Tuesday, July 1, 2014

MAKE IT STOP! When Movies Get Too Popular


I work as a preschool teacher, and that means I'm surrounded by all things Frozen. It's insanely popular right now, and as much as I liked the movie, I'm started to wish the kids would take a liking to something else. The Lion King, maybe? Toy Story? Tangled? Anything! It's everywhere! I started wondering how much the ubiquity of a film affects my opinion of it. 

When I first saw Napoleon Dynamite, it was still in limited release, nobody had heard of it, and I saw it in an almost empty theatre. I thought the film was hilarious, and I told all my friends about it. As time went on, the movie blew up. Napoleon Dynamite merchandise was everywhere (thanks Hot Topic!), and everyone was constantly doing Napoleon impressions. I remember it getting on my nerves, and saying things like "GOD, it wasn't THAT great! Everybody needs to CALM DOWN." I took a long long break from the movie, a movie that seemed less great now that it was everywhere. The same thing happened with Borat. I never wanted to hear "Very nice!" in that Borat voice ever again. But when I think about the films by themselves, stripped of the impressions and pop culture impact, I still like them. I just need a long break to see the movie again with fresh eyes.

Do you have a similar experience with a particular film? Are you able to enjoy a film the same after it gains a lot of popularity? Does a film suffer when Hot Topic gets its hands on it? Are we all just snobs and hipsters?




1 comment:

  1. This happens to me, too. Not just with movies, but the overexposure to things can make them so boring and irritating. It happened to me with The Avengers (which I still haven't seen because there was so much hype before it, I couldn't bare to go see it), The Hunger Games franchise, and so on. Anyway, yes, I totally agree. I don't know if it's because it's popular or if it's just because it gets old pretty quickly when everyone is talking about the same thing.

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