What Kind of Movies Do People Like Just Because of Nostalgia?
In fandom circles, people fear the visit of the Sucking Fairy . This mythical creature sits down on books, films and TV shows that you loved as a child – we’re talking about works that are fundamental to your development – and infects them with poisonous magic. “Oh, I loved it when I was 12!” you think as you flip through an old show on Netflix. And you hit the Play button with an enthusiasm that quickly fades when you realize … oh, that’s bad, actually, if not too problematic (or downright insulting) in retrospect. But if the Sucking Fairy has a weakness, it’s nostalgia, and sometimes nostalgia is stronger … let’s call it “good taste.” This is why so many films that received terrible reviews after their release are strangely reclassified as cult a few decades later. It’s not that Steven Spielberg’s Hook is suddenly a good movie (it’s not; the original 29% mark on a tomometer is in line with the money). Rather, many of the people who watched it in 1991 were kids and now they have grown up and they can’t watch the movie without remembering the simpler times, the times when mohawks, skateboarding and neon cooking fights were (I’ll spare you my rant about how I didn’t even like Hook when I was 10 years old, lest it sound like I’m bragging about my early-onset good taste, I fully admit that I spend so many hours watching all this shit. Hook: Which is bad.) I am not saying that critical consensus is always correct, or that the tastes of the public do not change over time in the aggregate. I think some films do arrive too early (the mainstream was certainly not ready for the overt anime influences of 2008 in Speed Racer, the overt bombing critically and commercially that became iconic around five minutes after leaving theaters ). But sometimes a bad movie is just a bad movie. It’s okay if you like it — it’s okay to love the “bad” things to watch and enjoy — but that doesn’t fix what’s wrong with them. So what I want to know is which films have been mis-canonized as “really very good!” looking back, whether it be your friends and family or the internet in general? As much as it pisses you off that I polled on Twitter once and a fair share of people said Hocus Pocus ( Rotten Tomatoes rating: 38% ) is a better Halloween movie than The Nightmare Before Christmas ( Rotten Tomatoes rating: 95% )? What unexpectedly beloved “classics” prove that children are to blame? Let me know in the comments and I will summarize your answers in one of the following posts. (Hurry up, while nobody mentioned the Star Wars prequels!)