In the last week, I've had the chance to watch three favorite movies from my youth: Wizards, from when I was 14, The Thing, which I finally watched when I was 21, and Excalibur, from when I was 17.
Wizards has not held up so well. It's not internally consistent in either its logic or its art, the dialogue week to my adult ears, and the production values seem almost a decade older even than its year of production (1976). Ironically, perhaps, I am more impressed than ever with the stills (from noted fantasy cartoonist Mike Ploog), much more so than with the animation. Still, while seeing it does not invoke the obsessive passion I had for it as a 14 year old - and for several years thereafter - it did remind me of that crazy feeling, which is in itself reason enough to watch it. It was the perfect movie for that time of my life and that time of fantasy - the genre for which I am clearly predisposed - in pop culture. I and many of my friends were just discovering Dungeons and Dragons (1974, but spread like a brushfire) and similar fantasy games, and reissued or original fantasy of all flavors were flooding retail bookshelves. I would recommend Wizards with a few caveats: don't watch it for its own quality, watch it to appreciate the changing landscape of pop culture in 1977 and to catch a glimpse of what it was like to be a fantasy obsessed 14 year old at the time.
The Thing, despite its early 80s pedigree, is still a good movie to watch. It's flawed in many ways, including the too-obvious monsters - the best suspenseful monster movies don't show the creatures very much, or very clearly - but it does generate really nice tensions and suspicions. The ending is somewhat unsatisfying, possibly representative of movie trends at the time, but there is some pretty good acting. The Ten Little Indians thing seems pretty typical of the major horror movies from the late 1970s onward, but The Thing (based on a short story from the 1950s) handles it better than most. Definitely a great example of the horror genre dressed up as science fiction. Or vice versa, your mileage may vary. Not so interestingly, The Thing did not really seem to speak to my life at the time I watched it like Wizards or the next movie. I loved it, and I had a ton of things going on in my life at the time, but I discerned no connection.
The third movie from my youth which I've watched this week is one of my all-time favorites, Excalibur. I saw this when it came out in 1981, watched it on a date with a girl who was to become my first girlfriend, and I loved it. Maybe it's just me, but I think that it's held up really well, maybe more appreciated now than it was for much of its history. It's an iconic, dreamlike fairytale, replete with intentional anachronisms and unrealistic sets and dialogue, but that seems to be part of its genius: as its themes of betrayal and redemption, passing of eras, and the power of dreams, the movie seems to transcend a specific point in time. As 17 year old, I had yet to experience the betrayal of a friend and a lover (that would come soon), but I appreciated the aspects of honor, and destiny, and of living up to ideals. As I've viewed the movie again over the years, I've grown to appreciate the many levels on which it works, and many of the themes I missed then I picked up later: the abuse of power, the imperfection of humans when compared to their ideals, the encroachment of Christianity on earlier beliefs. It was only in recent years that I learned how surprisingly faithful the movie is to Malory's version of the classic tale. So, at least in my eyes, this movie has held up for 30 years. It might not be for a modern audience, but it still moves me with more than nostalgia.
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