Movies That You Once Held Above Others...But Not Anymore
 

This isn't like the blockbuster film thread in that it can be any movie from any time of any budget level. Basically, a movie with which you really connected and loved at the time of its release and did enjoy for a while, but eventually it just became another movie.

I would say an example of this for me are the Lord of the Rings films. I loved them when they first came out and IMO they are still good movies, especially Fellowship. However, I no longer have them as the pinnacle of my movie collection. I think when the first one came out in 2001 I was so in the funk left by 9-11 that I was elated to have a movie that featured good vs. evil at its most fundamental level. The trilogy as a whole still holds up but the Hobbit trilogy, well, it has some good points but is overall superfluous.

I also remember watching the movie Swingers on a constant loop when I was college, and I do have it digitally and when I watch it's still fun, but not what it once as for me.

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Face/Off - I loved the hell out of it the year it was released, but can't stand to watch it anymore.

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I used to hold the Bond movies in higher regard. I still like certain ones, but overall I don’t care about the franchise as much as I used to. I think I’ve seen other spy type movies that I enjoy more, and some of the recent Bond films have been just okay, as well as a lot of the older ones don’t have a lot of replay value to me.

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I’d have to say something like The Shawshank Redemption. I loved it when it came out but thanks to it being played virtually nonstop on cable (I’m looking at you TBS and TNT) for the last 20 years, I’d just doesn’t hold the same power it used to. I can’t see myself pulling it off my shelf and sticking the disc in my player anymore.

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Braveheart - Watched it when it was first released and liked it a lot. Watched it a couple of years ago and realized that it's not that good. My taste in film has changed a lot since 1995.

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Nolan's Dark Knight Trilogy.

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PLANET OF THE APES (1968) was one of my favorite movies and I saw it on the big screen 6X in its first two years of release and a few more times in the 1970s.

I watched it on TCM the other night for the first time in 30 or 40 years. It's a good movie and has good stuff in it, but some elements of it struck me as just silly, like that misshapen ape village which is completely impractical for any sentient beings to live in. And that's where they base their Ministry of Science? It would be like putting the Defense Dept. in an old western saloon in Tombstone, AZ. None of the buildings seen from the outside are big enough to hold what we see on the inside, like the row of human cages, the tribunal chamber, the "human" museum, and the church. And why would there be a museum filled with stuffed humans in the center of town when there's plenty of live humans in cages just yards away? Also, why did Charlton Heston's character never wonder why the apes were reading and writing English, for God's sake, on what he thinks is a planet 2000 years in the future and thousands of light years away!

I'm sorry, but the older I get the harder it is for me to suspend disbelief.

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Fight Club - I loved when it came out and it's still a technically good movie, but it's got a pretty muddled and unpleasant "message" to it, and it's hard not to look at it now as an inspiration to all the hate-filled incels and losers online lashing out at everyone for their own problems.

Top Gun - I must've seen this in the theatre 3 times in the summer it came out, but watching it again recently with my kid for the first time in years and boy, it's a cheesy, propaganda filled and pretty homoerotic piece of work. Cruise has made a couple dozen movies better than this one and it's certainly dated badly.

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For someone who has Michael Bay's Transformers movies as some of his favorite films of all time this post is quite hilarious.

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Not all of them, but I feel the same about The Dark Knight to an extent. It’s good, but I don’t love it like I once did. That said though I love Batman Begins and feel like it’s tremendously overshadowed by The Dark Knight.

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American Beauty- It’s a movie that I really liked when it came out. And I thought the performances were universally great. It felt sort of revolutionary for a Best Picture winner in 2000 - like it was really shanking things up. But it really hasn’t aged well, and not just because of Kevin Spacey. It feels very homophobic and archaic twenty years later. The new thinking that 1999 was maybe the best movie year ever has really hurt its reputation.

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I remember loving Gladiator when it was in theaters, and the first release of the DVD was one of my most played . In fact, I think that movie and The Matrix were the two that really sold people on the format back in the day (i.e. it was one of the first titles people got when they purchased their players, or inspired people to get players). While I still enjoy it as a "guy" movie along the lines of something like Scarface or Top Gun, it started to lose its luster for me once it won Best Picture. I liked the movie, but knew it was not that level of material.

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This was my first thought. I was completely enamored when it first came out, and it was my #1 favorite movie as a teen, until Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon eventually toppled it (I once had a huge preference for medieval or at least pre—gunpowder action movies like this). But as I got older I learned how different actual history was compared to what was shown, and then Mel Gibson went full-on batshit insane, and it just lost it’s appeal.

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I hate to say it but Star Wars. I was obsessed as a kid. I had Star Wars everything. But I saw them less and less as I got older. I think the big delay in getting the original trilogy onto DVD was a contributing factor. I didn't have a DVD to watch during a time when I was watching more movies than ever. I know me getting older probably has a lot to do with it. The fanboy and Lucas drama surrounding them also plays a role. The movies just lost the wonder for me. I've only seen one of the new wave of movies in the theater. Just no hurry to see it. The Mandalorian has actually been the first thing in a while to draw me back into that universe.

I will also give a shout out to the early Kevin Smith films. I really liked his movies up to Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, but I have no desire to revisit any of them and haven't in a long time. I don't think the humor has aged well. Clerks would be the one I could see watching again at some point.

