About once a year, some cable channel airs a personal guilty pleasure of ours. No matter what we’re doing – or what we planned on doing that evening – we have to stop everything and sit on the couch and watch part (or all) of that film.
These sentimental favorites can’t be watched every single day (believe me, I’m a big fan of “The Devil Wears Prada”, but it gets shopped around all the different TV channels so often that it’s almost impossible to not see it listed on the guide every night). But if you space out your viewings to once every year or two, it will make these viewings meaningful.
The movie at the top of this list, for me, is 1998’s “The Parent Trap” – Disney’s modern re-telling of the 1961 original starring Lindsay Lohan, Dennis Quaid and the late Natascha Richardson. It’s a sweet, funny and moving family comedy that actually gets better with age.
So, last month, I watched the majority of “The Parent Trap” again (for probably the fifth time) on the Hallmark Channel. The last time I watched it was about a year and a half ago on E!
I knew what scenes and lines of dialogue were coming, and yet I still smiled and laughed. “The Parent Trap” has a concept that’s so simple, and yet it’s executed with such energy and spunk by writer/director Nancy Meyers that it just doesn’t get dull or tiresome after the fourth or fifth viewing.
“The Parent Trap” turns 20 on July 31st (less than a month before I hit that same number). It wasn’t a smash hit for Disney in 1998, earning $66 million (ranked No. 32 overall for the year, according to Box Office Mojo). But it’s one of those films that’s still talked about two decades later… at the very least to allow us to look back at when Lohan was innocent.