Ryan McNeil
One fun little side effect of our friendship is anytime she mentions not enjoying a movie I believe to be a classic, or essential viewing. My reaction to this news is usually the same:
“You must have missed something. Go back and watch it again.”
While part of this answer comes from trying to be a twerp and see how much I can get away with, another part of it comes from my own experience. See there are films – great films – that I watched at one time or another. When the credits rolled, I can remember thinking to myself “What the hell was that supposed to be?”. At the risk of revealing my ignorance, FARGO was possibly the foremost example where I just didn’t get it until years later.
I thought about turning this notion into a top five…”Top Five Films I Hated-Then-Loved” (spoiler alert, THE THIN RED LINE, and RUSHMORE would have made the cut). But instead I thought I celebrate my emergence from online hibernation by asking you dear readers…
What movie did you hate on first viewing, only to later discover that you actually really liked it?
WOW. Well, Hatter’s right. We are friends, which is why he gets the latitude to call me out on the carpet for hating most of the ‘classics’ of cinema. Regardless, I thought that it would be only fitting that I should be the first to post about this….
I hated The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford at first, and then around noon the next day it dawned on me that it might be one of the best movies ever made.
And, of course, anything Hatter convinces me to ‘watch again’.
I thought Zoolander was really stupid when I first saw it. Then awhile later I kept catching it on TV and realized it was hilarious and sort of addicting.
A lot of times the opposite will happen to me- I’ll really dig a movie while I’m watching it and then once I get over the newness of it I’ll like it less upon reflection.
What didn’t you like about Fargo the first time around?
Interesting answers ladies.
As to your question Alex, back when I saw Fargo at the age of 18, I wasn’t really familiar with black comedy. So a lot of the funniest moments just sailed right over my head.
The whole movie just seemed really weird.
I chalk my appreciation of it up to some co-workers who loved repeating lines from it, which lead to the inevitible “Oh now I get it!” moment.
I want to play along but I just can’t! There isn’t a film that I originally hated then ended up loving.
I found on first viewing I didn’t think Conversations with Other Women brilliant but I’ve watched it again and again and there is something amazing about it.
Also, I was so mad when I didn’t love Across the Universe. I was growly type mad. I need to revisit it, and I want to love it.
Hmmm, the closest I can think of at the moment is Antonioni’s “Blow Up”. I didn’t hate it, but there were a number of scenes that I just didn’t get. Some examples: 1) when the photographer is rolling around on the floor with the nubile young models and their faces keep changing from smiling to frightened, 2) when he keeps blowing up a section of a picture and it gets grainier and grainier until in the last one we suddenly see a perfectly clear picture of a gun and 3) that sudden ending right after the mime tennis players.
So I was frustrated because there were a number of great looking scenes, an interesting mystery (which doesn’t seem to go anywhere) and a live performance by The Yardbirds – but what the hell was the rest of this? But it stuck in my head and I kept going over these different layers of perception and individual context and it all started to make sense (well, as much as a European art film can “make sense”). Your own context determines your own truth…
And then I bought the DVD. B-)
Fun question, Hatter.
I’m gonna go with Casino. I thought it was boring when I first saw it. Didn’t appreciate it at all. I was probably too young. Over the course of several years and a few more viewings (thanks, cable!), I’ve come to not only love it, but I’m one of the blasphemous few that rank it above GoodFellas.
There aren’t too many movies that I’ve watched, hated, then re-watched and loved. I generally don’t re-watch a movie I didn’t like. And besides, the ones I didn’t like don’t end up amounting to much more than footnotes in cinematic history.
That being said, I do remember the first time I saw Glengarry Glen Ross. It was in Dublin, with my mother, and we really wanted to see Scent of A Woman, but it was sold out. We saw the poster for Glengarry and thought “wow, what a stellar cast”, and took a chance. We both walked out thinking the same thing: “What was that all about?”. We figured that you must have to be in the business world to just get that type of film. Flash forward five years and I’m doing an ISU for Writer’s Craft in OAC, and Ms. Atkinson recommended David Mamet for me to do a study on. So I re-watched Glengarry Glen Ross, and it finally clicked. While it’s not a desert island 5, it’s in my 20 for sure.
The 2 that immediately come to mind are: Moulin Rouge! and Napoleon Dynamite.
I kind of hated MR! on first viewing and didn’t get what all the fuss was about. I thought it was cheesy and manipulative. I was told to watch it again about a month later – and of course, loved it. It’s kitschy and tart and has some really lovely small moments as well as the whole “Can Can” circus feel.
The other movie, ND, I think you need to watch at least twice to even figure out what’s going on. I sent this to my parents’ house and they were a little in disbelief during the first viewing. They watched it again on day 2 and strangely enough, it’s one of my their very favorite movies. My 60+ year old mom was going around saying, “Give me your tots” for some time afterward. š