Rewatchable (Premium)

Like any couple, my wife and I have had our disagreements, but it’s notable—and maybe mostly luck—that we’ve had few major fights over the years, certainly nothing that either of us later regretted. And though we have real problems like anyone else, uncertainty about the future, worries about our kids, and so on, our biggest day-to-day issue is decidedly less dramatic.

In what is perhaps the ultimate first world problem, we will sit in front of the TV, me paging through multiple online services with the remote, her on her phone, both of us searching for something—anything—to watch. It is in these moments that we reach a dark nadir of our relationship. As the minutes tick by, we become more and more frustrated with each other’s inability to solve this problem. In the most painful of these nights, we often spend more time looking for content than we do watching it. And whatever we end up watching is often a compromise, a true-crime documentary or other one-off that fills the suddenly short time we have left before bed. So we sit in the dark, half-watching and stewing in frustration.

Or, at least I do. These nights are the proof point for one of my ADD-related pet peeves, that I never be stranded with nothing to do during downtimes. I prepare for plane flights by making sure that I have music and podcasts downloaded to my phone, and videos downloaded to my iPad, just in case. (More often than not, I just open a laptop and write, though I do listen to music then.) I likewise have several reading apps on my phone, and always have Kindle e-books and audiobooks downloaded and at the ready. I’m like the digital content version of an end-of-times survivalist. A content prepper, if you will.

I hate these downtimes. It dates back to my childhood, when I’d grab a cereal box and read each side of that while eating breakfast if there was nothing else at hand. When we visited the accountant the other day in the middle of the afternoon to sign our tax forms, we ended up waiting about 15 minutes before we saw him—it was Tax Day, after all—and I regretted not bringing my laptop as I was in the middle of something at the time. But the worst example from this year was back in February when we renewed our temporary residency in Mexico: We spent over 90 minutes waiting in line before we talked to anyone, and then another 90 minutes after that before finishing up, and we weren’t allowed to use our phones the entire time, even to read offline. I was almost literally crawling up the walls. Oh, the humanity.

But it gets worse. I am, after all, the guy who responded to, “You really are a glass half full kind of guy” with, “You have no idea: My glass isn’t half full, it’s empty, and I’ve noticed there’s a crack in it, and now I’m just waiting for the internal bleeding to start.” Yes, that really came out of my mouth. And, yes, I said that to my wife.

More specifically, I experience a special kind of hell in the aftermath of finding and enjoying a perfect Netflix series, podcast series, or e-book or audiobook. And that’s because I know that whatever comes next will never live up to it. The problem has gotten so acute that I now start anticipating it while enjoying the good content: I know it will be fleeting and that disappointment is imminent. And that, if it’s a TV show, that the disappointment will include at least one night of my wife and me, sitting in the dark, getting aggravated with each other.

I can’t solve the TV problem: It’s unlikely that we’ve missed any high-quality TV shows made in the past several decades, and as more and more video services come to market, the quality of the resulting content is going down. So the exceptional shows just become rarer, more valuable.

What I can solve, sometimes, is my need for other forms of content. Content that is, in some ways, filler for those downtimes. I will never be left without something to read, thanks to my embarrassingly large Kindle library, multiple reading apps, and the hundreds of often long-form articles I’ve saved for later in Pocket. Audio content—podcasts and audiobooks, basically—can be trickier. I listen to this content at the gym, in the car, while cleaning up, and at other times. And it’s nice to have choices. You never know what you’ll be in the mood for.

Finding the ideal audiobook is like a gift from above. These things are usually pretty long, so they can often last a long time. The original version of The Martian, the one with RC Bray’s original narration, is perhaps the all-time best example of the perfect audiobook. But in my rundown of my favorite audiobooks (and e-books) from last year, Surrender: 40 Songs, One Story by Bono stands out as a more recent shining example of this type of content: It’s a long book, over 20 hours in audiobook form, but it’s read by the author, a notable raconteur. It’s a terrific story well told, and I didn’t want it to end.

