I’ve noticed more and more that people are mentioning
whether or not they’d rewatch a movie, implying that it affects their
grade. I’ve touched on it before, but I’m
curious now how much weight each of us puts on a movie’s rewatchability. Personally, it means next to nothing to
me. There’s far too much easily accessible
good media out there for me to ever factor this in. Hell, the last movie I think I sat down to
rewatch was The Two Towers, and that was two years ago. (Not counting movies for MMC of couse.)
Like I said, with so many options out there, what is the
appeal to rewatching anything? I know it
helps a little with comedy, as some jokes are better the second time around,
but with a Western like Butch Cassidy or a documentary like Dear Zachary, does
a rewatch really help? And isn’t that
experience powerful enough especially with Dear Zachary to stand on its
own? And at the same time, why would you
choose to rewatch any movie when you could watch something like The Graduate or
Apocalypse Now for the first time? I loved
Apocalypse Now and gave it an A – I have no desire to ever watch it again. I had a great experience with it; why change
how that went with another viewing?
I’m also getting to the point where the need to rewatch a
movie is becoming a negative for me.
This is why I bumped my Major League grade down to a B after watching it
recently, and I should probably revise my Anchorman grade, b/c it has this same
dilemma. Saying a movie needs watched
again is almost an apology for the content.
90% of a typical movie’s audience will only see the movie once. I see it as a small failure of the director
that their movie needs to be consumed multiple times in order to “get it.” That’s what makes a movie like Inception so
impressive – the plot is nuts and complicated, yet you can catch everything in
a single viewing so long as you’re paying attention.Now, that being said… My next pick is a movie we’ve all seen, so I’m definitely bucking the trend whenever I get to pick again.
"Saying a movie needs watched again is almost an apology for the content."
ReplyDeleteThis is how i feel when you say that a movie needs to be watched in a group.
As for rewatchibility, I don't recall factoring it into my grades, and if I have, it's minimal. I do enjoy rewatching some movies. Sometimes you want the trusted go-to movie with a known positive experience.... or, because something changed and I want to give the movie another chance. Aren't those the reasons why we do anything more than once?
I still watch The Princess Bride multiple times a year!
Rewatchability really doesn't impact a movie's grade for me at all. Sometimes, a violent movie improves on a second viewing just due to getting over the shock of it. That was the case with Gladiator and Kill Bill, and will likely be the case with Raid 2 when I get around to seeing it again.
ReplyDeleteRewatching movies though, very much has a purpose, if only to live in that space again. I generally don't rewatch whole movies over again, including ones I own, but I repeatedly watch scenes from movies on youtube. I've got the processing scene from the Master bookmarked in my browser. Though again, if I was transported back 40 years ago when there wasn't a way to own a movie, a movie like the Master would still be an A+, rewatch or no.
That being said, I rewatch TV shows much more than I do movies, primarily through Netflix. Having an episode of Bob's Burgers on in the background while I'm cooking or doing some take-home work is par for the course for me. The idea that rewatching is a fool's errand because there's plenty of other stuff seems like a Sisyphean task. A person's never going to get ahead of everything that comes out so you may as well revel in stuff you love.