It can be classics that don’t do it for you, films from genres that you normally love, anything your favorite professor said would “change your life” but didn’t. Mine are:
Spaceballs (GARBAGE)
The Big Lebowski (I don’t have a good reason, I just didn’t like it)
Dirty Dancing (I can’t even remember why they are dancing??)
Raising Arizona (I probably would love it if I really sat down and gave it a chance instead of half-heartedly watching the first half every six months, but I will never do that)
Babette’s Feast (SO BORING I WANTED TO DIE AND I STILL DO)
This is not an important conversation to have but let’s have it anyway!
Amadeus
YES omg it is so bad and that guy’s stupid laugh and ARRRGGHHHHHHHHHRAGE.
When I was at school, I was in the ‘hopeless at music’ division and instead of actually trying to get us to play instruments, an entire term’s worth of lessons consisted of watching Amadeus in 20 minute chunks, making notes and writing up what happened for our homework. So I hate it too, now.
That was my experience, pretty much! My music professors (I was a music major) told us that WE SHOULD LOVE THIS MOVIE. And I didn’t like it.
Ugh. That movie’s the worst. It was my theatre teacher’s “I’m behind on grading you guys watch this” film.
I’ve never seen it, but I have nevertheless, in protest against it, listened to Salieri’s music.
He was really good.
When I was at uni I wrote a piece on the play (which I liked) vs the movie (which I didn’t).
My main point was that the play was Salieri vs. God: Salieri vows to prove to God that Man cannot be mocked and that he will be remembered, one way or another. And yet, the play ends with those two characters (forgot their names, may have been numbers) saying that they don’t believe Salieri killed Mozart. Which to me was proof that Salieri lost to God. All this is missing from the movie, which is just a story about Salieri vs Mozart/genius vs. mediocrity (even though Salieri actually isn’t a bad composer, I do like him).
However (and it’s a big however to me), at that time I was still religious and, accordingly, was seeing religious overtones (and undertones, and middletones ;)) everywhere :/ Haven’t reread the play since I saw the light (so to speak;)), so maybe I was just talking out of an orifice which is normally used for rather different purposes…
Didn’t help that I hated the laugh, too.
I haven’t read (or seen) the play, so grain of salt, but I do think the “Salieri has a personal vendetta against God” dynamic comes through in the film, hence the frame of him telling the story to the (rather scandalized!) priest. He makes the point repeatedly that it wasn’t really Mozart that was mocking him, it was God, and throws his crucifix into the fireplace. He’s furious because God put genius in an unworthy vessel, Mozart, and only gave Salieri enough talent to recognize that genius. Then Mozart dies before the Requiem is finished, and Salieri is convinced that God killed him rather than allow Salieri to share in his glory. So Salieri ends the movie convinced that God has won. I think everyone else just thinks he’s lost it.
Only comes to show. Apparently, to my then-religious mind it wasn’t nearly religious enough.
Or I’m just not a fan of movies based on books (or even plays).
Possibly a combination of both and some pretentiousness thrown in for good measure 😉 I don’t think I’ll ever bring myself to watch/read it again, in my current frame of mind…
🙂
Yeah, I didn’t finish watching House of Mirth either.
More like House of Dearth
(of Mirth)
I loved the book, but the film adaptation bugged the hell out of me because it needlessly played around with the plot so much.
Kingpin. That movie was gross and not funny at all.
Wait, were we *supposed* to like Kingpin?? I saw it in high school and all I remember of it is that Woody Harrelson “milks” a bull. :-/
As previously discussed, I am Not A Movie Person. Despite this, I spent many years trying really, really hard to be since a bunch of my insufferably pretentious friends were very very srs about movies. Sorry, FILMS. So I have sat through way more ridiculous crap than anybody should have to. Supposed classics that I cannot stand:
Deerhunter (long, long, so so long, so boring, and long)
Me and You and Everyone We Know (I hate whimsy, and I hate Miranda July, I’m sorry not sorry)
Whatever the hell that one was with Sissy Spacek and killing people and some kind of ridiculous conversation about paper bags?
I also hate whimsy and Miranda July!
I am also Not A Movie Person. I’m just not. I don’t think it’s my attention span, because of the few films I do enjoy some are like epic sagas (for example, I own Das Boot and Gone With the Wind on DVD), I just….have no interest there! And I took a film history class in university that involved watching the Battleship Potemkin and it nearly killed me. I just fail to get it in some kind of fundamental way, I think, with few exceptions. I don’t know what it is.
Yeah I can binge-watch TV shows like nobody’s business. We discussed this in another thread, and what I have come up with is that I prefer a short, resolved story arc with long-term character building rather than trying to care about people I’ve never met for two hours. The shows I like are pretty particular for this reason as well.
Fun fact: my dad’s cousin directed The Deer Hunter.
Confession: I’ve never seen it.
I am also Not A Movie Person, so the main reason I am not posting more movies in these comments is because I never bothered to watch them in the first place so I can’t quite say I hate them.
I really wanted a better payoff after investing that much time in Deerhunter. So awful.
Oh man yeah that Miranda July movie, like, was that whole pooping thing (ugh I feel gross now) supposed to be… funny?
I have no idea and just remembering it causes me to shriek inside my head. MAKE THE MEMORIES STOPPPPPPPPPPP.
Also sometimes I’ll remember her filming her stupid fucking feet and just get all ragey.
The Last Emperor.
I couldn’t get through the first 10 minutes.
it’s the first movie I ever saw, and we went to see it twice. I then refused to wash my hands using hot water between the ages of five and seven, because I was utterly convinced I would bleed out in the sink if I did.
Anyway, age ratings on movies are sometimes appropriate! There was a babysitter after the Dead Poet’s Society incident.
I will never like The Big Lebowski, no matter how many men explain to me that it’s noir. Thanks, guys! Got it! Fuck right off!
Was about to write the same thing. I recently watched again, thinking I’d missed something. Nope. Stupid. Crude. No redeeming value.
I’ve never watched it because dudes like it so much. AND I NEVER WILL.
I’m sure I’ve tried to watch it many times – always with dudes, and I always fall asleep. I also feel this way about Anchorman: dudes like it; it’s not actually funny.
I actually kind of like The Big Lebowski, although it didn’t grow on me until I’d watched it (with dude friends, yes) a couple of times (not actually trying to pressure people to give it another try; there are plenty of reasons not to like it). I think it’s mostly because my immature sense of humor loves the ferret in the bathtub and because I like to quote Maude’s vagina lines while I’m having sex. Part of me suspects that a lot of people see Maude as a ridiculous feminist caricature, but it seems to me that the movie itself looks at her with a modicum of respect (which on second thought perhaps only impresses me because I’m holding the movie to such low standards). I guess I watch it in a cult-movie way, where the lines become iconic not because they make sense, but because they fail to make sense in a certain way (where that way is sometimes stylish, sometimes zen-koan-ish).
But Anchorman, though. It’s like, I can see what they were trying to parody, but it’s so heavy-handed that it hurts to watch.
This movie is spinach and I say the HELL WITH IT
What does it mean for something to be spinach?
Serious question.
That is my ex’s favorite movie and I thought I hated it. Weirdly enough, when I watched it after breaking up with the guy who quoted it constantly and saw The Dude as a role model, I found the movie MUCH more entertaining.
Yeah, if you’re able to identify with Jeff Bridges, I think it becomes a much better movie. I honestly didn’t know about this Lebowski hatred that seems associated with dude Lebowski fans, but it makes sense; dudes can ruin anything. (Not that that is the only reason to hate TBL; rich tapestry, etc.)
The performances in TBL get me every time, though. Philip Seymour Hoffman alone!
I like it, but I hate dudes who like it.
True Story — I bought a cheap box set of Coen films — watched raising arizona a BUNCH, miller’s crossing and blood simple — enjoyed both. Have been so sick of hearing “shomer fucking shabbos” my whole life I didn’t watch Lebowski. Sounds like a it was a smart move.
The Big Lebowski is Noir? I like it (and most other Coen bros movies), but it’s noir in the sense that Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke is a road movie.
Men always have this desperate need to make everything they like EXTREMELY SERIOUS AND IMPORTANT. I’ve never understood that.
Well, that way it’s not fluffy or frivolous, like Lady Things.
Nailed it. (Big Lebowski is Not Noir, and I dare any man to try to make me think otherwise.)