Related to this, I will sometimes come across an incredible podcast that is new to me but ideally has been around for a while and thus has a collection of content I can have at the ready. My clearest early memory of this type of podcast was How Did This Get Made?, which I recall discovering back around 2010 or so because of the (terrific) TV show The League, which features two of the same comedians in its cast. I eventually grew tired of it, especially the tedious live shows, but that took several years, and it was a nice fallback for a long time.

In more recent years, podcasts like That Chapter (based on a YouTube channel I really like), American Scandal, and If Books Could Kill, plus one-offs from other podcasts I follow, have helped fill the hole. But finding something new (to me), with a lot of content is difficult, unusual. Sometimes, I find myself paging through the recent episode releases list in Pocket Casts and can’t find something I feel like listening to. Again, first world problem. But torturous nonetheless.

But then it happened. The mother lode. The perfect storm of … well, perfectness. It’s a Bill Simmons podcast called The Rewatchables. You probably haven’t heard of it. And even if you have, you won’t understand fully why it’s so special to me.

For those unfamiliar, Bill Simmons is a sportswriter, and the parallels between him and me are astonishing, with the notable exception that he is demonstrably more successful than I am, and rich beyond my wildest dreams. We are roughly the same age, both grew up outside of Boston, and we clearly have the same interests and influences. Known as the “Boston Sports Guy” early in his career, Simmons went on to become a writer and analyst at ESPN, where he created The BS Report podcast and the Grantland website. He was always in the background for me, but when I found and devoured his ‌The Book of Basketball: The NBA According to The Sports Guy, a 750-page tome about my favorite sport, he created a life-long fan. This guy knows what he’s talking about and is a great writer.

Simmons is interesting on a number of levels, but from a writing and speaking perspective, he is perhaps unique in his field for his regular references to pop culture. (And not random pop culture, but pop culture that’s understandable to my generation.) And this is tied to the commonalities noted above. Like Seth Macfarlane, another content creator who has a background very similar to mine—he created The Family Guy, which routinely features humor specifically local to the Boston area and his upbringing there—he speaks to a broad base of people, but also a bit more specifically to people like me who are my age and are from the Boston area. I envy both these guys in a way: My friend John and I are hilarious together and often lament not creating a TV show or similar tied to our own very similar experiences, something we’ve discussed endlessly over the years. (I think of this show as Townies and have very specific ideas about how it could work and why the premise is funny and could go on almost indefinitely.)

Anyway, Simmons eventually left ESPN and, after a short stint at HBO, started a new solo venture called The Ringer. Its primary output is a series of podcasts, and while there are of course sports-specific shows, there are also more generally interesting shows. Including The Rewatchables that, once again, speaks to something I hold quite dear: A love of those movies that are endlessly rewatchable. The reason this is special to me is that the show covers a wide selection of movies that falls into a personal pantheon of content that’s best described as “movies I rewatch all the time and most critics seem to hate, dismiss, or ignore.” We align almost exactly on this selection of movies, and this podcast features entertaining discussions about almost all of them. To the tune of hundreds of episodes. Hundreds of episodes of new content that I want to enjoy almost in its entirety.

Perfect.

So what are these rewatchable movies? There are objectively great movies like The Exorcist, Casino Royale, and The Godfather that are beyond reproach and universally accepted as being the best of the best. Of course. But there are these other movies that are, let’s say, less well regarded but still, to my mind, among the best movies ever made. The movies I have watched again and again and again.

The best example, which is oddly not (yet?) among the 370-ish episodes of The Rewatchables, is Hudson Hawk, It’s often described as the worst movie ever made, but nothing could be further from the truth. Indeed, I think this film is the best and fullest expression of Bruce Willis’ perfect sense of humor, and I feel like I see something new every time I watch it. It’s absurd and amazing, a nearly perfect movie. If anything, it gets better with time.

