The Usual Suspects. It, along with maybe the Sixth Sense, is the archetypal "it's only fun to watch twice" movie.
Also, Kevin Spacey is generally a terrible actor. I have no idea how he has managed to snowblind people.
I'll like to read your thoughts on this. The Usual Suspects is one of those movies that were hailed by the mainstream viewers to be brilliant yet much of it didn't hold up so well under critical analysis.
I won't spoil anything I'm going to say, but as a little teaser: The Usual Suspects came out when I was either a freshman or sophomore in high school. At that age, nobody paid attention to, you know, not directly mainstream cinema (I lived in the middle of nowhere, and this was largely pre-internet era for most people, too). The Usual Suspects sort of became "the" movie for our little nerdy, brainy clique. It had lots of witty, quotable lines. It had a plot that was generally different than most of the stuff out there. It was a crime story with sensibilities similar to pulp fiction, but with more of a high brow bent. Anyway, I'm not going to try to go into explicit detail describing why I liked it when I was 14 or 15. God help anyone that can still explain why exactly they adored the shit they did when they were a teenager. The point is, I can see exactly why I might have thought that it was the Best Thing Ever at the time, but I can also see why a more educated and experienced, 12ish year older version of myself isn't so impressed by it, and it doesn't have anything to do with hating on the things I did when I was a dumb teenager. I loved huffing gas. I'll admit that. I loved The Usual Suspects. I'll admit that. But today, I only love one of those two things.
I do need to go revisit some other Kevin Spacey favorites, though. I think that I've skipped a lot of his post American Beauty work because he seemed to rush right for the shitty Academy Award pandering roles. I guess that's kind of back-fired on him. But I remember pre-AB, and possibly even right after it, there was a rather sizable contingent that would have labeled him one of the finer current actors in the game, probably based off his Usual Suspects performance. I just don't see that at all anymore, and I'm not quite sure why I ever did. His acting is so. . .stagey. Maybe it was liked because the stagey acting made him stand out different than the people he starred against, but nowadays, knowing better, it just seems like bad, stiff acting. He's also terrible at emoting.
On the other side of the coin, I didn't like The Game that much when it came out. Well, I probably found it entertaining and all, but I distinctly recall it being one of the first movies I could pick apart rather cleanly and see its problems. I think it's amusing that my tastes concerning these two movies have flip flopped.
