Ten mid movies I've somehow seen twice

As you likely know, I recently passed the milestone of 7,000 movies seen in my life -- that's 7,000 different movies, mind you, and doesn't count rewatches. If you add rewatches into my total viewings, I'm well over 8,000, maybe closer to 9,000. 

But there's a milestone related to that as well on the horizon: 1,000 different movies that I've seen more than once.

Well, it's not that close on the horizon.

Kiah Roache-Turner's movie Sting on Saturday was my 921st movie I've seen more than once. This list doesn't concern itself with the number of times that I've seen each of these movies, it's just a flat list of movies I've seen at least twice.

At the rate I'm going, I probably won't get to 1,000 for at least a few more years. I tend to rewatch let's say an average of 50 movies a year -- some years more, some years less, that's the exact definition of "average" -- and of those, at least half are movies that are already on my list because I'd already seen them at least twice. So it could take more three years even if you're saying that I add 25 titles to this list every year, which may be aggressive.

Really, this is just an intro to a different thing I want to talk about today, the proximity to 1,000 just being my excuse, with Sting serving as my news peg, to use the newspaper term.

Sting is not ordinarily the type of movie I would rewatch, and I don't mean I don't rewatch horror movies or I don't rewatch movies about giant spiders. I mean that I don't generally rewatch movies that I found mid the first time -- forgettable, without any prospect of really gleaning anything further from them on a second viewing. 

Why did I rewatch Sting, you ask, especially when I only just watched and ranked it last year? (In fact, and here is a coincidence about which I would have written an entire post if I weren't already writing this one: I watched it for the first time on June 28, 2024, and I happened to rewatch it exactly a year later on June 28, 2025.)

My wife is writing a script about a giant spider, and I suggested we watch some of the available giant spider movies to get the juices flowing, or more practically, to acquaint her with things that have already been done in movies about giant spiders, so she's at least aware of those things if she's going to be writing similar things in her script. Sting was one of the movies I suggested, and it's especially important she be familiar with this one, given that it was made by an Australian director, as will her film be.

Anyway, it got me thinking about the films we rewatch and why we rewatch them. Generally speaking, I was able to break down the films that any person would rewatch into five broad categories:

1) Films that are personal favorites, which might be movies from your childhood or more recent eccentric choices that you happen to love more than most people do.

2) Films that are considered all-time classics. 

3) Films that have a certain cultural prominence or significance.

4) Films you didn't like so much, but other people liked, so you think you must have missed something. (Series on this blog where I revisit movies where I felt like I was out of sync with the general consensus, and there have been several such series, are covered here.)

5) Films that were so bad that you have to watch them again just to experience the shock and disbelief all over again.

When cable television was more of a thing, you might have had a sixth category:

6) Films that are on cable all the time so you watch them passively in the background. 

And for parents:

7) Films your kids demand you watch with them multiple times. 

Sting does not fall into any of those categories. It does some things pretty well, and I think I might have liked it better on the second viewing than the first, just a little bit. Generally speaking, though, it is a mid film that I never imagined I would really think about again, let alone see again.

So, because you know my mind wanders toward projects, I thought today I would go through the 921 titles I've rewatched and give you ten that are like Sting, that stand out on this list for the fact that I would never have imagined watching them a second time. I'll also give you a bit of the context for the second viewing.

So you'll note this does not include movies I ended up finding mediocre on a revisit, but was originally rewatching for one of those five core reasons. These have to be movies like Sting, which were rewatched for none of those reasons. 

I guess I could just get nine more because I've already given you Sting, but I'll get ten more. So it will be 11 total.

I should also tell you that I will exclude any films watched purely for my Random Rewatch series on The Audient, a periodic series I do with sometimes large gaps of several years between entries, where I use a random number generator to watch films that land in the corresponding spot on my Flickchart. These have included Who Killed the Electric Car? (serviceable documentary), High Heels and Low Lifes (which I liked but not enough to rewatch), Hollywoodland (which was mediocre to bad) and Sucker Punch (about the same as Hollywoodland). The series has been on pause for a while since I can't bring myself to program the deficient children's movie Doogal. 

Anyway, instead of ranking them I will just go alphabetically. 

