Welcome
back to AVQ&A;, where we throw out a question for discussion among the staff
and readers. Consider this a prompt to compare notes on your interface with pop
culture, to reveal your embarrassing tastes and experiences, and to ponder how
our diverse lives all led us to convene here together. Got a question you'd
like us and the readers to answer? E-mail us at [email protected].
This
week's question: What's your most-rewatched movie?
Jason
Heller
I
practically grew up in a movie theater. In the '70s and '80s, my grandmother
managed a little one-screener—followed by a fancy strip-mall
two-screener!—in Englewood and Venice, Florida, respectively. This was
during my elementary-school years, which meant my little brother and I got
dumped off at "grandma's"—that is, her theater—to be
babysat all the time. Accordingly, I saw lots of movies multiple times at a
very young age. I'm talking some random shit, too: On its initial release, I
wound up watching The
Man With Two Brains (I was 11!) so many times, I can still sing Steve Martin's weird little
"under the mango tree" song from memory, 25 years after the last time
I heard it. And don't even ask me about E.T.—I easily logged 30 viewings of it the summer
it came out. Cable and VCRs, of course, totally changed things in the '80s, and
even though my family was too poor to be in on the ground floor of those
particular innovations (we didn't have a microwave, either), I still managed to
catch enough movies at friends' houses—including my most-watched movie
ever, the screwball Disney comedy Midnight Madness. They must have showed it a
dozen times a day on HBO after its initial release in 1980, and my brother and
I memorized almost every line of the gloriously stupid thing. Along with choice
lines from Weird
Science, Midnight Madness remains our favorite
fraternal in-joke, especially after I got us both copies on DVD a couple years
ago. I have to admit, though, that since I bought Weird Al's opus UHF a while back, it's gobbled
up almost as much mental real estate as Midnight Madness.
Sean
O'Neal
As
the lines of distortion on my surprisingly still-playable VHS copy can attest,
I have seen Ghostbusters enough times that it barely
registers as a movie, so inextricably is it woven into the very fabric of my
life. Turn it on at literally any scene, and I'll start spouting dialogue like
Dustin Hoffman's Rain
Man character rattling off "Who's On First?"—compulsively, and
barely cognizant of why it's funny anymore. I don't mean to imply that it
isn't; on the contrary, I still rank Ghostbusters up there my favorite comedies
of all time (along with The
Jerk and Airplane!, two more films I'm fully
capable of ruining with my own karaoke versions) and I seriously doubt any
movie will ever replace it. But in an uncomfortably psychologically revealing
way, my immersion in the film's many quotable lines crossed the borderline
separating casual reference and obsessive incantation long ago: It's probably
no coincidence that the peak of my Ghostbusters viewing (at least once a
week) came just after my parents' divorce, when I was consoled during rocky
nights by my friends Venkman, Ray, and Egon. However, a close,
far-less-bittersweet second would have to be Goodfellas, a film I've seen all the
way through probably 100 times and counting. (That's nearly 300 hours, or more
than 12 days of my life!) I own it on VHS and DVD, and yet literally cannot
help but watch it every single time it airs, even in its
bastardized, basic-cable, "freak you!" form. When it began running on
HBO while I was a senior in high school, I would often stay up until 4 a.m.
sticking around to the bitter end, which usually meant showing up wrecked to
Economics the next day. Sorry, Mrs. Brown, but the Smoot-Hawley Tariff didn't
have shit on the Lufthansa Heist.
Noel
Murray
I
hardly ever watch a movie more than twice anymore, but between age 10 and 30, I
was a major re-watcher. After seeing Star Wars four times in its first run (when I was but a lad of
7), I became convinced that true devotion to a movie involved practically
memorizing it, so when a movie came around that I loved, I'd immerse myself in
it for weeks and months on end. In high school, I watched Harold & Maude, The Graduate, Risky Business, Raising Arizona, and The Breakfast Club probably a dozen times each
on video, and after college, I saw Pulp Fiction and Dazed And Confused about half a dozen times each
in theaters. Honestly, I can't recommend that method, because I can barely
stand to watch any of those movies now. The movies that have held up best have
been the ones I've re-watched every couple of years: Singin' In The Rain, Meet Me In St.