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I think any teen film from the 80's that I grew up with, as they don't resonate with me now as an adult. It is not to say the movies are worse than I remembered, it's just the problems the characters are going through really doesn't jive with me at an older age. A movie like 'The Breakfast Club' was such a huge part of my youth because we can all relate to one of those characters (I played sports so I related to Emilio Estevez and how he treated a nerd like Anthony Michael Hall as he always had to put an act among his jock friends). We had a Judd Nelson at our school who put on this 'cool guy' act, but he came from a really bad family, and of course we all know a Molly Ringwald Princess in our class. I watch 'The Breakfast Club' now and it's still funny as hell, but I really can't relate to the teen angst in the 2nd half of the film. The same goes for 'Stand By Me' as it's one of the best movies of the 80's (very underrated), and I was the exact age of those guys who went on that journey and also related to their teenage problems at the times. But now I watch it as an adult and I just can't connect with them on that same level anymore. Not to get off topic but 'The Wonder Years' would be a perfect show that I loved as a kid, but I probably couldn't watch today for the same reasons.

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I enjoyed TRANSFORMERS 1 & 3, but I've never said I considered them among my favorite films of all time. I think I said in a recent post that TRANSFORMERS 3 was the best sci-fi film of this decade. Wouldn't even make it into my top 100 of all time. In any event, the TRANSFORMERS films are based on cartoons about giant robots so they shouldn't be held to the same standard as a serious science fiction film based on a novel by an acclaimed novelist with a screenplay by two of the most--at the time--esteemed screenwriters in Hollywood.

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It's probably generational as those are the types of blockbusters they grew up with so it's an almost an 'ignorance is bliss' attitude to what is a great movie. The bar is so lowered today with blockbuster movies compared to the golden age of Star Wars, Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Back to the Future. Most of those movies were original stories, original characters, and they had to focus on those 2 elements because of they were limited by technology. Now they can do what they want, so the blockbuster has been dumbed down for the audience in favor of big set pieces, and crazy action scenes.

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I think this is a good example. I look at my DVD catalog and what hasn't received the upgrade to Blu-ray and... there are many. Now, if I want to watch Gladiator, am I really going to pull out the old DVD or am I going to spend $10 on an HD upgrade or just move on to something else? Typically, it's more often the third choice. Not always, for what's in the DVD collection, but it happens.

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Die Hard 2, the original TMNT movies, and the Lethal Weapon movies.

Maybe in 1990 when I was not a sophisticated movie viewer and just watched comedies and action movies.

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I know it was historically inaccurate and that Mel Gibson is loony, but that's not why I changed my opinion. After watching it 20 something years later I realized that it is just badly written and filled with corny dialogue that sounds like it was lifted from a Lifetime movie. When it comes to "historical" epics, if you're not going to be accurate at least have an interesting story and screenplay to keep me engaged.

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Planet of the Apes is a fable. It's based on a nihilist postwar novel by Pierre Boulle, describing a world where the apes took over because humans just gave up. The story was transformed into a Cold War fable about humans being too violent for anyone to be safe around atomic bombs. The intelligent apes came out of nowhere, without any justification, and operate as a Greek Chorus stating and restating the theme. It's not serious science fiction any more than Star Wars.

The best way to describe how dated the movie has become is to tell you my reaction when we saw it in the theater 2-3 years ago. The intended viewer's response in 1969 was "Oh, we're so terrible!" My response in the 2010s was, "Fuck yeah! Humans kick ape ass!"

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I was never enamored of Gladiator. Ridley Scott had made many better films, the adulation of that movie never seemed right.

Fight Club always troubled me with its politics, but I think after a second or third viewing that is the point. I don’t think it inspired incels or neo-nazis or anything. It was just a reflection of a small subgroup that has always been around and still is.

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I will also defend Fight Club as an extraordinarily well put together movie. The acting, the writing, the editing, even the FX. I've watched this movie many times over the past 20 years (!!!) and it's still a great flick. But I do think there's a lot of disaffected youths that saw how "cool" Tyler Durden was and didn't follow it through to what happens to him. They don't get the lesson that they should find an answer somewhere in between being an office drudge and being a terrorist. Sure, you can help change society. But Project Mayhem ain't the way.


And I still love Star Wars. I went through a time in my 20's where I had the VHS set on repeat basically every couple weeks. I'd re-watch them even now if my family wouldn't get annoyed. Even with the problems of the PT and ST movies, I still love the story and I don't think I'll ever get truly tired of it.

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Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It's one of those movies that used to get played as a special event on TV in the early to mid-70's around Thanksgiving along with Willy Wonka, The Borrowers, and Doctor Doolittle. At the time, it was probably my favorite of the four. However, over the years, my feeling has repeatedly fluctuated between liking and hating the movie, but never loving it anymore. And now it's hard to watch it and not think of James Woods.

As for the other three films, Willy Wonka is the only one that really has held up for me since I was a kid. In fact, I probably appreciate it a lot more now than I did then.

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Maybe not the sequels (although I still kind of enjoy The Secret of the Ooze), but the original 1990 Turtles movie is fantastic. Really pretty ahead of it’s time if you ask me and holds up amazingly well. One of the better comic book movies before they were a common thing. The story is good, the tone is actually fairly serious but has a bit of humor mixed in, and the Turtles themselves look fantastic. The Henson costumes look far better than the abominations we got from the newer Turtles movies by Nickelodeon.