I took a class at my university on the Coen Brothers and their Noir films, and the professor did not include the big lebowski on the list, mentioning that she didn’t consider it film noir. That’s just one person’s interpretation but… you know.
My husband-then-boyfriend was so disappointed that I fell asleep halfway through Spaceballs. Occasionally, he brings up watching it again so I can see the second half, but for some mysterious reason, that hasn’t happened yet.
I feel like I could potentially like Spaceballs but the only time I saw it was with a group of dudes who adored it and quoted the whole damn thing. Of course I don’t think it’s funny, guys, because I wasn’t watching the movie, I was watching your bad cover of it.
Yes, I had this exact, incredibly annoying experience. See also: Tombstone. Dudes, please stop.
Oh man, you can’t watch Tombstone with some jackhole who’s quoting through the whole thing, that just ruins it for everyone.
I can’t be having with Spaceballs, but that’s because I grew up with a thoroughgoing rotter of a brother. He is still thoroughgoing rotter of, still loves that movie and his love for it has tainted it for me. I like Mel Brooks movie but not that one. Never that one.
But Spaceballs has Bill Pullman at his hottest. Being hot.
I will always love Spaceballs, which I can only attribute to having seen it at a very young age. I can’t imagine being introduced to it as an adult.
When I was in AP US History in high school, we watched Spaceballs. IN CLASS. Because we had already taken the AP exam, so there was no point in any further education in that class that year, right?
Also we didn’t cover anything that wasn’t going to be on the exam, i.e. anything precolonization or post WWI. Because there’s no point in learning things that aren’t going to be on the exam, right?
True story, I juuuust embedded a clip from Spaceballs in an online lecture for a class on postmodern narrative, as an example of a medium commenting on itself. But it is indeed a poor source text for US History. At least show Amistad or something! Make an effort!
See, that at least makes sense because po-mo 4eva!
My Spaceballs in that scenario is Tremors.
The Dark Knight. Everyone else likes it, but I hate all the knife slashing that happens in it, and Batman’s decision at the end to let everyone think he’s the bad guy is bullshit.
I hate Nolan’s Batman
Then again, my favorite one is the one with George Clooney. I have been repeatedly told that this is wrong, but I love the camp so damn much.
I like the one with Michelle Pfeiffer. I once had an argument with a dude who insisted that I must have liked Nolan’s batman because I’d liked some other film. Liking a film isn’t something you can argue someone into!
One of my favorite things to do is tell people (mostly dudes, tbh) that I don’t really care for the Nolan Batman trilogy. Endless entertainment, you can get those guys really going with outrage!
I can’t keep Nolan’s Batman movies straight, they bleed into each other in my head
(granted I haven’t see the third one. I have enough trouble with the first 2)
That’s because they’re all basically the same.
Someday everyone will realize that Batman Begins is the best of the Nolan Batman movies. The Dark Knight is overrated because of an admittedly bravura performance by Heath Ledger, and The Dark Knight Rises is fascist garbage.
I feel a lot better about not seeing the second two now; thanks!
Ugh, Dark Knight Rises sucks SOOOOOOOOOO much!
I have a kind of a That Guy coworker and I occasionally play a game where I say something just to see his head explode. “I really hated The Dark Knight Rises,” was one of my winners.
“I think Macs are overrated.”
YES. “Begins” actually feels like a comic book movie trying to be a good comic book movie, not a comic book movie trying not to be a comic book movie. I love Ledger’s Joker, and to a lesser extent Hardy’s Bane, but BEGINS is best of bunch by far.
Yes! Begins I liked a whole lot, which just added to how much I hated The Dark Knight.
Yes yes yes and also The Dark Knight Rises! Spare me, Nolan.
Funny story: my stepdad loves action movies, so I got him The Dark Knight for Christmas. We watched it, and afterwards, my stepdad could not shut up about how he didn’t like it. THEN a couple years later, the topic came up again, and he was like, “I hated that movie! Someone must have gotten it for me; I didn’t buy it” and I was like, “Yeah, that was me. SORRY.”
A man on Facebook once blew his lid because I suggested that Christian Bale as Batman was merely mediocre. Luckily we didn’t get onto my opinions on Nolan Batman as a whole, because he would have had an aneurysm.
His Batman voice is RIDICULOUSLY BAD. He sounds like he’s doing an impression of Master Splinter.
As my daughter said of one of the minor characters in Robin Hood (the good old Disney version), which we watched again the other night, “He sounds like he has throat cancer.”
I could never take Batman seriously in the Nolan movies because I can NOT take Bale seriously.
Yep, I never even saw that one! Batman sucks.
I’m a comic book geek myself — and one who even liked Miller’s two landmark Batman books of the 80s — but I really can’t muster more than a half-hearted “they’re okay, I guess” for Nolan’s Batman flicks. Or come to think of it, the X-men movies.
Actually, I’m not that jazzed about any of Nolan’s films.
I hate that movie for many, many reasons mostly that it’s stupid and nonsensical and overly complicated and what is even the point, it is not a good metaphor for anything (especially not “terrorism”) unless you’re a goddamn moron and I didn’t even like Heath Ledger in it. Ugh, and I actually went to see it in a theater too! I never go to theaters!
The only thing that makes me REALLY glad that the Nolan Batman movies exist is Abed and Annie doing impressions of Christian Bale as Batman in Community.
Seconding Spaceballs and Dirty Dancing
The entirety of Wes Anderson’s body of work
Almost every teen movie from the 80’s: Sixteen Candles/The Breakfast Club/Ferris Bueller’s Day Off/Pretty in Pink, with the important exception of Real Genius which is perfect and I love it
UGH WES ANDERSON MOVIES. Let me shout to the heavens how much I agree with you on those.
ATTN: World – Rushmore is super boring
Oooh yes. Eff Wes Anderson. I liked Rushmore and Tenenbaums when I first saw them, but after The Life Acquatic I realized he was making the same movie over and over again, and I’m really not interested in the nostalgia of Gen-X men, no matter how tidy their shots and set design are.
I liked Rushmore and Tenenbaums when they were released, but now it’s hard to watch them. It seems like they were very “of their time” or something. I recently tried to watch Moonrise Kingdom and couldn’t get through the first 10 minutes. I could watch The Life Aquatic again, though!
The Gen-X-Men: Verrrry ponderous superhero franchise, but with amazing stills of furniture you can’t afford. And all the superheroes cry a lot, for seemingly no reason.
that sounds like Ang Lee’s Hulk.
I have to admit, I really liked The Grand Budapest Hotel because it was weird and theatrical and campy and Ralph Fiennes is great. It doesn’t strike me as particularly “Wes Anderson,” but I am also fairly easily swayed by films that look like lavish theater productions and also Central Europe in the 1920s-30s.
YES! I got halfway through The Breakfast Club and I was like “I cannot stand any of these characters, why am I watching” so I stopped.
Re: 80s teen movies
I’ve only just started watching them this year, and (with the exception of Ferris Bueller), they have some suuuupppeerrr questionable moments that make me really uncomfortable. Like, how are people still recommending Sixteen Candles when the loveable geek character basically date rapes a girl? There are just so many things about those movies that have not held up.
my passionate loathing of Wes Anderson fully extends to absorb “I heart huckabees”
Oddly, I dislike (hate is too strong a word) all Wes Anderson movies except Fantastic Mr. Fox. I guess his particular style only works for me if the visuals have an added level of unreality similar to the narrative style.
How the hell did Sixteen Candles become a classic? I remember nothing about it except the absurdly offensive Asian caricature. Bored and offended to tears.
ALL THE STAR WARS MOVIES
I don’t give a shit about any/all of The Godfather
Lord of the Rings is like 467 hours of walking WHO CARES
Love Actually – I counted about 24 times I would have called the police/filed a restraining order if the events in the movie had happened to me in real life. “It’s so romantic!” ARE YOU SERIOUS IT IS A MOVIE ABOUT STALKING AND WORKPLACE HARASSMENT
Ugh Lord of the Rings, fuck those dudes and their rings
I fell asleep in the middle of the first one
I woke up 4 hours later and they were still walking, and I hadn’t missed any plot whatsoever
and that’s when I said, okay, yeah, this is not for me
After the end of the first one I was yelling. WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT, ALL THAT AND IT’S NOT EVEN OVER??
I mean I knew there were three books, but I thought they mashed them all into one movie.
Then a few years later I found myself in a ren faire costume lining up for a midnight showing and that was actually pretty fun.
