<p>I’m sure some of you, even all of you, have viewed a movie you saw as a teenager and loved, then watched it as an adult and asked yourself, "What the **** was I thinking? This movie stinks.</p>
<p>Had a bad cold this week and spent a day pampering myself with movies from the library. Here’s a horrible movie which I absolutely loved as a young teenager: Walking Tall. Oh! It’s awful!!!</p>
<p>On the plus side, Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse has held up very well. Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Melvyn Douglas… what’s not to love?</p>
<p>How about you? Any stinkers? Great flicks which you still love?</p>
<p>Great then/awful now:</p>
<p>Walking Tall
The Birds
Every Barbra Streisand movie</p>
<p>Annie Hall. When it came out, I loved it to the moon. When my D was around l8, she so reminded me of what I remembered of Diane Keaton in that character, that I rented the film for us to watch together.</p>
<p>Somehow it didn’t hold up at all. The motivations, timing and plot resolution just left us both cold. I can’t understand how it could be so different in my memory.</p>
<p>2001, A Space Odyssey. It’s soooooo slllllloooooooow!
And Silent Running even slower, and the cute little robots weren’t nearly as cute as I remembered even if R2D2 was modeled on them.</p>
<p>Haven’t seen them recently, but I have to wonder if I’d like Harold and Maude or* King of Hearts* now. Someone today on NPR was talking about watching The Graduate and saying there was no plot. I didn’t get Annie Hall when it was new. Diane Keaton was my least favorite of Allen’s leading ladies. My favorite movies of his are Zelig and Purple Rose of Cairo, weird I know.</p>
<p>I’ve been watching a number of the films that formed the core of my taste recently – some with my kids, some alone. Not much change in the movies I really, really loved: The Conformist, Cries and Whispers and Scenes From A Marriage, The Wild Bunch, Nashville, Chinatown, Lawrence of Arabia, The Right Stuff. I haven’t re-watched E.T. recently; I wonder how that looks now. But I saw Manhattan a few weeks ago and thought it had held up remarkably well, given its disgusting premise. Gordon Willis’ cinematography was sensational.</p>
<p>Love King of Hearts, Nashville and Manhattan. Recently saw Night of the Iguana, an oldy which was superb. Tin Drum is a favorite. Hotel Rwanda and Babel and The Aviator are modern favorites. Yesterday I saw Jodie Foster’s new movie. It was moving, but not a realistic portrayal of PTSD, and had its fair share of violence.</p>
<p>I agree about “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House” still LOVE it. The one that I loved then and now think, no, know is terrible, is “Billy Jack”! I saw the “Birds” recently and wondered why I thought is was so scary. Another Hitchcock, that is always good is “Rear Window”.</p>
<p>I used to sneak into the local movie theater a lot as a kid. As a result, I grew up on a steady diet of Black exploitation films. Coffee, Hit Man, Sheba Baby, Black Ceasar, The Mack, Cleopatra Jones, Superfly, White Mama, and many, many others. Loved them as little kid. Now I think about how those films probably warped my young mind during those years. I still come across them on cable TV every now and then. I’m always amazed how awful they are, Lol. Oh, but just over three decades ago it all seemed so cool…</p>
<p>All of Michael Powell’s movies get better and better…
Especially Black Narcissus, I Know Where Im Going, and Colonel Blimp–
the Criterion editions are fab.
At the same time practically EVERY film I worshipped in the seventies has gotten worse and worse. What was I thinking?</p>
<p>I so disagree about Animal House. I’ve seen it two or three times over the past five years, and thought it was as funny as ever. It’s not like it’s my favorite movie ever, but it’s certainly the champion of the gross college comedies.</p>
<p>srw–I was going to say Billy Jack, too. SAw it when I was like 14, don’t even have to resee it to be embarrassed just remembering how godawful it was.</p>
<p>Harold and Maude isn’t as fun as I thought then, though we watched it every semester when the college film groups showed it. King of Hearts holds up better.</p>
<p>My kids laughed at both of these (and the Birds) when I made them watch them.</p>
<p>Animal House withstands the test of time for me. It’s always hysterical, even though it has no resemblance whatsoever to college life as I knew it. Star Wars also holds up really well, I think.</p>
<p>What doesn’t hold up, even for a decade, is Titanic. When it came out, I guess I was so obsessed with the beautiful job they did with the reconstruction that I failed to notice that the love story and the acting are mediocre. I recently rented it and was very disappointed.</p>
<p>Perhaps the single movie that most impressed me as a teenager was Becket, which I just happened to see on TV one night. I have considered renting it from Netflix, but I’m afraid that I would be disappointed.</p>
<p>A couple of years ago, I happened to run across and reread the book that most impressed me as a teenager, and I did find it disappointing. The book was A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and I was stunned when I first read it because Francie was ME. I have never identified so strongly with any other character in fiction. But when I read it again as an adult, it seemed heavy-handed and preachy. Francie is still me, though. I was just disapointed that the author was trying to use her/me to make all sorts of points about alcohol and poverty that I could have done without.</p>
<p>2001, A Space Odyssey was stately; Barry Lyndon was slow. And Tom Jones was the anti-Barry Lyndon.</p>
<p>I had the pleasure of watching 2001, A Space Odyssey in Cinerama: on a true curved screen, 3 projector system… so I was spoiled. Of the many movies of my youth, “Z” and State of Siege (both directed by Costa-Gavras) were the most memorable. These were my first real exposure to European filmmaking and I learned an entirely new vocabulary for movies.</p>
<p>Then there were the grindhouse classics of the ‘70’s: horribly dubbed Chinese Kung-Fu movies and Blackplotation pics (all in their double feature glory). Lessons learned: Always avenge the death of your teacher and “Stick it to the “Man”. You watched Kung-Fu movies for the fighting sequences. On the other hand, Blackplotation pics like Shaft, Black Caesar and Across 110th Street portrayed the total distrust of the White Establishment by the Black community. If there was anything to take away from these movies, it was all about anger and rage. </p>
<p>I’m sure there were films that I saw that the test of time has failed. Nothing egregious comes to mind. What does bother me when I read down the list of the top 100 AFI movies of all time is the fact that so many classics would never have been made today…</p>
<p>Sigh. I remember in the book, Tree Grows in Brooklyn, how the little girl felt so grateful on a cold day, for the luxury when her mom let her hold a cup of hot water until it cooled down, how it felt in her hands. So wasteful yet so kind.</p>
<p>(Maybe those were the kinds of points you said you could do without ! )</p>