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. 

When watching movies is work

I'm going on a mini vacation to Arizona starting tomorrow after work. It's the road trip my wife and I have been dying to take for awhile now, and after a number of other ideas were tossed around, it's actually the destination we first brain-stormed almost two years ago: Bisbee, Arizona, just miles from the Mexican border, where we'll be staying in a vintage trailer park full of vintage trailers. Please don't steal our stuff while we're gone.

Even though I'll be missing only two work days, I still always feel like I need to tie up loose ends before leaving on such a trip. It just so happens that most of them this time had to do with the movies, not the tech support trouble tickets, that were on my docket.

That's right, during the 40-hour period from Sunday afternoon to early this morning, I finished three very different movies that felt like chores for three very different reasons. No one ever said being a film critic was "thumbs up" 100% of the time.

Let's go chronologically:

1. The Big Red One: Reconstruction (1980/2004, Samuel Fuller). A movie released in two different years? I should probably explain. This is a World War II epic whose director hated the cut that the studio forced on him, and six years after he died, film critic and historian Richard Schickel decided to release a reconstructed version based on some newly discovered footage Fuller shot back in the late 1970s.

The Big Red One: Reconstruction was not something I would have ever known anything about, and it was only recently that I realized it's an update of an older film. My editors assigned it to me over a year ago because they were surprised it wasn't yet reviewed. Most of the films I review are ones I've requested, but the first list I ever received back in 2000, plus two more since then, have been films they asked me to review. I tend to take these more seriously because I know it's content they actually want, unlike some of the funny titles I throw their way that they approve anyway.

But this one eluded me for quite some time, as until recently it was listed as "Very Long Wait" on blockbuster.com. I realized my only shot to get my hands on it might be if my wife helped me out by loading it on her Netflix queue, so I gave this title to her among a list of others with indeterminate availability. As irony would have it, The Big Red One: Reconstruction freed up on Blockbuster at just the time it arrived in the mail through Netflix. That worked out anyway, because only the Netflix copy was watchable -- Blockbuster had sent me Disc 2, featuring only the DVD extras, contrary to their own email notifcation. This isn't the only time Blockbuster's dunces have sent me the wrong movie. I recently got the 2007 version of The Hitcher when I had requested the 1986 version (which actually isn't as good as the remake). But as usual, I'm digressing.

In order to properly judge the success of The Big Red One: Reconstruction, however, I first had to watch The Big Red One. While there may be some debate about whether you need to first read a novel to judge its film adaptation, it's pretty clear that a review of a re-released film has little worth if you haven't seen the original. So set about seeing it I did. I returned the useless disc of extras (and didn't even bother to report it as a problem), triggering the sending of the original version of The Big Red One, which I watched last weekend. And which I thought sucked. I instantly understood why Mr. Fuller was so bummed about their evisceration of his pet project.

So as you can imagine, it wasn't very appetizing knowing that The Big Red One: Reconstruction -- a full 45 minutes longer -- was awaiting me. Not only that, but I couldn't procrastinate on it, because my wife's Netflix plan allows the sending of a new movie only once you've returned the previous one. And no, I don't get paid more for watching two movies instead of one.

So I started slogging through it last Tuesday at the gym. And then Thursday at the gym. And then Saturday at the gym. This got me through the first hour and 20 minutes only. I finally finished the second half on Sunday afternoon, but that was in two sittings as well, since I slept for about 20 minutes in between. So if you're counting, that's five different distinct viewings to get through all 158 minutes of The Big Red One: Reconstruction.

Happily, I can report that at least this version was much better. The movie had a much smoother flow once the bridging scenes had been restored to the cut. And hey, if I'm going to exercise before work on machines with 20-minute time limits, I should expect that a two-hour-and-forty-minute movie is going to take me awhile.

2. Ten Canoes (2006, Rolf de Heer). This was another film for review, one that I'd requested. It's the first-ever film featuring only Aboriginal actors, and it captures the Aboriginal traditions in a way that both respects them and makes them narratively lively and absorbing.

So why was this one a chore? Well, I can say it was absorbing now that I've watched it. But before that, it felt like a daunting task. A daunting immersion into a totally foreign world. So daunting, in fact, that this was the third time I'd rented it from the library.