But still, fuck all those dudes and fuck all of their rings.
I didn’t like the movies but I didn’t like the books either. Which always made all the spec fic fan dudes think I must be so less serious in my spec fic fandom than them because LOTR Above All Things. But No. They are boring. boring boring boring.
I tried to watch Star Wars (I have no idea which one) several times before I decided that I didn’t actually care and I have never regretted this.
My dad introduced my sister and I to Star Wars as teenagers. Afterwards we told him it was kind of stupid and boring and I think he was secretly a little upset 🙁 Sorry, Dad.
Aww, that happened to me and my dad too! I sort-of apologised years later by giving him the original trilogy on DVD for his birthday. Sorry Dad (I still think they’re garbage though).
YES a thousand times to Star Wars!! Maybe it’s b/c I was slightly too young to have seen most of them in the theater, but I just never got the magic. And so many of my friends have seen them 700x and have all the action figurines and old bed sheets from 1978 or whatever. I just stay politely silent when they get on a Star Wars worshiping jag.
I was also too young to have seen them in the theater but I have found that seems to have made little difference in my peer group, as they are rabidly nerdy about it and I just can’t stand anything to do with it, at all.
in the interest of transparency, it does not help that I share a first name with one of the female main characters in that movie series
My movie hate twin! Thank you for saying these things that are usually left unsaid.
Oh God, cosigned. Peter Jackson, listen up: no movie needs that many endings. None.
Although I also couldn’t be bothered to give a shit about the rest of the story, either, because I always get super suspicious whenever there’s actual Good and Evil, or even just Not Quite As Bad and Evil. Like I’m watching / reading history as propaganda from this fictional world, and really we’re talking about genocide.
I’m fun at parties!
Frodo thinks he dies, and then he wakes up in a clean white room full of people he’s pretty sure are dead. The ending is somewhat bearable if you think that he’s never quite sure whether he’s in the afterlife or not.
Frodo wandering around with those earnest Elijah Wood eyes, throwing himself off of cliffs and thrusting his hand into random fires just to see if he’s in some kind of purgatory? I can work with this.
The Star Wars movies do benefit a bit from watching them with a 4 year old who’s really into explosions and also space ships and the idea of light sabers. Having to repeatedly explain to an easily distracted preschooler why the guy dressed all in black is talking so funny means you just get the highlights of the actual movie.
(Two years on, my nephew is gonna be Luke Skywalker for Halloween this year so he can take his two light sabers trick or treating. My sister may never forgive me.)
Not-so-secret confession: I have never seen a single one of the Star Wars movies. (It started as a fluke — when I was a child, if I wasn’t interested in something it just Didn’t Exist for me in my world. It has now become part that, but also part Deliberate Life Choice.) I’ve also never seen anything Lord Of The Rings or Hobbit-related. I’ve also never seen Titanic — or almost any movie featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, in fact. And I _hate_ anything touched by the Coen Brothers and have refused to see almost all of their movies. (Really, more than Movies I Hate, I would do better writing about All The Movies, Music, and Television That Everyone Else In My Age Group Has Seen and/or Is Aware Of That I Have/Am Not. I’m still really good at being totally unaware of anything I don’t find interesting…)
hear you: same here!
Shakespeare in Love.
Le Fabuleux Destin de Amelie Poulain.
FOR REAL. Shakespeare in Love is just Joseph Fiennes making puppy eyes for two hours.
I just watched Shakespeare in Love for the first time earlier this year, and I was APPALLED at how terrible it was.
I just tried to watch Shakespeare in Love for the first time ever, and I only made it halfway through. It was like Elizabethan Moulin Rouge, except Moulin Rouge is awesome (and for those in this thread who hate it, your opinion is heard and respected because I acknowledge that that movie is kind of terrible).
I have always been of the opinion that Shakespeare in Love would be a much better movie if it was just an Elizabethan showbiz comedy starring Joseph Finnes and Geoffery Rush.
I would watch the heck out of that movie!
just fast forward through all the scenes with Gwyneth Paltrow in them, and boom!
Judy Dench was the ONLY good thing in Shakespeare in Love, iirc, and she was hamming it up no end. Amelie was also nauseously twee indeed
I watched Shakespeare in Love for the first time last year and was astonished by how mediocre it was.
In the process of studying french, I have been forced to watch Amelie about four time and every time it’s more annoying.
At some point Amelie replaced La Boum as “the movie to show people learning French.” What a loss that has been.
La Boum!! <3
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. So inaccessible and self-important.
AGREED.
i can’t tell you how many people were like “you totally have to watch this movie, you will love this movie,” and afterward all i could think was, “did you think i would like it because the girl DYES HER HAIR??”
I HAAAAAAAAAAATED it in high school. For some reason it’s grown on me since, but I couldn’t tell you why.
preach!
I just don’t get the Breakfast Club at all. Like, just DO NOT get it. It feels like one of the world’s most pointless movies.
Actually, most of the classic Hughes cannon does nothing for me. Maybe because I’m a millenial, not a gen-xer? Maybe because I’m from CA and not the midwest? Maybe because I went to a tiny nerdy magnet school and my lived experience of high school is nothing like ANY of those movies? Breakfast Club is the least engaging for me out of all of them.
(I don’t bring these facts up often, mind you, as I’ve met quite a few Hughes-ites in my general friend group. I don’t hate the movies, they’re just movies that happened to have happened and I have no stronger feelings about them (the stronger feelings I’m apparently supposed to have). Home Alone was pretty awesome, tho I’ll support any movie no matter how crappy, for a few magical seconds of rube goldberg devices in action…)
Edited to add that I adore Ferris Bueller and it is a perfect movie.
Not just you. I am a Gen-xer and I don’t get them either, including Ferris Bueller. Except for the scene in the museum I thought it was meh.
I don’t like any of the Hughes coming of age movies. Say Anything, Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller, Pretty In Pink etc can all go directly into the trash with nary a word of protest from me. The best thing he directed is Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, and the best thing he wrote was Home Alone.
I didn’t realize Planes, Traines, and Automobiles was Hughes. Madcap adventure with clashing protagonists is one of my favorite movie genres: see The In-Laws (original)
I am not a Hughes fan in general, but I really dislike the end of The Breakfast Club. “Yeah, let’s have the cool kids go off to hook up and make the nerd do our homework for us. We’re subverting stereotypes!”
I was prepared to like The Breakfast Club, and then I spoilered myself on Wikipedia and learned that Claire gets together with Bender and mysteriously never finished the movie.
“Arrogant, funny boy continually insults, mocks, and overtly sexually harasses girl, who reacts by being super stuck-up and rude in self-defense” was roughly 60% of my high school experience. I did not really feel like having that storyline end “and then the boy MAKES OUT with the girl.” It was super insulting. Whoops bye.
I think there is a point at which you watch movies about Young People (people under 25 in this scenario) and can’t enjoy the story because they are making Terrible Choices.
Like, I can’t watch the Breakfast Club without thinking about how absolutely terrible Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald’s relationship would be. He’s disrespectful to her from the get-go, mocks her publicly and then privately tells her he doesn’t mean it, and (statistically and based on what we see of his behavior) he’s extremely likely to be physically abusive! Like, he would feel bad about it, but he’s already got all the scripts in place.
(… did we already have this conversation?)
Honestly I feel like watching when it when I was a Young People was WORSE because now that I’m an adult I have some distance from just how genuinely awful all these Teens are. And am capable of finding them heartwarmingly flawed, instead of Universally Unspeakably Terrible. (WHY DO PEOPLE FIND JUDD NELSON’S CHARACTER CHARMING, HE’S NOT CHARMING, HE’S A HORROR, why yes I am still mad about nobody calling out Jack S.’s behavior in eleventh grade, why do you ask)
Yes, we definitely definitely have. Like, actually most of the John Hughes relationships are clearly not going to work out long term, either from basic personality differences or just because everyone is TINY and likely to grow apart over time. And specifically, Judd Nelson is so crap to her, why and how is this a good relationship idea?
The Big Lebowski is #1 for sure. Really couldn’t stand it.
Lord of the Rings and its sequels.
I don’t know if I was supposed to like Eraserhead but I feel like at least in pretentious circles I would be scoffed at for hating it.
Inside Llewyn Davis
Oh, can’t forget A Christmas Story.
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaate.
I mean. Not that I “hate” anything in this life. Because that’s a lot of negative emotion and who has the time?
