Your biggest misinterpretation of a film.

I'm not sure if this was by design, or if I'm just a dumbass, but it took an embarrassingly long time for me to realize Alonzo was the bad guy in Training Day. I spent most of the movie agreeing with everything he said and did. "Yeah, yeah, Roger did sell dope to kids the world is better without him." "Hell yeah, let street justice take care of those rapist crackheads, you go Alonzo." "Sure, bribe's will get things done. That's not Alonzo's fault, that's the game." "How sweet, he's taking care of his informants' families. Classy." "Oh shit, he paid to have his partner executed? Starting to have a little bit of doubt right now."

I wrote a mixed-to-positive (professional) review of *The Prestige* when it was released, my main complaint being that it was in essence “cheating” to introduce science fiction into a story about fiercely competitive magicians. Rewatched the film later that year, just to make sure I hadn’t missed something, and discovered that I had missed: the whole f****** point. It’s now among my 20 or so favorite films ever made.

When I first saw The Shining as a teenager, I thought it was basically "haunted hotel makes man go crazy." Rewatching it later, what hit me was how much of the terror is just domestic abuse with supernatural rot draped over it. The ghosts are flashy, but Jack is already the problem.

What was it about then?

> Having read up about it I’ll admit I got the complete wrong end of the stick. Read up what? If it points out actual things in the movie that you missed then sure. If it points out a grand theory of stuff actually in the movie that you simply prefer to your original one, then, sure, adopt the new one if you like, but the old one wasn't completely wrong. But if your view is based on the actual movie, you're entitled to maintain it, even if no one else agrees.

Movies aren't logic puzzles with a single answer that we can arrive at and which tells us explicitly what the film was about. The best art leaves room for us to bring as much of ourselves as we can to it, and your reading of that film is just as valid as anyone else's. I bet you all the change in my pocket, against all the change in your pocket, that if you told Wim Wenders how his film made you feel and how you interpreted it, he'd say, "*Oh, cool; thanks for sharing that with me."* *"We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are."* \-Anais Nin

Do TV films count? In an episode of the ITV series *Marple* which adapts the book "A Pocket Full Of Rye", I assumed that Rex Fortesque (the first victim of the story) was going crazy and senile as his son Percival assumed due to his apparently blowing a ton of money on frivolous invstments like worthless diamond mines in Africa, to the point Percival was trying to get power of attorney over his father for apparently going senile. And we're inclined to believe Percival since he's such a stickler to the business that he is shown to be utterly devoted to making more money through it. It was only when I watched the earlier BBC adaptation of the same story that I realised the truth - Percival is a f****** idiot, to the point where he doesn't know how to read the stock market properly and if he sold the mines off at a loss like he tried to get a conservatorship over his father to do, he'd have bankrupted the firm. >!In fact, the murderer's scheme depended on Percival being too stupid and arrogant to realise that the mines were in a region of Africa where uranium was just discovered to realise that they were now worth billions of pounds' worth, therefore he'd feel proud and clever of selling off a "pittance" for a lump sum.!< Also, the 1974 version of Murder On The Orient Express is quite a good example, since you don't realise until later that >!Poirot recognise Linda Arden as soon as he got onto the train!<, therefore he already knew the whole solution of the case as soon as either he read the burnt letter or >!he questioned Princess Dragomiroff. His questioning people is just him trying to figure out they were involved in the murder or not.!<

Adaptation. I didn’t realize that >!Donald wrote the final act!< until my second viewing.

I thought that Pray the Devil Back to Hell would be a horror movie about an exorcism. 

I just want to say that Perfect Days is an almost perfect film, I don't know what I was expecting, but it's a beautiful film and I love it very much.

I had difficulty understanding The Blackcoat's Daughter, it was something about how the two characters looked, I really struggled to both tell them apart and follow their individual stories. I think I was tired and it's all a blur now anyways. I just remember being really confused on who was who in every scene including flashbacks. I feel stupid just thinking about it as a movie buff today.

When I first saw Starship Troopers I was rooting for the soldiers.

Yeah. Turns out Michael Myers is the bad guy. Guess my media literacy sucks.