The Big Red One (1980, Samuel Fuller) - This fairly unremarkable war movie had a special edition come out in 2005 called The Big Red One: The Reconstruction. I was assigned to review it for AllMovie, but I thought I couldn't properly comment on the edition with the different footage if I didn't have the original as a point of reference. So I watched both of them within a space of a couple weeks, knowing from the first viewing that I did not specifically desire a second. Mark Hamill is in it. I don't remember a lot of the other bits, just that there was a lot of stuff that seemed like a B+ version of things I'd seen in better war movies.

Dopamine (2003, Mark Decena) - When I watched Dopamine on October 9, 2004, it was during a brief period of about two years when I wasn't working as a critic, after AllMovie temporarily eliminated the use of freelancers. When the regime changed in 2005, they gave me a whole bunch of new, and by that I mean old, titles to work on. The ones I'd seen, I didn't rewatch any of them before writing my review, except one: Dopamine. Why Dopamine, a sort of sci-fi indie love story, and not the others? No idea. By the way, it's not bad. 

Event Horizon (1997, Paul W.S. Anderson) - I hesitated to include this mediocre science fiction horror in this ten, because there was something definitive that prompted my rewatch. Namely, it was that something "really scary" happened in this movie, and not just the scare quotes in this sentence. I don't remember what I thought I'd heard was so scary, but I thought when I rewatched the movie, my mind might be blown at that point and I would just know. Well, I never noticed when that thing I thought was supposed to be so scary happened, and the things that did happen weren't all that scary. I think I needed to do more research. 

The Final Girls (2015, Todd Strauss-Schulson) - For some who rewatch, there'd be a bonus entry on the types of movies they rewatched: "films you forgot you watched the first time." I suppose that also works for Alzheimer's patients. (I'm not making light. With my family history, I expect to be such a patient one day.) My destiny may contain a faulty memory, but today, I never forget watching a movie -- except The Final Girls. Although there were less than four years between my October 12, 2018 first viewing and my May 28, 2022 second viewing, I genuinely did not realize I'd watched the movie before. And it took me until like an hour in to be sure. If you can't remember that you even saw a movie until an hour in, that's a great definition of "mid." (Of course, I then finished the viewing. Naturally.)

Housesitter (1992, Frank Oz) - I said Dopamine was the only movie I was assigned to review for AllMovie that I felt the need to watch again before reviewing ... well, maybe there was one other. I can't remember for sure, but I can think of no other reason I would have rewatched one of Steve Martin's more forgettable star vehicles from this period, which is not significantly improved even by the presence of comic genius Goldie Hawn. I know I did review it so this must have been the reason. However, I think this might have been in my first go-around of reviewing movies for AllMovie, which started in 2000, because Housesitter is not among the list of movies I've rewatched since 2006, when I started keeping track of my rewatches. Then again, it could have snuck in between 2005, when I restarted with AllMovie, and my 2006 start date for recording rewatches. 

National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 (1993, Gene Quintano) - And this makes three? A rewatch to review this is the only explanation for why I would have put Loaded Weapon 1 in front of my eyes a second time. I wouldn't say it's terrible, but it is by no means among the most memorable of the bounty of spoof movies from this period ... though it also might be terrible. Likely the presence of Samuel L. Jackson and the underrated comedic abilities of Emilio Estevez gave this movie some funny moments ... but you can bet I am not going to watch it a third time in order to find out. 

Pootie Tang (2001, Louis C.K.) - There was a clear reasoning behind my second viewing of Pootie Tang, but that doesn't change the fact that I knew it was mid and I knew it would be mid on the second viewing. When I saw this movie the first time, in 2004, I didn't really know who Louis C.K. was. The second viewing, in February of 2013, was conducted specifically to see if I would see some of the Louis C.K.-ness of it on the second viewing, now that I had seen and loved two different Louis C.K. shows. I did not see the Louis C.K.-ness. And now we're in a third Louis C.K. era, one where he's been rightly cancelled and has come back with a right-wing bent to his comedy -- and would surely not make a movie like Pootie Tang. As mediocre of a miss as it is, it's still better than anything he's got going on right now. 

Presence (2025, Steven Soderbergh) - Just this year. You may recall the circumstances because I wrote a special post about them. I watched this movie on a screener, even though it was another of my ReelGood writers who was actually writing the review. Then my wife bemoaned that there was nothing for us to see with my older son while my younger son was away at school camp, so I agreed to see it again. I don't dislike Presence to be sure -- in fact, it's in the upper half of my rankings this year -- but I don't think it ultimately works the way Soderbergh hopes that it works, there are some loose plot threads that never get revisited (so I don't know why they were included at all), and I certainly didn't need to see it twice inside two weeks. 