But.
On the other hand.
That movie is long fingernails on a chalkboard breaking and cracking as their owner just keeps dragging that shit for like ever even though it must really hurt their fingers and oh my god who cover all the walls with chalkboards and are they seriously just running around in circles?
OMG thank you, Christmas Story just makes me uncomfortable and sad.
princess bride bores me to tears and i have tried to watch it like nine times and always fall asleep after the snakes part
<pushes glasses up nose> Um, excuse me, they’re EELS, not SNAKES. Psssh. I mean. <haughty nerd laughter>
are the eels the same as the one-legged dude or the dude who says “unconstitutional” constantly
It took me a really embarrassingly long time to get this joke. Well played.
I once made someone fall in love with me from my unobtrusive Princess Bride comments. Not quotes, just close enough to hit that happy childhood button.
We didn’t work out but it was fun ^_^
Ha! I was like “the part with the snakes”? Maybe she’s talking about a different movie…. OH, the EELS! Then I scrolled down to see who commented about the same thing because surely one of us would.
I don’t like princess bride the movie OR the book.
I know the point of the framing device in the books is that he’s terrible but I still think he’s too terrible. Like Stephen King thinly disguised author insert terrible: the author gave their stand-in flaws to make them seem well rounded, but the character ALSO has the author’s flaws, and then there are TOO MANY flaws.
Also don’t like the princess bride! And the godfather.
The Godfather could have been cool if they realized that oranges were bad news and it became a movie about people avoiding oranges and becoming all-powerful.
OH THE FUCKING GODFATHER
IF I NEVER SEE IT AGAIN THAT WOULD BE OKEY DOKEY
And then their enemies have a secret underground orangery and smuggle orange peels into their throne room and mix orange juice into their spaghetti sauce.
I am into this game — No Country for Old Men would’ve VASTLY better if Anton Chigurh had just been a hair salon stylist who makes creative uses of tools in his work.
*gasp* Nicole Cliffe and I dislike the same movie? *gasp* We have both fallen asleep multiple times attempting said movie?
I am so cooooool hooray!
In college my friend made the same claim about The Princess Bride, and I was so flabbergasted that I said, “I demand satisfaction!” She actually took me up on the duel, and after further discussion, it ended up being a complicated three-round business, attended and moderated by our mutual friends, involving (1) peeling an orange artistically, (2) coming up with obscene song lyrics, and (3) plastic lightsaber fencing. If I won, she had to admit once and for all that it was a good movie, and if she won, I had to admit once and for all that it was boring. I won the orange thing, but she came up with a much better obscene song. We both began the final lightsaber stage of the duel left-handed, and switched midway through.
She won. I’m with you, Nicole, The Princess Bride is a boring movie.
THANK YOU there are some cute things but I was never a part of the cultural movement
I never really got into it either. I think I just didn’t see it as a child and then saw it as an adult when it did absolutely nothing for me.
I do love The Princess Bride, but I rewatched it over the summer and was shocked by how terrible Buttercup is. Westley is literally overcoming death for her, and she just sits around and whines about how unhappy and helpless without him she is. I feel like she is otherwise poised in the story to be a really kickass, strong character, which makes it even worse.
Well, Wesley also straight-up smacks Buttercup and is generally kind of awful to her post-reunion, pre-Fire Swamp. I don’t remember being shocked by that when I was a kid, but as an adult…
OMG yes, I’m so glad to hear other people say this. Westley is pretty much an abusive tool and that kills the romance for me straight up.
At a certain point I realized that there is really nobody worth rooting for in this movie except Inigo Montoya and Fezzik. If it were the Inigo and Fezzik Show, it would be much better.
My parents raised me without a TV, and for like five years, every single time I got babysat it “let’s entertain LeastBittern with this freaking movie”. Like, TV screens will entrance me if they’re playing C-SPAN, but I could be watching this film Clockwork Orange style and get distracted.
Uhh sorry about that
Yeah, I don’t recommend it.
I was also a victim of the “no TV as a kid, so now any screen will draw your attention” thing. Like I will take a book to the laundromat to spend the time studying, and instead watch terrible game shows that I don’t enjoy because MOVING COLORS. And I avoid sports bars because I know I will end up staring at the screen even though I have no damn clue what the rules are of whatever game is being played.
But even with that, I have never successfully watched Tombstone without falling asleep.
I’M SO GLAD OTHER EXPERIENCE THIS. although i was actually permitted TV, it was just PBS only until I turned 14 and was like “I’M TIRED OF MISSING OUT ON REFERENCES MY PEERS MAKE”
I’m so glad I’m not the only one. Seeing this movie for the first time, as an adult, I was so confused why people love it.
The Matrix is boring & has its own head up its own butt.
Go on, fight me about it. I’ve seen Fight Club (yawn), too, so I know how.
Also my husband keeps trying to get me to watch things with cinematography in them, like, usually subtitled, and I’m all, sure, hon, let’s screen that in bed so I can fall right to sleep.
Fight Club. Not even Helena Bonham Carter could make me like it.
the matrix is the WORST
No, the matrix 2 and 3 are the worst. Like a vortex of terrible, awful, no good garbage.
Like x10! I hated 2 so much I refused to watch 3!
See, once I realized that The Matrix is the WORST I happily stayed away from 2&3 which seemed unbearable x 10000000
The only movie I’ve ever noticed the cinematography (whatever that is) in is whichever Hulk Ang Lee directed. I’m sure that would give a Film Person hours of material with which to insult my bored ego.
The Matrix is so, so, so dumb. My PHILOSOPHY teacher had us watch it (bless her, trying to get high school students into philosophy) and it ENRAGED me how stupid it was. It wouldn’t bother me at all if everyone would just admit that it’s standard popcorn action fare, but everyone seems to think it’s ~sooooo important~ and intelligent and it’s DUMB.
*raises tiny, impotent fists to the sky*
“People make terrible batteries” is what my friend said every time someone brought up the “awesomeness” of the matrix.
IT IS SO STUPID AND MAKES NO SENSE
that might be forgivable if it had ANYTHING ELSE going for it, but it doesn’t.
I don’t want to alarm you, but… we may be sharing a husband. Calling dibs for Friday night
Everyone should be so lucky as to marry my husband, despite the whole cinematography thing.
What’s it fuck with Brad Pitt….
Snatch. Hated it. Still have no idea what happened, and don’t care AT ALL. Also that Lock Stock movie.
My first-year dorm’s common room collectively owned a single DVD, and it was Snatch, and so I have seen various parts of that movie about thirty times. I still have no idea what happened in it but I do sort of have a fond memory of it because I liked that dorm.
The Mexican was Brad Pitt at his worst, and Julia Roberts at HER worst, and James Gandolfini going ‘WTF am I even doing in this terrible movie with these terrible people.’ I want those 2 hours back.
Snatch was the movie where I discovered my one freakish linguistic superpower, which is apparently understanding a fake Northern Irish traveller’s accent. Didn’t have a problem understanding the travellers at all, even Brad Pitt.
Sadly, since their accents were fakey fake fake, I have had no further use for this skill.
Oh and: The Harry Potter movies *cowers*
Loved the books, don’t care about the movies.
Ditto. I saw them all in the theater and I don’t care if I never see them again.
I saw maybe the first one? I don’t know. I read all the books and loved them but honestly I’ve never gone back to them like I usually do with books I really love. Not sure why. Maybe it’s because all the later books were massive tomes where basically nothing happened. I don’t know.
I’m the other way round with these! Never planning on rereading the books, watch the movies about once a month.
I don’t care about either. Is there anyone else out there aside from my mum who feels the same way?
Nah. I like both, but I had a friend in high school who felt the same way.
YES. You are the most correct person on earth.
SECONDED. Watching them just makes me irrationally annoyed at all the plot points they missed out. Granted, completely faithful Harry Potter adaptations would probably be longer than Shoah by the time they got to Goblet of Fire, but still.
Don’t cower.
I took a Harry Potter class in college. We bitched about the movies for more than a full class. A unit focused Movie-Book changes. We were very passionate.
I was disappointed, because I enjoyed the books, and wanted to like the movies, but they were Meh. Not terrible, just Meh.
Oh — except for my boyfriend Alan Rickman, of course.
I saw the first one when it came out (and I was 11, and it was a birthday treat!) and HATED it. Tried again with friends at university when the first Deathly Hallows film came out – no, hated that too. And I love the books.
