Remember when you were young and each and every movie you saw was your favorite as soon as you walked out of it. I remember a specific brief period where I spent weeks raving about the movies Titan A. E. and Dinosaur, movies that are hardly regarded as anything special.
During this period, every single movie with either Adam Sandler or Rob Schneider was automatically hilarious and any poorly acted, simple plotted action movie that had at least one explosion was Oscar caliber. I also remember being confused when I saw poor reviews for Little Nicky and thinking how the critics are always wrong.
The interesting thing is, the change in taste of movies did not occur gradually, but was a chain reaction stemming from one film. One occasion to make comedies need more than farts to be good and make action movies need more than slow motion, or to make horror movies need more than decapitation by chainsaw and drama movies need more than some cheesy piano melody playing while the sun sets.
For me, it was when I saw Mr. Deeds. I didn’t see it in theaters, and my friends who had seen it were raving about it to me since they did. I finally saw it at this youth group event when I was in seventh grade, where they loaded around 50 children into a gym and put it on. And as it played, everyone around me was laughing, and I was just silently thinking that’s really not that funny.
All of a sudden, every comedy movie I had ever seen was put into a new perspective. I re-watched and re-evaluated many of them, and realized that many of them were not actually funny, and were too shallow of a humor to really even be good movies. It wasn’t every movie, I still find many funny, but there were so many movies I previously loved that I was suddenly able to take off the list.
From there, it spread into other genres. I realized that Jason X, oddly one of my favorites at one point, was actually one of the worst movies ever created. I even needed to watch The Matrix, which had always been one of my favorites, to make sure it was actually good and not just good to the old me.
It worked both ways though. Many movies that I had considered boring were suddenly entertaining. I used to always assume that movies made before roughly 1990 were too hindered by their poor special effects to be good, but I managed to cross this idea out of my mind. North by Northwest, Vertigo, Chinatown and even The Godfather were all movies I have learned to love but the old me would have hated.