Trainwreck (2015, Judd Apatow) - This is probably the only film on this list where I have no idea why I watched it again. It wasn't to review it, because my then-editor at ReelGood reviewed it. It wasn't to discuss it on the ReelGood Podcast, which we also did, but did at the time of its release when my viewing was still fresh. No, this was watched about 14 months after I first saw it -- after I first saw it and found it among Apatow's poorer efforts, I should add. It could have been because my wife wanted to see it, but that doesn't sound right. Speaking of Alzheimer's, I guess it's fine that I don't remember the reason behind all my rewatches. Human beings are not perfect recall machines, and I'm probably closer to perfect than most people. I guess maybe I thought it was Apatow so I had to give it another chance, liking most of his other films? But I've never given Funny People another chance. 

Word Wars (2004, Eric Chaikin & Julian Petrillo) - Okay make that two movies. You can take your pick among the multiple reasons listed here about why I might have watched Word Wars again. I might have been reviewing it five years after my first viewing, having seen it in 2005 the first time and feeling like I needed to freshen up on it in 2010. But by 2010 I was mostly reviewing only movies I had just seen, having worked through the backlog a long time before that. I might have watched it again because I thought it would be better. (It's not bad but it's pretty forgettable.) But maybe I just watched it again because Scrabble is my favorite board game, and any movie about Scrabble might be worth watching twice. 

When I originally went through my list, I came up with a shortlist of 19. However, those extra nine were easily shaved off as they had other, legitimate explanations, like they were watched for a film festival and then also on opening night of the festival, or that they were too good to be really called mid, even if the decision to rewatch them was sort of random.

With the limited amount of time I have on earth, it's nice to know that I'm mostly rewatching movies for the right reasons. 

The obligatory post-Louie Pootie watch

If you're like me, you saw Pootie Tang within a year or two of its 2001 release, and didn't really know what to make of it. You knew there were some good parts, but overall you thought it was definitely a misfire.

If you're like me, you then went on to fall in love with Louie C.K., who happens to be the writer-director of the aforementioned Pootie Tang. In fact, when you first saw Louie C.K. perform, you remembered him as the guy who your friend at MTV Films once described to you as this promising young comedian who had written and directed this new movie called Pootie Tang.

If you're like me, not only do you love Louie, C.K.'s half-hour comedy-drama program ("sitcom" does not seem like the right word) currently airing on FX (though not again until 2014, unfortunately), but you even loved Lucky Louie, C.K.'s underappreciated first effort to break into half-hour programming on HBO. Okay, "loved" may be a strong word -- that show was rough around the edges, even more than it intended to be -- but "liked very much" would be fair.

If you're like me, you thought it was now worth going back to watch Pootie Tang again, to see if you could see in that movie the origins of the successful star C.K. has become.

So if you're like me, you watched Pootie Tang on Saturday night with your wife, who was seeing it for the first time.

If you're not like me, you've never heard of either Pootie Tang or Louie C.K. and have probably stopped reading by now. But if you haven't stopped reading, it's probably time for me to tell you a little bit about Pootie Tang, though the above poster certainly gives me a tremendous assist in that effort.

The title character (Lance Crouther) is a specimen of pure cool shaped into human form. He's loved by everybody despite selling out to nobody (or maybe because of that). He dresses in what one would consider to be a pimp's attire, but one of Pootie's many attributes is his respect for the women who adore him (which doesn't keep him from sleeping with them, but only when a mutual respect has been established). He's defined by being above the fray. He even speaks his own language that's a hybrid of English and made-up words ("Wa da tay!"). Lastly, he has the ability to dodge bullets (smacking them away with his braids) as well as to kick anyone's ass with the help of a pseudo-magical belt he can remove from his waist as quickly as any old West gunslinger draws his pistol. Despite his incomparable fighting skills, Pootie exists to bring peace and love into the world -- as long as these things are also groovy.

