A few friends and I recently discussed movies we thought warranted a second watch. We debated whether a film aged like fine wine or sour milk. It meant whether we thought a movie held up, or was even better, years after its original release, or whether we didn’t think it was all that good now, even though we once held it in high esteem. One of my friends said Terminator 2 aged like sour milk. Though I haven’t seen it a second time, this movie was so far ahead of its time in terms of technology in 1991, but I don’t doubt it might be unwatchable 30 years later. The sour milk example I gave was The Great Outdoors, a movie that a 12-year-old me thought was hilarious in the theater, but that I didn’t chuckle at once during my 2012 viewing. An example of a movie that aged like a fine wine was Apocalypse Now, a movie I didn’t necessarily love when I first saw it, but one I grew to appreciate as I aged. Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, Do the Right Thing, and He Got Game are fine wines. I remember thinking it was “pretty decent” in 1998. It has stood the test of time and, as we have seen in recent years, applies more to the sleaziness of college basketball recruiting.
Category Archives: Rosario Dawson
Top Five (2014)
The short. Skip Birdman. See Top Five. It’s the same movie with a couple of exceptions. Top Five has humor, is much more realistic, and you can relate to it more. It also isn’t the most over-hyped movie in the last five years. In fact, despite its 88% “fresh” rating on Rotten Tomatoes and lots of word of mouth on the street, it still surprisingly didn’t do all that well at the box office (just $23 million domestically). I did not see this movie in the theater, though it tempted me. The most significant thing going against the film was its release date. It opened on December 12th, right in the middle of when all of the big-time award movies were in the theaters. As a result, it got lost in the shuffle. If the studio could go back in time, they might have released this movie in August.