That movie aside, The Rewatchables has covered many of my favorite movies that fall into this same category, and I have of course front-loaded these episodes as I go through the podcast. St. Elmo’s Fire, a movie I know so well we have an annual watch party with friends, is absolutely one of the worst movies ever made, and yet I love it so much and know it so well I’m almost a scholar. Zodiac, a plodding investigative story of a true crime that spans decades and is still unsolved. The Princess Bride, of course. So She Married an Axe Murderer, by far the best of Mike Myers’s movies and an underappreciated gem. Major League, the greatest sports comedy of all time. Inglorious Basterds, a masterpiece of dialogue and alternative history. So many more.

The Rewatchables isn’t perfect. (Nothing is.) There’s a bit too much sports talk, which I understand and sometimes can relate to, but also know would fall flat with others. The hosts literally break down touch football scenes in The Big Chill and other movies, for example, and their 20+ minute discussion of the poker game in the Casino Royale episode is gratuitous, unnecessary, and boring. And some of the rotating hosts aren’t great. But overall, this podcast is superb. I couldn’t be happier to have found it.

Related to this, I recall how limited our entertainment options were as a child, and that, among other things, we were stuck with whatever was on TV at the time. At an early age, I realized that certain movies that were so good, so rewatchable, that I would simply toss the remote control aside and stop flipping between channels when they were on. Every James Bond movie fell into that category, and every Clint Eastwood western. On Saturday afternoons, Channel 56 outside of Boston played two classic horror/sci-fi movies back-to-back, like Godzilla and Rodan, during its “Creature Double Feature.” You get the idea.

I was thus delighted in watching the original Lethal Weapon in the theaters years later when Mel Gibson’s character comes home, turns on the TV, finds that The Three Stooges are on and throws away the remote control in an exaggerated way. Exactly. That’s it.

These days, I don’t even have traditional TV, or cable, or anything like that. But there are certain movies I will just put on because I never get tired of them, movies that are perhaps less divisive than those I listed above but also not on many best-of lists. Movies I watch again and again and again that I suspect many others never even think about. Prometheus, a Ridley Scott masterpiece (like almost anything he’s made), The Russia House, and Ronin factor in highly here. But there are so many more. Movies that aren’t bad, but are also not traditionally highly rated. Choices that might seem weird to others, but are nonetheless movies I love.

It’s a long list. And I would be surprised—delighted, but surprised—if any of these are on your own list of favorite rewatchable movies.

The American (the George Clooney version). Atomic Blond. The Arrival. Any Planet of the Apes made in the 1960s and 1970s (and, OK, sort of the newer ones too). Both Deadpool movies (“We’ll always have Bowie”). Desperado and its underrated (and to my mind superior) sequel Once Upon a Time in Mexico (“No, I’ll kill the chef”). Doctor Sleep (a rare example of a movie being better than the book). The Fifth Element. All three Fletch movies (the new one is terrific). The Hitman’s Bodyguard (but not really the sequel). Kingdom of Heaven (Ridley Scott, again). Man on Fire (Ridley Scott). The Ninth Gate. Paris (a 2008 French film no one has even heard of with a terrific soundtrack). Sideways, which is perfect in every way, and Shoot ‘Em Up, for the ideal Paul Giamatti double-bill. The endlessly quotable Spaceballs. Stakeout (1987) and Running Scared (1986), my favorite buddy cop comedies. Super Troopers. The Thomas Crown Affair (the 1999 version, which I feel is superior in every way to the original). The original Transporter. All three of The Trip movies. 2010, an underrated story and movie. 3 Days to Kill. These are all “throw the remote away” good. I’m sure I’ve forgotten some, plus I love horror movies, the dumber the better. All the Friday the 13th movies and that ilk.

To be clear, I’m not even mentioning the really good movies. There are a ton of those on the list too. But they’re all obvious. This is more about some weird nexus of personal preference and content that’s so good that it doesn’t so much fill the time as it time well spent.

It’s rewatchable, or its audio or written equivalent. It’s a gift. It’s the best.