Casablanca is really boring.
YES! My late, great, dearly departed journalism professor LOVED this movie and made us watch parts of it in class and I was just like “zzzzz.”
Ditto Citizen Kane.
I cannot agree with you on Casablanca, but I will not argue here.
I will agree that Citizen Kane IS GOD AWFUL AND I HATE IT IT’S VERY BORING AND LONG AND I DON’T CARE ABOUT ANYONE IN IT.
I’ve never been able to finish that crap.
Nooooooooo, oh God you broke me.
My favorite moment in all my watchings of this movie was my junior year of college. I was an RA, and we were screening it for our residents (who were forced to go for a “cultural event”). I was sitting with some girls who were head over heels for Grey’s Anatomy, in Season 2 at the time, and Rick says his horrible line “Was it Lazlo, or were there others in between or… aren’t you the kind that tells?”
One girl looks down at the rest of us and completely deadpans Meredith’s “You don’t get to call me a whore.”. High fives were exchanged by all. I always watch that movie thinking of the searing things I would say to Rick if I were Ilsa, and it makes it thoroughly enjoyable.
ILSA IS THE BEST BAR NONE.
And to be fair to Ilsa, she does say some pretty searing things to him for that one.
I feel like I never have to watch Casablanca because it’s been quoted extensively in various pop culture outlets, so I probably never will.
Everyone has told me for years how great/funny/amazing A Christmas Story is. I don’t like it or find it funny.
[CREED ARMS]
100% cosign. That movie straight up sucks. I’m sure if people didn’t have childhood nostalgia for it, they would realize this. (I myself didn’t see it until I was a grown-ass adult.)
I saw it for the first time as a child with my immediate family (all of us seeing it for the first time at the recommendation of another karate/activity mom or something) and as a collective whole we had the same “_this_ is what everyone was raving about?” reaction.
100% AGREED that movie is TERRIBLE.
Instead of watching A Christmas Story when one is in the mood for nostalgic and family oriented holiday movies, just watch Home for the Holidays. All the good family feels, and so much better.
My family’s accepted Christmas Movie Canon is now The Bells of St. Mary’s, Holiday Inn, White Christmas, and Muppet Christmas Carol. Outside of that my mom will watch anything (barring A Christmas Story) on Netflix Instant’s Christmas movies section all the way through at least once, even if halfway through she doesn’t like it.
It is THE WORST.
All Christmas movies I have ever seen have sucked, but people will CUT YOU if you tell them that about whichever one they watched growing up. The only Christmas movie I have ever enjoyed watching was The Greatest Story Ever Told, because I only watched about an hour of it while getting drunk with my sister Christmas Eve and we added our own dialogue and narration through the boring parts (which is all the parts).
The fact that they play it all day on Christmas on TNT or TBS or whatever the fuck station Ted Turner owns now is criminal and he should go to jail JUST FOR THAT.
There was nothing worse in 1996 than channel surfing past the marathon and your dad makes you go back and now you know you’re stuck for the next six hours and you give up and go read a book.
I have never managed to watch A Christmas Story because I cannot get past the scene with the flagpole at the beginning.
YES! I like my Christmas movies with at least SOME good cheer (and significantly less awfulness) in them.
MY PEOPLE
[I honestly have a hard time watching 1980s movies as an adult in the 21st century, so if I didn’t see it as a kid it’s dead to me.]
Cannot stand A Christmas Story. Every scene is cringe inducing.
that’s because IT IS PURE GARBAGE
I hate this movie.
I HATE A CHRISTMAS STORY SO MUCH. It makes my joints ache like I’ve been stuck in an isolation prison cell for way too long is the feeling I get after watching it or even catching a glimpse of it really.
AGREED. I’ve thought about it at length, and I’m pretty sure that film’s sense of humor is just too “Midwest” for my poor Italian-Catholic sensibilities.
Oh man I agree. I’m surprised that I agree, but – despite watching it many times since growing up – I’m just not a huge fan.
Of course, I don’t much care for any “new” holiday movies, except for Elf, but I will watch “Holiday Inn” and “White Christmas” every year until the DVD falls apart.
THE WORST HOLIDAY FILM.
Never liked it.
Never got why it was such a big favorite.
And I don’t know exactly what year the story was set in, but the mother’s Big 80s Hair is so jarringly out of place as to be distracting.
Basically any movie that’s about sad things happening or about diseases (The Andromeda Strain, etc.)
The target audience for Spaceballs is 10 year old boys who loved Star Wars.
Slap Shot. I like Paul Newman and hockey! I will watch Miracle any time it’s on TV even though I own the DVD!
Slap Shot is misogynistic, homophobic garbage.
Thank you so much for this. Mr. Wren loves the crap out of this movie, and I just find it to be crap. (I also love Miracle and will find excuses to put it on whenever possible).
I liked this when I saw it in college, rewatched it last year and it was bad. so bad.
I’m a Chicagoan and not only did I not like Blues Brothers, but I fell asleep halfway through the movie. Womp womp.
My brother kept nagging me to watch it and telling me I would “love it”, it’s boring as shit; you didn’t miss anything.
Also the last 3 Batman movies. OOH LOOK HOW SERIOUS BATMAN IS! IT’S SOOO EDGY THAT WE’RE TREATING BATMAN LIKE A SERIOUS THING WITH ZERO JOKES IN IT!!!!
WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT THERE’S NOTHING FUNNY ABOUT A MAN WHO DRESSES UP LIKE A BAT FIGHTING A MAN WHO DRESSES UP LIKE A CLOWN, NOTHING AT ALL
I hate everything by Christopher Nolan since Memento, especially Inception. That movie was SO pleased with itself, and it wan’t nearly as clever as it thinks it is. It’s like every sophomore philosophy major ever. Ugh.
I love old movies but Citizen Kane just leaves me cold.
Same! I watched it with my dad as part of my Turner Classic Movies education, but I’d rather watch Casablanca any day. I try to excuse myself by saying I know Citizen Kane is Important because of whatever Reasons people have, but eh.
It is very important but it is also incredibly boring.
Watched it for a film studies class. Once was enough. I’ve explained to people that I can recognize that it’s an Important Piece of Cinema, but still dislike it. It changed the way films got made, in a technical sense. It is also so full of self-indulgent bullcrap that I can’t even with it already.
Cube. It’s ninety minutes of my life that I will never get back, and I’m still pissed about it.
Also The Dark Crystal. I know. I’m sorry. But every time I try to watch it, I fall asleep. I think there are some movies that need to be first encountered in early childhood and watched a million times if they’re going to become beloved. You need that nostalgia to pull you through.
was cube supposed to be good?? I haven’t seen it but my friend and I hate watched hypercube and it horrible in an amazing and mesmerizing way.
My husband was convinced I would love it and was flabbergasted by my reaction.
I kind of feel the same about Labyrinth? Like, I love David Bowie, but I didn’t see Labyrinth until I was a near-adult Bowie fan and it just didn’t appeal to me very much. I didn’t like the songs, the plot was annoying, the puppets were kind of gross. It’s no The Man Who Fell To Earth.
Yeah, I love the Dark Crystal but if I hadn’t watched it a million times as a kid I am pretty sure I would think it is crap.
Cube is the best movie of all time. HyperCube (or Cube 2) is garbage.
“You’ll love The Squid and the Whale! You’re into weird films, right?”
……
The Squid and the Whale is clichéd indie (of course the father is an academic and an intellectual) ~coming of age~ bullshit.
fun fact: that movie will also ruin your childhood if you were really into Fly Away Home
And of course we need to see a young kid masturbate in a library and then destroy those poor books with his….ugh. I turned that movie off right after that scene.
I still have no idea what that movie was about but now every time I see that diorama I think of it -_-
Ooh, I did not like that movie at all. Just nothing likable.
Of all the movies I have ever seen in my life, that is the one I most regret seeing. And I saw it in the theater, too. In retrospect I should have walked out, but I was with friends and it would have been awkward.
Love love love Squid and the Whale. I don’t mind at all that you don’t like it. But it makes me so curious. What are some indie coming of age movies that are not bullshit? And just indie (not necessarily coming of age) movies that are not bullshit? I also liked Rabbit Hole and Please Give and The Stories We Tell (I don’t know, they just come to mind when I think indie).
The Godfather. Dear god, The Godfather. My dad and my brother both fucking LOVE the whole trilogy and can’t understand why I find it so boring.
