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Underwhelmed By Greatness?
Have you ever had this experience? Have you ever sat down with a book, a film, an album, what have you, that you’ve heard from time immemorial was a classic and thought…eh? Maybe you would have liked it if you had come to it cold, but it just couldn’t bear the weight of its own legacy.
I’ve always been a big Alfred Hitchcock fan. Vertigo is one of my favorite films of all time. The episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents entitled “Breakdown” is one of the most gripping 30 minutes of television I’ve ever seen (you can find it on Netflix or Amazon). While I’ve worked my way through most of the Hitchcock corpus, I had, until recently, somehow failed to make the time for Rear Window, considered one of the director’s all-time classics. Finding myself with some unexpected free time on a recent Sunday, I popped it up on Netflix. And, well…eh.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s a solid film. The acting is stellar, confining the action primarily to Jimmy Stewart’s apartment was clever (it’s essentially the movie equivalent of a bottle episode), and there are some moments of genuine suspense. Overall, however, I came away underwhelmed. Without giving too much away (although, to be fair, the film is 60 years old, so a spoiler alert is an act of charity), the tension in the plot runs as follows: one of the main characters either did A or did B. In the end, it turns out he did B. Not exactly white-knuckle stuff.
Now, to be fair to the film, I probably would have had a much different reaction had I seen it in a cinema in 1954. In 2015, however, when thrillers go to baroque lengths to hide the ball on plot twists, Rear Window seemed almost pedestrian by comparison. Had it been some obscure little film, I probably would have delighted in it. As a movie that’s so deeply engrained in pop culture, however, that my first consciousness of it came through a childhood viewing of a Simpsons episode, it had a higher bar to clear.
And, honestly, that feels, at some level, like a disservice to the film. But there’s simply no way to decouple my reaction from the expectations created by decades worth of hype.
What “masterpieces” have you come to late, only to discover that your expectations were disappointed?
Published in Entertainment, Literature
War and Peace. Not only does it have its reputation as one of the all-time greats of literature, but I had just finished Anna Karenina, which deserves every bit of praise it gets. I don’t think it could have lived up to expectations even if it were practically perfect, and it wasn’t.
Adulthood.
This came up during the Meetup: Firefly.
That’s nerd blasphemy.
Tread lightly, Mike.
Almost everything Goethe wrote.
There’s a caveat in that I’ve only seen the first episode, because people oversold it.
I’m sure it gets better.
Citizen Kane. Boring.
Btw, as to Rear Window I have only one thing to say to you – Grace Kelly’s entrance.
The movie has Grace Kelly. I think you might have missed the point.
Honestly, I am more likely to be underwhelmed by most classics on first viewing. Even a lot of classics which I have come to love did not live up to expectations. For a lot of classics, nothing could live up to the expectations that are put on them.
Caddyshack.
I don’t judge any show by the pilot. Of course it doesn’t help that Fox showed the episodes out of order. I never watched it until way after the fact and it was on Netflix, but I’ve been drawn in by the themes of the show more than by the craft of its production or individual stories. Oh, and Cristina Hendricks is a seductress in it. I can forgive A LOT for that plot line to exist.
The problem with a movie like Rear Window is that you almost certainly already “saw” it before you actually saw it, because it has been adapted, parodied, and blatantly ripped-off way too many times over the years.
I’m not a big fan of Agatha Christie, for example, because almost all of her stories were repurposed wholesale by the many, many tv mystery shows of the 1970s and 1980s. It was the rare tv mystery show that didn’t do its own version of Ten Little Indians or Murder On The Orient Express.
The classic movies that tend to hold up better are those that don’t really lend themselves to being remade, repurposed, or parodied.
I was mesmerized by Citizen Kane when I first saw it, at least partially because the first time I saw “Citizen Kane” was when I actually saw Citizen Kane. Nobody else has ever really used Citizen Kane as a template for their own movie or tv show (except for parodies of the whole “Rosebud” gimmick, but that isn’t really the point of the story so it’s ok that one detail is spoiled).
By contrast, a kid seeing Star Wars Episode IV is going to be disappointed, because they’ve already seen dozens-upon-dozens of movies which used that movie as their template/inspiration.
You don’t want to watch an old movie and think, “haven’t I already seen this movie?”
