Welcome to the Weekly Movie Thread, your place on the Avocado to discuss films with your fellow commenters. Want to make a recommendation? Looking for recommendations? Want to share your opinions of movies, both new and classic? 

Today’s bonus prompt: have you ever felt intimidated that a film is so hyped it might let you down?

The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly is one of my favorite westerns, and one of my favorite films of all time. This is not an uncommon opinion. It’s #10 on the IMDB Top 250 movies list. It had beautiful cinematography, one of the most incredible soundtracks of all time, and while criticizing the American Western managed to redefine the genre for a new generation.

All that is to say that the legacy kept me from watching A Fistful of Dollars and For A Few Dollars More. Surely anything in comparison would seem a disappointment. With The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly being as incredible as it is, the two previous movies would only seem like a step back, right? How could Sergio Leone capture the magic of anything earlier? That would be akin to watching Star Wars and then watching the charmless THX-1138, right?

That said, I have finally seen these two movies. While The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly is still tops in my book, watching these films impressed me. Leone’s signature style was already strongly present from the beginning. You could watch a string of spaghetti westerns with one one of Leone’s thrown in and you can see how polished his films seem compared to his contemporaries.

There are many other films I haven’t seem because they are so acclaimed that I would feel let down if I didn’t like them. I still haven’t seen The French Connection, Chinatown, or The Wild Bunch all the way through because they’re spoken of as important films. Will I enjoy them, or will I be let down like I was with Easy Rider? One day I’ll be able to sit down and watch them like the two earlier Leone works, seeing the through eyes free of expectations.