I think the Godfather is a guy/dad thing. It does nothing for me.
The Menz also love that Kevin Costner baseball movie Field of Dreams which is so boring and also deals with Dad-angst
Yeah, it’s definitely a Man Movie about Honor and Brotherhood and GODDAMNIT WILL SOMEBODY DO SOMETHING INTERESTING ALREADY.
I agree about “Field of Dreams” as dad-bait but “The Godfather,” parts I and II is for everyone. Don’t give it up to the men!
The Godfather/The Godfather Pt. II are my favorite movies and I’m questioning the judgement of anyone who loves the whole trilogy. It’s just…no.
THANK YOU. I’ve also had about a dozen men in my life try to explain the motif with the oranges and I DO NOT CARE
Also, HEY DUDES, I do not need it explained because I have eyes and oranges are orange. I can SEE THEM appearing in all these pivotal scenes. That’s why the set designer put them all over in the first place.
I say I like the Godfather, but I think it’s more I have succumbed to the Godfather because I feel like it was ALWAYS on when I was growing up. I don’t think I really like it. I think I might even strongly dislike it, and yet I’ve seen all of them too many times because the Godfather trilogy is to my dad what Legally Blonde is to me: must stop everything and watch it if it’s on cable TV.
Oh yeah. It’s weird because Apocalypse Now and The Conversation are two of my favourite films, but The Godfather just made me feel like my brain was drying out with boredom.
A Christmas Story (I? I have no idea why people love this movie.)
In Bruges (still can’t find the humor. Have looked for it. Not there.)
The Godfather movies (yes, good, you’re all horrible and shooting each other, good job)
The new Hobbit movies (I say this as someone who really loves that book)
Star Trek Into Darkness was a more recent one. I almost got in a HUGE, heated, raging debate with a fellow Trek-fan (don’t get me started on the Trekkie vs Trekker thing, either, ugh), and I just. I just stopped. Because it was Wrath of Khan, except it was stupid, and UGH. If I want to enjoy Bandycoot Cabbagepatch, I will watch a different movie.
Bandycoot Cabbagepatch <3
PartnerChouffe is a MASSIVE MASSIVE Star Trek fan and English and harbors what would be an unreasonable crush on Cumberbatch if I didn’t share it equally, and he absolutely detests Into Darkness for the exact same reason.
the new Hobbit movies are absolutely terrible. *high five* (and I’ve seen each LOTR movie like 5 times in theaters, so it’s not like I have an aversion to the franchise!)
Right? But it’s like they took all the best parts of the book and took a meat cleaver to them. The only redeeming part of the first one was getting to hear Richard Armitage sing, because MY GOD THAT BARITONE.
Watching Richard Armitage do anything is inherently rewarding.
It’s all about Lee Pace for me, but I get you. He and Martin Freeman are pretty much the only things that make the Hobbit movies bearable.
Oh man. Yes it is all about Lee Pace. And Martin Freeman. And Richard Armitage. And Aiden Turner. Ok, it’s about a lot of people for me. And yet, these movies are still terrible. You took a fantastic cast, a cast that is basically my dream cast for this movie, and put them in something that sucks. Thanks Peter Jackson.
I could watch the dwarves arriving at Bilbo’s house on a loop, but there is no way I’d touch the rest of the film again.
Yes on the Hobbit movies. Yes 50000000000 times, they are total fanboy garbage rehashing the worst CGI excess of the original LOTR trilogy.
And I agree, Christmas Story has NOT aged well. We screened it in grad school a decade ago for a movie night because a couple of us were all like “OMG, greatest movie ever!”, and I have rarely been so embarrassed. It didn’t help that the movie ends with a racial slur and half the audience was Chinese.
The week after that they got back at us by showing Shaolin Soccer.
A friend of mine insisted we go to Bruges on our vacation because of that movie. She was disappointed when it was… exactly like in the movie. I think in her imagination “going to Bruges” = sleeping with Colin Farrell, which did not occur.
I enjoyed the film and visiting Bruges, but neither of them had anything to do with wanting to encounter Colin Farrell.
OMG I didn’t even watch Into Darkness because (a) I’m still pretending the first reboot never happened and (b) then they went and cast Sherlock-I’m-so-white-I-glow-in-the-dark Holmes as Khan.
KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN! *smashes things*
No one told me Bandaid Cranksplat was playing the role of Khan in that movie. KHAN? SERIOUSLY? HE’S AS WHITE AS THE DRIVEN SNOW and I don’t care how good his evil-voice is, that’s why he’s a dragon. It is not enough to be Khan.
Also I just cannot get over the aesthetic shift from shirtless, long-haired, bead-necklaced pirate-in-space to… clean-cut suit-wearing preppy schoolboy??? no. no no no no no.
In Bruges was the biggest crapfest ever. I actually paid money to see that confused, wildly tone-shifting mess. All the indie film dudebros I saw it with were so excited to see it and loved it. Should have been tipped off from the start.
Aww, yeah. Hobbit movies.
I told my husband going into the first one that I don’t care about the Hobbit. He was so excited he made me watch it anyway. He still owes me 3 hours of watching something he doesn’t care about while he keeps his mouth shut.
I loved In Bruges soooo much the first time I saw it, before I knew anything about feminism or racism or fatphobia or just not being an asshole. I saw it again a year ago and spent an hour and a half cringeing until I finally got to the movie set at the end and noped out before they could shoot Jordan Prentice in a schoolboy uniform. NOPE.
STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS WAS HORRIBLE. [high fives you into space]
Not even because of Star Trek things which I don’t know anything about but because I genuinely believe it was objectively terrible. And I liked the first reboot. But Into Darkness? No.
I love all the Coen Brothers movies except No Country for Old Men, which I fell asleep watching.
I also hate Ever After, and I feel really bad about that.
I can’t stand any Baz Luhrman films either, which has always made me feel like a mutant.
Yes! High Five! Fell asleep to NC4OM in the theaters.
I also hate Ever After and I do not feel bad about it. Why can’t the prince just marry her when he finds out who she is? She’s still the daughter of a rich man or a nobleman or something, right? Her stepmother making her act like a servant doesn’t make her servant-born. If he cares about her lineage so much, then good news! She is basically exactly who he thought she was.
I mean, I basically hate it because of the Leonardo nonsense, but the whole plot is pretty eyeroll-worthy. People love it so much though! I normally love feminist retellings of fairy tales! Drew Barrymore!
Rear Window – lame and weird and not at all surprising. Although I could just gaze at Grace Kelly and her outfits for hours.
There were things/people besides Grace Kelly and her outfits in that? I hadn’t noticed.
Based on several other movies I do enjoy, I’ve been told I should love Magnolia. I don’t. That movie is trash and everything in it is trash.
I watched Magnolia IN THE THEATER with my best dudebro friend. And my GOD how we suffered. It just went on, and on, and ON, and suddenly it’s RAINING FROGS for NO DISCERNIBLE REASON. It would have warmed your heart to witness the post-trauma bonding of the audience as we all filed out, baffled and angry and resentful and talking to strangers in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS about the shitshow we’d just witnessed.
It was SO bad, my friend and I immediately went into an adjoining theater to watch 5/6ths of Bring It On, a far superior movie. We were owed it by the universe, and the universe delivered.
(I do own the soundtrack, though, because Aimee Mann is a treasure and I listen to her whenever I’m feeling too upbeat and need to come down.)
I couldn’t stand it when I saw it in theaters – but that was years ago and I liked There Will be Blood and the Master, so maybe my tastes have changed.
Bridesmaids! Thought it was terrible and not funny. I forced myself to laugh along with my friends for a while and then fell asleep.
I enjoyed Bridesmaids but what drove me crazy was how everybody was like “FINALLY A REALISTIC PORTRAYAL OF FEMALE FRIENDSHIP!” Excuse me but no.
My therapist wanted me to watch it, and when I did, I was…pretty insulted. I think her message was that women’s friendships change and you should, you know, pick yourself up and do shit with your life or something, and that I get. But I thought most of the characters were horrible. And I just wanted to take Chris O’Dowd out for coffee and away from these horrible people the whole time. But that’s all I’ve got.
Bachelorette was wayyyy more my speed.
I thought I was going to hate Bachelorette because Bridesmaids made me so uncomfortable but it was so much better.