The movie Pootie Tang is essentially the story of this character as he is put through trials and manipulated by a nefarious corporate entity into endorsing a lot of very un-Pootie things. And it's actually considerably more straightforward, plot-wise, than I'd remembered. I had this memory that one of the reasons the movie didn't work was that it had a bunch of unrelated scenes strung together in an order that was neither chronological nor logical. That's not the case. To call the movie a conventional narrative would not be accurate either, as it does contain a number of asides, and the character's unique rhythms will never be effectively translated to everyone. But it's not avant garde and inaccessible like I'd remembered.

Outside of the general narrative spine that keeps the plot moving forward, the movie can best be described as a series of scenes that feature what would seem to be tall tales about this larger-than-life figure. All the scenes where he comically whips a variety of adversaries with his belt fall into this category, as they are intentionally cartoonish but also shot in an exciting fashion that gives them pretty good action movie credibility. That Crouther is so good wielding the belt has a lot to do with why these scenes are so crackling. Then there are also some great apocryphal moments from Pootie's childhood. Legend goes that he was always a heartbreaker, and that when he was a child, women three times his age could not resist him. One funny scene involves a distraught lover throwing Pootie's belongings out of her apartment as he stoically looks on from the street below. Since he's only 8-10 years old, one of the items she tosses out the window is his Big Wheel tricycle.

And I have to admit I dug it a lot more this time around. Not only did these scenes flow better on a second viewing, but as I said before, they made more sense as part of a cohesive whole than they did originally. Some movies are just like that, and it does not surprise me in the least that Pootie Tang is one of them.

The supporting performers played a big role in why I enjoyed this movie better the second time. Not only were there the reliable contributions of Chris Rock in several different roles, but Wanda Sykes is great as Biggie Shorty, a streetwise woman who is almost always seen dancing emphatically to unheard music playing through her headphones. (She's mistaken for a prostitute because she dresses in short skirts and does this dancing immediately adjacent to a group of actual prostitutes). When I saw the movie the first time I was unfamiliar with J.B. Smoove, who has one of the largest roles, and it was great to see him now that I know and love him. There are also some great cameos, most notably from David Cross as a fake Pootie Tang sent out to be a corporate shill at the openings of Pootie's Bad Burgers fast food restaurants.

The question that interested me the most about Pootie Tang, however, was whether I would be able to see C.K.'s brand of humor present in this film. Strangely, the answer there is "Not really." Whereas C.K.'s TV show is perhaps one of the most brutally realistic shows on television in terms of how the things that happen to him rarely have good explanations and rarely end happily for him, Pootie Tang is pure satire, rarely tethered to reality in any significant way.

There are, however, a couple of things I can point to as revealing these two C.K.s to be the same man. For one, both Louie and Pootie find space for absurdism. Even as realistic as I have said Louie is, it does have the occasional dream sequence or other flight of fantasy that's totally out there. The show wouldn't work nearly as well as it does if it didn't have those sequences. Another thing I see in common is C.K.'s abhorrence of typical narrative structure. His TV show is structured in a way you simply don't see anywhere else on television, with most shows divided into one short story and one longer story, but only on days that C.K. is feeling conventional enough to adhere to even his own loose guidelines. Pootie Tang may be deceptively conventional in its structure (or more conventional than I thought it was), but the pacing and the placing of scenes are almost as idiosyncratic as we see on the show.

But on a deeper level that may speak to both of the things I've just identified, what I see in both C.K.s is a certain rebelliousness, a certain WTF attitude, a certain "take it or leave it" approach to comedy. Clearly, C.K. couldn't have made it to where he is by playing it safe. Pootie Tang was an early attempt to throw the spaghetti against the wall and see what stuck. His ensuing television shows were a much more successful attempt to do the same -- to strike out on his own, as a unique personality, and see if the public wanted more. Eventually, they did. A lot more.

You could say that Pootie Tang was the best flop ever to happen to Louie C.K. If Pootie Tang had been a hit, who knows what direction that might have taken C.K.'s career. At that age maybe more than now, he probably would have been tempted by the trappings of fame, and maybe he would have spent the next five years making increasingly less successful variations on Pootie Tang, as long he was being paid handsomely to do so. He may never have gotten to the profound insights we see weekly on Louie, because many of those were honed by years of struggling rather than years of succeeding.

If C.K. had never made Pootie Tang, though, I think the world would be a lesser place. There's something deliciously odd but also sweet about it, and my second viewing has confirmed: I'm glad it's something that exists in the world.

Now, get here fast, 2014, so we can see more of Louie C.K. as we have come to know him.