Louis, Rear Window, The Remains Of The
Day,Citizen Kane, Casablanca, Goodfellas, The Endless Summer, Serpico, Blow Out, The Philadelphia
Story,The Royal
Tenenbaums,
and so on. The movie I wish I could say I've watched more
than any other is McCabe
& Mrs. Miller,
and I have probably seen that one—my favorite movie by my favorite
director, Robert Altman—about 10 times, and still look forward to soaking
in the wintry atmosphere, nascent Americana, and tragicomic characters. But if
I'm being honest, there's one movie I've seen probably 20 times, or roughly
once a year since I first saw it as a teenager. The movie is Miracle
On 34th Street,
one of the finest achievements of the Hollywood studio system, and a
simultaneous celebration of the Christmas spirit and responsible American
consumerism. It's
A Wonderful Life is a wonderful movie, but Miracle On 34th
Street describes
a Christmas I recognize. Watching it is as much a part of the season for me as
trimming the tree, making candy, and buying a bunch of crap nobody needs.
Andy Battaglia
I watch Annie Hall every few months, probably up
to around 20-plus times by now, without growing the least bit tired of it. I
consider that movie pretty much perfect on lots of grounds: The performances
are strong, the jokes are sharp, and the notes it strikes about the rise and
fall of a relationship strike me as very sound. But I still can't figure why that movie, of all the Woody
Allen films I grew up loving, is the one. I think maybe it's the way Allen
addresses Diane Keaton for flipping through a "cat book" at the
bookstore. Otherwise, in stricter comfort-movie terms, the film I've watched
just as much over the past few years—for its heroically understated tone
and the way it hardly looks or feels like a movie at all—is Kenneth
Lonergan's You
Can Count On Me.
Tasha
Robinson
I've
actually never been a real fan of re-watching films; I don't have a comfort
movie I re-watch when I'm down, or something I put on in the background when
I'm doing other things. I had a college friend who claimed she'd seen the
original
Star Wars
upward of 40 times because she was such a huge fan, and another who says he's
seen A
Few Good Men
a similar number of times, largely because his dorm had a closed-circuit TV
system where students could request films, and A Few Good Men was requested a couple times
a day, every day. I honestly don't have the slightest understanding of why
anyone would subject themselves to that; being repeatedly subjected to the same
movie even once a week for a semester would drive me completely insane, let
alone once a day. Most of the time, I don't even watch films twice, because
there are so many films I haven't seen yet, and a new film will always win out
over a re-run. That said, I've probably seen Akira half a dozen times, largely
for review purposes. I saw it the first time when it played in a Washington DC
art theater around 1989, and then again in college when the dub came out on VHS
in America, and I wrote it up for the school paper. Since then, I've wound up
reviewing multiple new DVD versions spread out over the past couple of decades,
at least once watching it twice back-to-back to compare the subtitles with the
dub track. I love that film, I see something new every time I watch it, and I
believe multiple viewings are necessary to follow the story, and even so, I
feel like I've seen it far too many times.
Genevieve
Koski
I'm
one of those people who always has to have some sort of noise going on in the
background when I'm at home, and that something is very often, oh, I dunno, Ferris Bueller's Day
Off rerunning
on TBS for the berzillionth time. But I rarely actively watch those movies, nor do I
usually have them on from start to finish, so I don't think they count. I'm
also not going to count Rudy, which I was subjected to no
fewer than nine times in the four years I attended high school, for some
ungodly reason, courtesy of a few very unimaginative/tired teachers. (Not that
it's a bad movie, but no one needs such a concentrated dose of Rudy.) Embarrassingly, there's a
four-minute segment of the '80s animated kiddie flick The Chipmunk
Adventure
that I have literally worn out of my VHS copy, due to an odd college ritual my
roommate and I had of watching the musical number "The Boys And Girls Of Rock
And Roll" when we were drunk, bored, or procrastinating—though I don't
think I've watched the rest of the movie since I hit puberty, so I'm giving
myself a pass there. When it comes to films I purposely sit down to enjoy over
and over, it's a toss-up between two sentimental clichés. I make a point to pop
in It's
A Wonderful Life every year
right around the time that holiday stress has me wanting to chuck lumps of coal
at the heads of passersby on the street. And The Wizard Of Oz is the first movie I remember
thinking of as something more than a distraction—something I cared about
once the tape had been rewound and put away, something I wanted to honor with a
Halloween costume—so it gets a nostalgia screening at least once a year,
usually around the holidays as well.