Oh thank god! I thought it was just me! I tried. I’ve tried a few times and I can never make it more than 15 minutes in. Everyone is horrible and it’s just gross and annoying and I cringe-y and ugh.
Yes, I could not get into this either. And everyone is all “Oh, Melissa McCarthy is so funny and it’s great since she’s fat” but no, the whole schtick with her hitting on that guy in the airplane was based on the idea that fat people’s sexuality is a joke. Ugh. Give me Sookie any day.
Home Alone. I feel like my entire generation holds that movie as the definition of Christmas in their minds and even as a kid I could not understand the appeal. I remember thinking very clearly as a young person watching the movie for the firs time “That full can of paint, smashed against someone’s head like that would kill them. He just killed that man”. Also, the whole movie is predicated on the fact that this family is rich enough to take everyone to Paris for Christmas. Pass.
I thought I was the only one who doesn’t like this movie! I think it probably has a lot to do with the fact that I didn’t see it as a child, though.
Oh yes, me too! I was about five when I first saw it and the violence absolutely horrified me. I haven’t revisited it since, so I don’t know if I was just a hypersensitive child, but I remember it as pure torture porn.
Agreed. I saw all the Home Alone movies in theaters as a kid but I still dislike them strongly. They’re stupid and gross and that kid is obnoxious.
I saw it for the first time last year and was very taken aback by the massive house. How rich are these people?
Say Anything.
Respect boundaries, Lloyd! Damn.
I loathe pretty much every single one of John Cusack’s characters (and the films they are in) the 80s and 90s, but none more than that one.
I think the only time I liked one of his characters was in Grosse Pointe Blank. Aaaaand I just remembered how much I hate High Fidelity. And Serendipity, though I don’t think anyone but TBS thinks you’re SUPPOSED to like Serendipity.
But seriously, besides the boundary issues, you’re just going to go to England to follow around the high-school girlfriend you’ve had for three months and pursue your dreams of…kickboxing? That’ll work.
The Shawshank Redemption has for years stood at or near the top of the imdb top 250, which is laughable to me. That movie is so, so dumb. And I say this as an unapologetic Stephen King fan.
I was gonna say The Shawshank Redemption, but you’ve said it for me!
I think it’s okay, but the adulation it’s received is really disproportionate to its merits. It’s like the perfect middlebrow movie, though, so of course it’s eternally popular on great aggregators of middlebrow taste like IMDB.
I probably despise The Green Mile more than any movie I’ve ever seen. Guy getting electrocuted for 5 minutes on screen? Check. Magical negroes? Check. Disgusting.
There is another movie called “Tony Manero” which I recommend all Toasties avoid like the plague. Misogyny, brutal killings, seventies outfits, and that’s really about it. I hatewatched the whole thing.
Hercules. The Disney one. I mean I’m not actively opposed to it, but it doesn’t fill me with joy and warmth like all the other Disney movies from my childhood do.
I just get mad that they messed up his origin story.
The rampant sex jokes in that movie were quite disturbing. I mean in an adult film? Fine. Teen films? Eh, kids these days… but one aimed at little kids? Eeew.
Saw Ghostbusters for the first time in 10 years in the theaters last week….wasn’t impressed.
Agreed – it does not hold up well at all. I was bored last year when I tried to rewatch it.
Saw it for the first time in probably 15 years the other night…also was not impressed. (Though I’ll admit the reveal of the giant marshmallow man would have killed me if I hadn’t known it was coming.)
IT’S NOT GOOD. I watched it because it always fucking comes up at bar trivia but it wasn’t worth it because I don’t even remember anything because it was so boring and terrible.
The new hobbit movies.
Halfway through the goblin chase scene my friends and I pulled out our phones. AND THEN IT STILL WENT ON FOR FIVE MORE MINUTES
Yes. They are just bad. BAD.
I got bored in the cinema for the first one, got the second one on DVD when it came out and went down to a fiver, and was massively bored in that too. The boy and I both fell asleep during it, and neither of us are planning on seeing the last one. Such a shame to ruin the book like that.
god, they’re so bad! So bad!!!
I love Tolkien and I love The Hobbit and I’m very fond of the LotR adaptation; I have no idea what happened wrt The Hobbit!
I think as a rule of thumb I should not be able to read a book in less time than it takes to watch the movie.
I watched the only good and watchable part of the second movie. The part with Benedict Cumberbatch. The rest is totally unimportant.
Wait, we’re supposed to love those? I thought it was Accepted that they suck.
Yeah, I like them, but there’s movies listed under “because you enjoyed Reign of Fire” in my netflix, so….
now I want to go rewatch Reign of Fire. That movie was so much fun in the theater.
Watching the action sequences in the Hobbit movies is like watching somebody else play a video game.
Wait, did anyone like those? They were COMICALLY bad.
My boyfriend defends them every time I complain about them. But I can’t tell if he sincerely likes them or if he just finds them a good time and doesn’t feel the same burning fire of righteous indignation and wrath I do every time I think about them.
Also, I am restraining myself so hard to not defend some of the movies you all are mentioning, because I know we are not supposed to and that’s not what this is about. But some of these movies, and I won’t name names, are absolute treasures and you should be ashamed and horrified by your lack of taste, you philistines.
Can this be a safe haven where we can let go of our horror that someone wouldn’t like our favourites?
(I’m going to do it anyway) because Casablanca! That cut me deep.
YES CASABLANCA
I was going through the thread going “oh, god, I know someone’s gonna say Casablanca, and that’s OKAY they are TOTALLY ALLOWED to not like it but…”
Rick/Louis is one of my all-time OTPs. And I cry during the Marseillaise scene EVERY DAMN TIME.
IT’S SO BORING.
*Flips you all off, dives out a window*
tearing up right now TOO
If I had a dollar for every time I say “I’m shocked…shocked! that…[fill in the blank],” I’d be a very rich woman.
Claude Rains is perfection in that film.
“If I were a woman, and I weren’t around, I should be in love with Rick.”
Don’t you love how Yvonne, the good-time girl at the bar, is singing along with tears in her eyes? She may be a lady of easy virtue, but damn it, she’s a patriot too!
Her face right there is probably the most memorable shot in the entire movie for me…and her voice, as she chokes out the words. That’s when the tears actually start falling for me.
(and Rick’s little nod to the band to go ahead)
(and Ilsa’s face when she looks at Victor…”oh, you beautiful, brave idiot.”)
Vive La France!!
Yes please. People hating on The Shawshank Redemption made me cry. That movie means so much to me. 🙁
Oh jeez, I’m legit sorry. I don’t really hate The Shawshank Redemption, it just didn’t do it for me. But clearly it does do it for many, many other people, or it wouldn’t be so highly regarded.
I also don’t see what anybody likes about tomatoes, but everyone assures me that they are delicious, though to me they just taste acerbic and watery. Clearly everyone else is tasting something that I’m not, and I’m a little jealous, and a little perplexed, but I’m happy that they’re happy.
Eat your tomatoes. Watch your Shawshank Redemption. Be happy.
Now, have you had a homegrown garden tomato, or only supermarket tomatoes? Homegrown garden tomatoes are much much more delicious, whereas most supermarket tomatoes are picked when they’re still green so they can be transported hundreds of miles, and thus never develop a flavor. The flavor they’re supposed to have is sweet and acidic and magnificent.
http://www.treehugger.com/green-food/how-tomato-s…
Of course it’s possible you just have different taste buds that can’t pick up the wonderful things about tomatoes. I have the cilantro-tastes-like-soap thing and I can’t taste the delicious at all, whereas other people assure me that it is heaven in a leaf.
Yeah, I know these sorts of threads are places for us to bare our souls without judgment, but then what happens is I read all these posts and go “Oh no, everyone hates the movies I love!! What am I doing wrong?!”
You are doing nothing wrong. Taste is subjective.
ignore bocadelperro, you are doing everything wrong and must flagellate yourself
I KNEW IT
(In seriousness, thank you, bocadelperro!)
You’re welcome. If people would realize that somebody not liking a thing that you like is often simply a matter of taste and not a moral judgement on your character, cocktail parties and first dates and shopping and so many other things would be much more pleasant.
But if you don’t like The Godfather, you have so soul.
This is why I can’t read the Goodreads reviews for books I love (and had to stop reading the “books you’re supposed to love but don’t” thread here). When I see people hating on my favorite books I feel wrong for loving them! Screw you all, The Night Circus is amazing and I don’t want to read your entirely valid criticisms of it!
