Johnny Mnemonic. I understand Keanu is supposed to be a nice guy in RL and all, but after this I couldn’t see his face without breaking into a rant. Yeah I know it’s been 20 years.
Prometheus. The prettiest big budget shit movie I’ve ever watched in the theater. I hate it. I even watched it at home on cable because I (wrongly) thought I was maybe being too harsh and unfair. If anything, I was too charitable the first time around. Awful.
The Seeker: The Dark Is Rising is the most offensively, actively horrible thing I’ve ever watched, and I made it through Jesus Christ Vampire Slayer while sober.
One of my buddies in college was a huge nut for the rather musty old book series the movie was based on, so even though it looked to be a pretty awful LotR/Harry Potter coattail-rider, a few of us went out to see it with him. Dude was positively vibrating with excitement; I guess he’d read all the books like half a dozen times or whatever as a kid.
Yeah, no. This movie is shitty in all the ways that aren’t any fun at all and none of the ways that are even remotely fun. Awful acting, terrible script, laughable effects, stupid villains, a loathsome hero, all brought together by a universal feeling that no one involved at any point along the way from conception to release gave even one tenth of one shit about it being good.
I screamed in the street for like five minutes about how awful it was when we got out. I think the dude who brought us all almost cried. Not sure if from the screaming or the movie’s shit-like steaming, though.
Hellboy 2. I left after 15 or 20 minutes. God that movie was stupid. I felt like I was watching an extended clip of the Power Rangers’ Japanese stock footage scenes.
Aeon Flux. I’ve never been much of a Charlize Theron fan, but somehow I ended up in a theater to see this idiotic mess of a film. I went to the food court and ate Cinnabons instead.
I actually tried to as a sort of spiritual palate cleanser. I think I managed to finish 3 of them, maybe? Yeah, I wound up petering out in The Grey King. The books were basically fine, but just a little too dry for me, as I recall. Mind, we’re now, what, 11 years removed from the experience? So memory fails :)
Actually, I seem to recall that Book 2 was pretty solid into good for me, now that I’m diving back into this stuff. 1 and 3 stumbled away from the stuff I was digging, so even though 4 was sort of a return to form, I lost motivation and never wound up finishing. D’oh.
I like the thread but I don’t think I’ve ever actually walked out on a movie. Only time I can recall leaving before a movie was done was when there was some projection failure and had to stop the movie. I remember that happened during “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”; why I went to see that movie escapes me.
I came home from a long day, and my sister had rented this at Blockbuster. I grabbed some food and sat down.
This movie was so stupid it caused me physical pain. And I do not mean that in the hyperbolic sense, I literally mean I was in actual physical pain from the sheer stupidity anger* after about 15-20 minutes.
*initially this was an autocorrect induced typo, but it fit so I’m leaving it
Book 2 is, I am pretty sure, the standout of the lot. But I found the whole thing very satisfying.
Transformers 2 is my ultimate hate in all of moviedom. I thought the first movie had mildly entertaining moments but did not want to see another one. But I went to some other movie with a friend of mine, who was driving, and he insisted on staying and sneaking into Transformers 2. I did not bring any other means of entertaining myself and this was before I owned a cell phone, so rather than sit in the lobby with nothing to do for well over 2 hours, I went in. God, it was so bad. Incredibly stupid, badly written on every level, racist, sexist, immature, and to cap it all off, the action scenes were visual mush, cut into complete unintelligibility. Even some profoundly dumb, poorly written action movies at least redeem themselves with the actual action. Not Transformers 2. I really should have just stayed in the lobby.
Word. The worst part of of this film (which is saying something) was the Engineer=Jesus subtext. Dear god this movie was utterly dumb.
However, the movie I have hated the most is Signs. (Signs: Remastered, aka Interstellar, was only slightly better.) The movie spends a bunch of effort setting up a legitimate difficult question about faith and the afterlife and coming to terms with the randomness of death and the universe. Gibson’s character is having perfectly understandable and relatable doubts about his lifelong faith. These themes resonate because they reflect most peoples’ experience with losing a loved one, or dealing with some other personal tragedy, or even just contemplating cosmic injustice. These are fairly deep, weighty ruminations that people–particularly people who believe in a benevolent deity–really have to grapple with. It’s Zarathustra’s lament.
And then Shyamalan resolves the question in the most facile, insulting way possible. When I saw the film, I couldn’t fucking believe it. It’s one thing to have a clever twist that hinges on something fantastical like ghosts or superheros. It’s another to hang it on an experience of tragedy that most people actually have to struggle with and are struggle to find answers for. I had a good friend in college get hit and killed by a car. I had a close family member recently waste away over two long years from ALS. We’ve all had these kinds of experiences and they’re hard to make sense of, to find meaning in. “Swing away!” Bleeeeehhhhhh.
I should add that there have definitely been movies that rubbed me the wrong way. I remember being irked by the political message that “Hero” seemed to be making, though I liked the movie. I remember feeling that the narrative of “Identity” cheated in a way that ruined the movie. And I remember getting dragged along to “Jay and Silent Bob Fart Around for a Couple Hours and Annoy the Piss Out of divedivedive” but then I was there with friends and couldn’t really leave.
I could spend all day in here, but I am going to do some responses, and limit my self to 2-3 a week.
And Point Break. His big line should have been “I’m a surfer, not an FBI Agent!” not the other way around.
And A Scanner Darkly. Nothing angers me like fantastic source material (a great novel) pissed away by an overrated hack (“it took twelve years to make!”).
I got mad and turned it off. Aliens 4, I just fell asleep for an hour. I think I prefer the latter. Better on the nerves.
The Rock. wanted to walk out, but was with friends. Pearl Harbor; was forced into it by a date. Warned her. Walked out, visibly angry (we broke up). The Island; walked out. Wife wasn’t pleased.
My worst movie experiences were Star Wars Episode 2 - bad enough that I blocked it from memory because I legitimately don’t remember watching it, even when I found the ticket stub – and Talladega Nights. The latter was the back half of a drive-in doubleheader and the guy who set the night up apologized to the rest of us.
That’s fascinating. I have a very different take on the film, and really like it.
@LockerK that reminds me of another John C Riley and Will Farrel joint a friend dragged me to. Brothers. My god what a wretched film. Miserable and unfunny through and though.