Steve
Hyden
Like every other nerdy white guy born between the
years 1967 and 1987, I watched Star Wars at least 30 times before I
turned 12. Since then, I've seen it maybe twice. The mainstream '80s comedies I
grew up on have held up better into adulthood—I'm sure I've seen Ghostbusters, Airplane, This Is Spinal Tap, Ferris Bueller's
Day Off, and The
Breakfast Club at
least 10 times each. Then there's the movies I see over and over because
they're always on TV; thanks to HBO and VH1 Classic, respectively, I know Dodgeball: A True
Underdog Story and The
Last Waltz by
heart. (I'm also a fan of the edited-for-television version of Casino I've caught on USA at least
five times.) I saw Kill
Bill Vol. 1 four
times in the theater, a personal record and a testament to how Quentin
Tarantino's original grindhouse epic reignited my love of movies. Lately, my
most re-watched movie, strangely, has been Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest
Guys In The Room,
a great documentary and an even better sweaty-palmed noir thriller.
Donna
Bowman
Since
I started teaching classes on film to bright undergraduates, my rewatching
quotient has gone way, way up. Citizen Kane appears on the syllabus every
semester, not out of some kind of obligation, but because no matter what the
theme of the course might be—memory, time, history, cool charisma,
auteurs—Kane fits. It's the Great American
Movie, an omnibus that keeps showing a different face. And every year, I'm
amazed by how flat-out entertaining it is. I screen a Hitchcock film every time
I teach, too, and most often it's Vertigo, a movie I never really understood until I
started teaching it. Now I sit as its slow fuse wends through the labyrinthine
psychology of the characters, and marvel at how such a methodical film
nevertheless seems to catch half-glimpsed lightning in a bottle. Most of us
have seen the films of our teenage years more often than any other, but my
moviegoing started late, and by the time I had a chance to see Ghostbusters five or six times, I was
already devouring the canon at the university library. And thanks to the good
folks at Criterion, who made the Powell-Pressburger filmography their first
priority when they started producing laserdiscs, I've seen The Red Shoes,
Black Narcissus, and The
Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp far more often than the defining film of my
generation,Star Wars. Actually, truth be told,
I've probably only seen Star
Wars two times all the way
through—maybe it's the lingering guilt over having pretended to see it in
order to fit in during recess.
Kyle
Ryan
Like
a lot of people, I'd have to split this into two categories: childhood and
adulthood. As a child/adolescent, I watched Mr. Mom, Back To The Future, Ghostbusters,Better Off Dead, and The Goonies so many times I can quote
them almost verbatim. It was as a child that I saw It's A
Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for the first time, and it
has remained a favorite of mine into adulthood, so it's probably the film I've
seen more than any other. I'm a sucker for screwball shenanigans, and Stanley
Kramer's 1963 ensemble comedy has the screwball-iest of them. Kramer has a bad
rep among cinephiles (and I'll agree with them about Guess Who's Coming
To Dinner),
but Mad
World still makes me laugh.
Keith
Phipps
My
most-rewatched movie would probably have to be something I first saw years ago
that hasn't yet lost its charm to me. That rules out Star Wars, sadly, which has had the
charm special-editioned and prequeled away in recent years. And it rules out Pink Flamingos, which carried on the task
of teaching me about the power of transgressive humor after I graduated from Mad magazine. I still love it,
but I think my gross-out threshold has actually gotten lower over the years.
But it still leaves Pee-wee's
Big Adventure, Dawn
Of The Dead (the
original, as if I need to clarify), and Goodfellas, longtime favorites I could
watch on any given day of the week. Like Noel, I don't revisit my favorites as
often as I used to—or probably should—if only because the more I
see, the more I realize I still need to see. But it's good to know they'll
always be there waiting for me.