I discovered this when I was cleaning out the car on Sunday in prepration for this road trip. It had obviously been awhile since I'd done a proper cleaning, as I found two different receipts for library rentals, both of which featured Ten Canoes as one of the three titles you're allowed to rent on any given visit. One from August and one from December. I'd picked up Ten Canoes a third time last Thursday, really intending to watch it this time. But it was late Sunday afternoon, I already knew how the rest of my day was going to play out, and frankly, I knew my schedule would be pretty busy before leaving on this trip. (In fact, the only reason I'm writing this now is because I'm at work and all my bosses have gone home). And the videos were due back before the library opened on Tuesday, after a rental period that had already been elongated by the library's normal Sunday closure and its Monday closure for Presidents' Day. The fact that my wife, a native Australian, has already seen it tended to further disincentivize my viewing.

Well, it seemed like too much of an indignity to this little movie to force myself into an eventual fourth rental. So I carved out the time Monday evening to watch it, even though the DVR was already stacked with shows, which would need to be cleaned off to make way for the ones that would record while we're away.

I was distracted a handful of times by the needs of the evening, but made it through just before 9, right as a delayed dinner was coming out of the oven. And damn glad I did -- it's a fine piece of filmmaking, and not the least bit alienating. One thing that's good about films like this and like Apocalypto -- which is similar in ways, but very different in others -- is that in addition to all the exotic culture they show us, they also remind us how similar all human beings are. As it turns out, the Aboriginals make fart and dick jokes just like we do.

3. The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: A Veggietales Movie (2008, Mike Nawrocki). On this one I have only myself to blame. When I saw the billboards for this movie a year ago, I thought it seemed ridiculous. Yeah, I know I'm not the target audience for Veggietales. But the unwieldy title of this movie seemed to be a particularly artless spoof of the recently completed Pirates of the Caribbean series. I fixated on the idea that it wasn't even a good parallel with Pirates of the Caribbean in terms of the naming structure. In which of these titles -- Curse of the Black Pearl, Dead Man's Chest, and At World's End -- is what the pirates actually do even hinted at? In one of those moments where I've started writing my review early -- in this case, a year early -- I planned to request this movie to review when it became available on DVD.

So I rented it from the store two Sundays ago. Blockbuster is pretty good about in-store returns now that they've tacked on a week's grace period to all their return dates. With this system, even the hot new releases won't cost you anything until you've had them out for nine days. With older releases, like Veggietales, you get more than two weeks to return them without penalty.

However, by Monday night, I realized that if I didn't get that movie watched before the trip, I'd be perilously close to late fees by the time we returned. (Plus, our immediate viewing priority upon returning will be the Oscars). The only thing worse than watching this Veggietales movie -- aren't these vegetables supposed to be Christian vegetables or something? -- would be getting charged a fee to either watch it or not watch it.

So at the ridiculous hour of 12:46 a.m. last night, I put it in the DVD player. It's slightly less ridiculous when you consider that I don't report to work until 9:30 on Tuesdays, but still, it's ridiculous. And I had one of those experiences that I'm sure some of you have had before, when you're fighting the return deadline of a movie and you absolutely can't fall asleep while watching it. Of course, this only makes you more likely to fall asleep.

Which I did. Several times. But like a good soldier, I kept on watching. I'd watch for five minutes, then take a nap, then watch another five minutes. I got through about the first 20 minutes by 2 a.m. this way. But then I had to pack it in for what was left of a full night's sleep. I woke up at 7:30 to watch the last hour, and am proud to say, made it to the finish line.

And what do you know? Pleasant suprise #3 out of 3. No, I'm not about to tell you that The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything is high art, or anything even close to that. But I will say it's not quite as baby as I thought it would be, not nearly as Christian as I thought it would be (I noticed nary a sign), and on a good day, it can be characterized as cute. On a bad day, at least it's inoffensive.

I've earned my vacation, wouldn't you say?

And sorry for my long-windedness. You probably won't get another update on The Audient until next Monday, so I've got to get everything out now. I guess I should have told you earlier to break this up over multiple sittings.

After all, I happen to know all about that kind of thing.