a very specific sort of typecasting.)
So that didn’t work out for Ted (or, more importantly since Ted was a jerk in this story, Natalie). But the idea behind the episode is a good one: Sometimes we reach unfair conclusions about something based on one pass, and they warrant further explanation.
The example Ted gives in the episode is deciding he didn’t like a city because it was raining the day he visited. The example I want to give? Movies. The thing about movies is that when you like a movie, really like it, you’re very likely to see it multiple times and cement your opinion, while when you don’t like a movie you’re more likely to never see it a second time and let your negative opinions fester and grow. At some point, initial opinions of a movie become locked in.
Which isn’t wrong! First opinions of a movie are valuable. But sometimes — especially if you find yourself particularly disliking a movie that the general public swears is good — it might be worth giving movies you didn’t like a second shot. I always tell the story of A Knight’s Tale, a movie that I swear zero people anywhere liked on first viewing, but if you watch it a second, third time, suddenly it’s great. I love A Knight’s Tale. But I hated A Knight’s Tale the first time I saw it.
Today I’m highlighting a few movies I only saw once and didn’t like, but the rest of the world likes them so much that I figure I might need to give them another shot someday. Will I ever do that? I don’t know. There are a lot of movies I don’t already dislike, and so little time. But maybe.
(Spoilers ahead. And remember, I’ve only seen each of these movies once, often long ago, so if my interpretation and/or recollection of the issues is imperfect, well, that’s part of the reason I should make see them again.)
The Dark Knight
Batman Begins was fantastic. The Dark Knight Rises was dreck. The Dark Knight was, to me, much closer to the dreck side of things than the fantastic. I like to say that an approximate graph of quality of the Nolan Batman films is this: \.
Why didn’t I like The Dark Knight? An utter waste of Aaron Eckhart and Two Face. Christian Bale bad-actoring his way through Bruce Wayne and Batman. Maggie Gyllenhaal somehow putting in a worse performance than Katie Holmes as the same character.
But the biggest problem with the movie was also the best part of the movie: The Joker. Heath Ledger’s performance was, without question, tremendous. The acting done for the role was incredible. The problem was the role itself didn’t make any sense. Almost everything the Joker did required so many coincidences outside his control that it stretches credulity well past its breaking point. His heist at the beginning of the movie, where each henchmen kills the one before him, requires the guys to be in such specific spots that would be impossible to ensure (especially the one hit by the bus) that even a cursory examination renders it silly.
I absolutely hate movies where the big scheme only works because it works. For example, if you remember the first Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holmes movie, one of the crucial bits that made the whole scheme work was a guy walking through the “rain,” but it turns out it wasn’t rain, it was some chemical (this is also a movie I only saw once, give me a break) being sprinkled from a window. So … as moviegoers, we saw it shot like a guy was walking through the rain. But actually, it wasn’t raining, it was just sprinkling from one window … and the guy just walked through it? The plot only worked because there would be no movie without the plot working. Things like that annoy the ever-loving hell out of me. And that’s essentially everything The Joker did in The Dark Knight.
The Departed
If you ignore Jack Nicholson’s role, The Departed is very well-acted, but it’s another example of a movie where plot takes priority over characterization. When a plot is driven by character, you get a good, engrossing movie that makes sense. When characters are driven by what the plot requires, you end up with people acting in ways they wouldn’t, and it takes you out of the performance.
Case in point: Mark Wahlberg’s Dignam. He was a hateful sonofagun, yes. But everything we saw about him indicated he was a good cop, or at least a loyal one. But then after Martin Sheen’s Queenan is killed, Dignam — somehow the only person who knows Leonardo DiCaprio’s character’s true identity — just … leaves him out to dry. It had to happen that way for the finale to play out as it did, but it utterly betrayed Dignam’s character to that point.
Add in the fact that somehow, despite being technically flawless in a bajillion ways, I remember the movie being horrifically edited — I vividly remember a scene where we see a close-up of a cell phone with blood smeared across it, we cut to a face, then back to the phone that is now blood-free — and I just don’t understand the appeal.
No Country for Old Men
It’s not that No Country was bad. It very much was not. But it was released within a month of its sister movie There Will Be Blood (they were even filmed so close to one another that a plume of smoke in Blood forced a delay in No Country’s production), and There Will Be Blood was far, far superior.
That’s really the point here. I liked No Country. It was a movie I’d be fine watching again. But There Will Be Blood was the best movie of 2007 — and not by a little — with the best single acting performance ever committed to film, and the fact that No Country is for some reason remembered as the superior film is annoying to me.
The Kill Bill movies
I like Quentin Tarantino movies. I’m on record that he desperately needs a second director on set who just lets him do whatever he wants but then dials back the Tarantinoness by about 10%, but he’s a master of dialogue and plot (even if he has some very problematic traits), and his movies are so very much him that you’ll never mistake them for something else.
