Well, today is Christmas Day. At this point, the many of you who celebrate Christmas will either be elated, exhausted, disappointed, or a combination of all three. Especially if you’re a kid (which means you’re probably not reading this) since you got very little sleep in anticipation of the presents you were going to get and now your bursting with energy and excitement because all your dreams came true or exhausted and kind of bummed because you didn’t get what you wanted. The same applies to any other gift-giving celebration, up to and including birthdays and anniversaries. Anticipating a present, even if you’re just waiting for something you ordered yourself to arrive in the mail, can be far more thrilling than actually opening the present. In celebration of this time honored tradition of anticipation and disappointment, or in those special cases, full satisfaction, I now give you some of my most anticipated movie releases, i.e. cinematic gifts, over the course of my life and which ones came through and which ones utterly disappointed (many more in the second column, I’m afraid).
Back in the late seventies, Roger Moore was flying high as James Bond and after seeing and thoroughly enjoying The Spy Who Loved Me, I was quite excited to find out that Moonraker was going to be the next one. Actually, at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me, as they used to do in the closing credits back then, it said, “James Bond will return in For Your Eyes Only.” Thing is, that’s before they knew Star Wars was going to be a massive hit and so they went back and adapted Moonraker instead, hoping to cash in on the outer space special effects craze of the moment. This didn’t bother me a bit because Moonraker was the first James Bond book I had ever read and I didn’t care what the excuse, I just wanted to see it on the screen. Little did I know they would almost completely discard the story and fill the last half hour with some of the most painfully stupid action a James Bond movie has ever seen. When I “opened” the present of Moonraker, let’s just say, I wanted to re-wrap and return it that very same day. A couple of years later, I didn’t have very high hopes for For Yours Eyes Only and ended up liking it substantially more than Moonraker so you win some, you lose some, I guess.
Speaking of the late seventies, I remember finding out that The Poseidon Adventure was going to have a sequel and it was going to star one of my favorite actors, Michael Caine. I mean, I loved Michael Caine and still do. I had probably seen Zulu three times already by that point and loved Alfie and Sleuth and The Italian Job and Billion Dollar Brain and… well, you get the point. So the idea of a second Poseidon Adventure, this time with Caine, was pretty damned exciting. And then… and then… I don’t think I really need to tell you how that turned out, do I?
Okay, let’s break up the negativity for a second with a positive reaction. Back in the early eighties, I became fascinated with Ed Wood and Plan Nine from Outer Space. It played more than a few times on the old TBS channel, the one before they came up with TNT, and when I found out in the early nineties that someone was making a movie about Ed Wood, and that someone was Tim Burton, and I still hadn’t gotten to the point where that name basically meant nothing but disappointment to me, I was excited. Tim Burton had yet to let me down again and again and again and again… and again. I tempered my excitement with the expectation that it wouldn’t do a great job with Bela Lugosi and when I heard Martin Landau would be playing Lugosi, I thought, “That’s a strange choice,” and prepared to be utterly disappointed. And then I saw it. To this day, it’s still my favorite Tim Burton movie and I couldn’t imagine anyone doing a better job as Lugosi than Landau.
And now back to being disappointed.
The year? 1984. The movie? 2010, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The result? Utter disappointment. I honestly believe it was around this point that I stopped anticipating sequels altogether. I just stopped. It seemed like they always let me down.
Oh no, wait, I didn’t stop. Have I mentioned how excited I was for a third Godfather installment? Have I mentioned how that turned out? Have you figured it out by now? Of course you have.
Okay, back to being positive. I’m a bonafide NASA junkie and when I heard that there was going to be a movie about the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, to be called Apollo 13, I got pretty damn excited. When I heard it was going to be directed by Ron Howard, the same guy who directed nothing but movies I hated, like Splash which, truly, I hated, I thought, “I don’t care, this is going to be good, I just know it!” And you know what, it was good! I think it’s his best movie still.
The truth is, no matter how much I want to go back and forth between positive and negative, the majority of the time I’ve looked forward to a movie, it’s ended up being a disappointment. Maybe the anticipation is a part of the problem. On the other hand, movies for which I had no expectations, or even opposite expectations, proved successful. I remember, upon hearing reassessments of Heaven’s Gate, that I was going to watch it and confirm how bad it was. When I watched it, I thought, “This movie got a bum rap. It’s pretty good.” At the same time, I didn’t think, or think now, that it’s a great movie by any means so if I had gone into it thinking it was supposed to be great, I would have been disappointed. Either way, I would have seen the same movie and had the same thoughts on it, but slanted in one direction or another based on my expectations. And maybe that’s why, in recent years, I don’t even read about upcoming movies, I just see them, usually with no expectations attached. In many ways, it’s the best gift you can give yourself. And movies are still my favorite gift to give myself. Any day of the year. Merry Christmas, everyone!