From 2006:
I sometimes do too much fieldwork before seeing a movie, building up a whole structure of preconceptions that I then have to trundle into the theater with me and crane my neck to peer around at the thing itself. Long ago I recognized that this sport was spoiling perfectly good movies for me, or even preempting me from seeing some of them. So I stopped giving more than a skim to reviews of new movies until after I’d seen them. But at the prospect of an older movie, I still head straight to the bookshelf…
Read the whole thing here.