Reservoir Dogs is one of my favorite movies. Django Unchained was some fantastic set pieces. The opening of Inglourious Basterds would have been one of the best scenes in movie history if not for that uber-Tarantino-y godawful pipe. I think Pulp Fiction is overrated but good.
So I was very eager to watch the Kill Bill movies. I missed them in theaters, but when I lived in Kansas, I had a Netflix subscription (back in the “you mail us a DVD” days, because I’m officially An Old) and eagerly added both movies to my queue. And I watched both, even as the first one made me actively angry.
And here’s the thing: I can break down what I didn’t like about Dark Knight or Departed even today. Kill Bill? I blocked them out. Other than “The reason we don’t fight with swords anymore is because guns exist now,” I can’t really remember what I didn’t like about those movies, except that I sat through them rolling my eyes and questioning any residual Tarantino love. Maybe that’s a sign I should give them another chance. Or maybe it’s a sign I really, really shouldn’t. But there you go.
The Godfather
I’ve written about this before (good luck getting me to remember when), but there’s a scene in Family Guy where their house is flooding and, if I recall correctly, they start to confess things, and Peter explains that he didn’t care for The Godfather, leading to everybody (Chris-but-really-Seth-Green in particular) yelling at him. His reason? “It insists upon itself.” And while I can’t explain what that means … it’s absolutely right. There has never been a movie made that was prouder of itself merely for existing than Godfather, to the point that I expect the sequel to be just as self-satisfied, except that I’ve never even bothered to see it. The movie wasn’t bad by any means, it just wasn’t anywhere near as good as it thought it was.
The Truman Show
I feel very comfortable I’d like this movie more now. I think I just didn’t really grok the idea of the movie when it came out (I saw it opening weekend in June 1998, so I was 14 and probably not in the right mindset). Jim Carrey did far better dramatic acting in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, far better comedic acting in Earth Girls Are Easy and Cable Guy. It was guilty of the phenomenon I mention above, where some plot machinations work out strictly because the movie requires they work out. You can’t, for example, manufacture a fear of water like that. I would wager it was just as likely that Truman would have become dedicated to overcome the ocean than become fearful of it, except then the movie wouldn’t have worked. And maybe Truman had no point of reference to compare the skyline he saw to, but I refuse to believe someone can be fooled by a biodome into believing it’s the actual sky.
So it was a ludicrous premise that I struggled to dive into. But if I were to watch it again today, I think I probably would be more able to suspend my disbelief and try it again. Maybe someday.
Bridesmaids
A main character doesn’t have to be likable. But if your main character is going to be unlikable, it needs to be for a better reason than “I’m just going to whine the whole time.” Kristen Wiig’s character was a miserable wretch throughout the movie. She loses her job, gets offered a new one despite putting forth no effort, then sulks her way through that job and gets fired. Her taillights are out, the cop gives her a contact that will fix them for her cheap (or free? I can’t remember), but she ignores it and then gets all pissy when she gets rear-ended. Throughout the movie, she was just a hateful person who didn’t deserve any of her friends, and it made the entire movie hard to watch. Basically, take out Melissa McCarthy’s genuinely funny character, and there were no selling points to Bridesmaids. I do not understand the appeal.
The Nightmare Before Christmas
This one isn’t my fault. I saw Nightmare in theaters in October 1993 with a friend (I don’t even remember which friend) and my dad. And going with my dad to movies was always a fraught exercise. My dad was a hater. Unless the movie was a baseball film or a country music biopic (the last thing he saw in theaters was I Saw the Light, and he loved that), odds were good dad was going to come out saying it was terrible.
(Only tangentially related, but a funny-if-annoying story: I used to do stand-up comedy. Not much, and I only ever had one paying gig, but I dropped in on open-mics often enough. Convinced my parents to come to one, which they ducked out of right after my turn — which is frowned upon, but you tell me 70-something father to stay at a thing longer than he had to. I went out into the lobby to say goodbye to them. The lobby wasn’t buzzing or anything, because there were still performances going on inside, but there were fellow comedians and attendees out there, and as soon as we get into the light, dad says “You were good! Most of them stunk!” I swear, you could never shush my dad enough.)
So going to see something as quirky as Nightmare Before Christmas with my dad was as sure a way as anything to hear complaints for hours afterward. And unlike Death to Smoochy, which I also saw with my dad but was 18 and better at forming my own opinions, I was 9 for Nightmare, heard my dad rant about how bad it was, and decided that that must be my opinion too.
I recognize that’s silly. I see ads when some channel will show the movie and sing along to the “What’s This?” song, and I know that I would probably enjoy the movie. But there’s a small part of me that I can’t overcome that has internalized my father’s ranting and swears it’s a bad movie. It isn’t fair. I’ll overcome it someday. But not yet.
Those are my “saw it once and hated it” movies. What are yours? Hit me up!