(When I first saw Rear Window, I kept expecting a “twist”, that Stewart wasn’t actually seeing what he thought he was seeing. But there was no twist. The “mystery” in the story was actually more straighforward than in all the parodies and repurposings. The plot is basically “man witnesses crime.”)
Shakespeare’s sonnets. Dang near all of them.
If you’ve ever read his complete works cover to cover, the sonnets are at the end. After such wide-ranging blank verse giving insight into so many aspects of human nature, it’s a bit of a disappointment that the sonnets’ scope seems so… constrained.
The plays were for a paying audience.
The sonnets were either personal letters to a particular individual, or else they were for Billy’s own personal consumption.
I bet George Lucas’ personal diary/correspondence is way less interesting that Star Wars too.
;-)
I think we’re all jaded by the spectacle of modern film. We expect to be visually awed at every turn. It’s CGI crack.
When deMille needed a crowd of 10,000 C.B. went out and hired a crowd of 10,000. Now they hire 50 people and pay them to wander around a green screen for half-hour and then digitally replicate them to their little heart’s content.
And Grace was beautiful, but I never thought she was that good as an actor. She may be the least deserving Oscar winner of all time.
I was really surprised at how much I hated Katherine and Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
Cracked has a very good podcast about how difficult it is to create comedy that can transcend time.
Each generation has its own sensibilities and its own cultural references, so comedies get dated pretty quickly.
This is why comedies can pretty easily get away with reusing the structure and tropes of previous works, as long as they don’t reuse the actual jokes and/or cultural references.
For example, no sane person would try to do a shot-for-shot remake of Animal House or Up In Smoke today, but there are still plenty of “outrageous college comedy” or “stoner comedy” movies made.
http://www.cracked.com/podcast/cracked-podcast-episode-1-generation-gaps/
Watch “Jaynestown”. Yes, it does.
Sigh.
Moby Dick.
Yeah, it’s a classic. I get that. Peter Robinson will probably be chiding me. I get that, too. But, I’m sorry. It’s a closed book to me. I cannot . . . get . . . through . . . it. Sorry.
I even tried listening to it as an audiobook, because someone with my handle and avatar should be able to say they have read through it once. I gave up after it almost put me to sleep on the morning commute and very nearly caused a bad accident. Now the only time I attempt it is when I am suffering insomnia. Works like a charm.
Seawriter
The Great Gatsby was a great bore.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin. People told me it was a classic. In historical terms, it is, but a pretty awful one. Characterization horrible. Wildly overdramatized. And personally I’ve never been able to stomach that flowery 19th-century style of prose.
TcG beat me to it. Grace Kelly is quite possibly the most beautiful woman in the history of cinema. No joke. I remember being kind of annoyed with Jimmy Stewart’s character for his underwhelming treatment of her… but that’s not really a point about the movie.
My husband was so determined to get through that book. He finally made it through the audiobook and was so proud of himself.
I have not, (tried to read and gave up) but I see no reason to subject myself to it to prove a point. I’ve read and enjoyed enough old classic literature with dry and difficult prose that I don’t see why I should beat my head against the wall for this particular book!
Anna Karenina, and pretty much anything else Russian. I feel the same way about Russian opera- don’t get it, hate listening to it.
I second that. I just can’t do it. I had blamed it on being a slacker college student, so when my 14 year old read The Brothers Karamazov and gave me specific reasons I should read it, I jumped in. Oh dear God, I thought I was going to die. I made it through the first three chapters with little comprehension and less appreciation. I just don’t get it.
In contrast, I loved Russian composers when I took piano.
Dostoevsky is not overrated, though. Try Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov on for size. Also, Gulag Archipelago lives up to the hype. You may simply be reading the wrong Russians!
I had that problem with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I had heard every line in the movie before I actually watched it.
The Old Man of the Sea, by Ernest Hemingway. Written by a man, for other men. Left me cold.
I think that argument is overblown.
Firstly, on the big screen a crowd of 10,000 still looks way more impressive than a CGI composition. The big CGI spectacle movies don’t do well simply because of the CGI. If that was true, then movies like Noah, Elysium, Oblivion, and Tron Legacy would have been blockbusters.
Meanwhile, the highest-grossing movie in the United States last year was American Sniper.
Story still matters.