I feel exactly the same way about The Magicians. I can’t defend it, not really, but Damn It, it’s my very favourite book in this challenging world.
If anyone says Lost Boys I might cry a bit.
Who could hate that movie!? It has 80’s motorcycle vampires and dorky baby Coreys and noodles that turn into worms. Everything that you could hate about it is exactly what makes it so wonderful.
Ditto.
gah, Eternal Sunshine is brilliant and true and sad
Okay, got that out of my system, back to hating.
I love it too. It’s one of the most romantic movies I’ve ever seen.
Oh god I agree. When I saw someone hating on it, it almost made me want to cry as much as the actual movie did.
I embrace my shame and lack of taste COME AT ME BRO.
I am telling myself that anyone who doesn’t love Dark Crystal and Labyrinth must be a baby millennial, born into a CGI world, too young to appreciate the magic of puppetry, and it won’t be long before they are trampling all over my lawn while I threaten them from my rocking chair on the porch.
It’s not so much that I hated the rest of the movie, but I cannot (CANNOT) watch David Bowie’s dick flopping all over the place and have myself a good time.
Big George: “What’s a Philistine?”
Sally: “It’s a real dirty person.”
That’s from Dead Man. Everyone step away from Dead Man or things will get real.
Weird/lame brag – my parents have the canoe from that movie in their front yard! (it came with the house when they bought it) They call it the Johnny Depp butt boat because.. his butt touched the boat? Yeah I don’t know.
Rear Window? Is nothing sacred?
Yeah, the comments are just proving to me that I care about movies way too much!
Interestingly, I am finding the comments are proving that I care about movies a lot less than I thought! (this was not true with the book thread). Or maybe it’s just because the only movie(s) I truly love that has been named so far is Lord of the Rings, and I already know that what most people hate about it (it’s long) is precisely what I like. I just like long, plodding, things where everything else – cinematography, effects, music, etc. – are very well done.
That and I love sword and sorcery battle scenes. I could watch an entire lotr-length movie filled with only these battles.
Thank you – I needed this because Princess Bride (~sob!~), A Christmas Story (~weep!~), Casablanca (~why, why, dear lord?~)!! Philistines, all of you!
I’m waiting for the “Let’s talk movies you’re supposed to hate but love” thread. 😉
The Jump Street movies. No shame. I WILL FIGHT ALL OF YOU.
Because they’re AWESOME
The 1996 remake of Sabrina with Harrison Ford. Someday I will write a brilliant piece that convinces everyone what a lost classic it is. Or I’ll just watch it again when I’m sick.
YES YES YES THIS
But I can’t lie, I’m laughing so hard I’m crying at some of the hate being poured on some of my faves. I might not agree on everyone’s (dis)taste in movies, but I can’t deny y’all are HILARIOUS.
I don’t get the Citizen Kane hate. It’s boring? Really? Seemed like a pretty compelling story to me. And just because the Big Lebowski has some annoying fans doesn’t mean it isn’t an awesome sendup of Raymond Chandler novels.
All of the Godfather movies. A bunch of shitty mob assholes double cross and kill each other. Hooray!
I feel like all mafia movies/tv shows are basically interchangeable – you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. And I have little interest in any of them.
They also shoot up lovely Classic cars. Two thumbs down.
I love Spaceballs, but my mom haaaaaaaates it so my brother and I literally used it as a cover for our underage drinking when I was in college: “We’re gonna go watch a movie, Mom. Oh, sure, you can join us. Yeah. We’re watching Spaceballs.”
The Big Lebowski, on the other hand, is one of those rare and precious movies that all five of us love equally.
Everything Mallory said, and Brazil. UGH.
Big Lebowski: too boring, didn’t finish.
I second Brazil.
I’ll third Brazil — I watched it when I had a bad fever and wanted so badly to turn it off but was too weak to get up and find the remote. UGH.
Brazil probably MADE YOU SICK.
Agreed on Brazil and I’ll add the only other Terry Gilliam movies I’ve seen: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and The Brothers Grimm
Boyfriend tried to get me to watch Fear and Loathing recently. Half an hour in I said “So is this…basically what this movie is?” Him: “…I guess, yeah.” Off. Why do people like it? He couldn’t even explain!
I will second (third, fourth, fifth?) A Christmas Story. Don’t get it. Not funny.
Virtually all of Tarantino’s catalog. I intensely dislike gratuitous shock-me violence. Pulp Fiction nearly gets away with it, but that’s about as much as I can handle. See also: Fargo. NOPE.
All I hear in Tarantino movies is a shitty entitled white guy going “HEY LOOK AT ME I’M THE ONE WHITE GUY WHO CAN SAY THE N-WORD AREN’T I EDGY AND COOL HEY HEY HEY LOOK AT ME HEY N-WORD NO HEY I’M NOT RACIST IT’S COOL BECAUSE REASONS!!!” I have a soft spot for Pulp Fiction but the rest of his stuff can fuck off.
Man, fuck Tarantino. I will watch selected parts of Kill Bill, solely because I have a longstanding crush on David Carradine, but for everything else…violent, racist bullshit.
re: Tarantino: #bless. Someone else mentioned The Big Lebowski’s endless potential to generate mansplaining and QT’s movies seem to be custom-made for that purpose.
I hate him so much that I’m embarrassed every year when my birthday rolls around and am reminded he shares it with me.
Could be worse; I share mine with Michael Douglas and Catherine Ziti-Jones.
$: – p
I enjoy the Coens and Tarantino, and I am constantly shutting down mansplaining about both bodies of work. Yes, I find Pulp Fiction entertaining. No, I don’t want to hear you expound for 15 minutes on your grand unified theory of what’s in the briefcase. Haven’t you ever heard of a macguffin before?
Jumping in on the Tarantino hate. His movies are like Ugg boots: they’re god-fucking-awful, but supposedly stylish, so everyone has to pretend to like them.
Whenever I watch a Tarentino movie all I can see is the director, juuuuuuuust off camera, masturbating furiously.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Please stop quoting it at me, please stop telling me how funny it is, please stop trying to explain it to me. I get it, I just. don’t. like. it. I like other Monty Python movies, for the love of god, can’t you leave me alone about this one?
I do like the movie, but BOY am I tired of people quoting it! It doesn’t make you funny or interesting!
I feel like if you’re a person who still quotes it endlessly and you are no longer in middle school, you have a problem.
Um basically all Mel Brooks movies.
LOTR, The Hobbit. (Seriously, fuck those the Hobbit movies.)
Star Wars
I love Star Trek but don’t really care about any of the movies. I am openly hostile about the new ones, I DON’T CARE HOW MUCH BENNY CUMBERBATCH YOU PUT IN THEM.
There’s definitely more, since I am definitely more of a TV person than a movie person.
Man, I loved Mel Brooks movies as a teen, and wow they do not hold up now that I’m an adult with like taste and critical analysis skills and stuff.
I’m ride-or-die for Tolkien, so I’ve seen Hobbit 1 and 2 and I will see the 3rd one but BOY are they boring/unnecessary. I’ll never not watch any of the LOTR movies when they’re on, I do a full re-watch of all three about once a year, I re-read the books about once a year…but the Hobbit does nothing for me. (It’s sad, really.)
I know that Woody Allen is a piece of shit, but HOLY FUCK, I would’ve hated Manhattan anyway.
Never finished the Stars Wars, LOTR, or Godfather trilogies because I watched the first films of all three and was bored.
That movie is grooooosssss.
“Blue Jasmine” is the worst movie I’ve seen in the last couple of years and what a critic’s darling it was. Bore no relationship to any kind of reality I know of – not that a movie has to be realistic but “Blue Jasmine” tried and failed to do so.
I hated it but watched it with coworkers in the middle of the day, so like whatever, but when I found out how much critical praise it was getting, I couldn’t believe it!
I actually liked Woody Allen once (I’m waiting for him to die before I can enjoy his stuff again), but my god Manhattan is awful.
I enjoyed parts of Manhattan, for example the reveal that Diane Keaton’s character’s ‘sexually devastating’ ex-lover was Wallace Shawn in full Wallace Shawn mode (kind of a dumb joke, but it still makes me laugh), and the cinematography (sorry!) But I was never interested in or sympathetic to Allen’s character’s “dilemma”. I remember the first time I saw it being quite horrified that his 30-something friends are totally blase about him dating a schoolgirl – I’m pretty sure that even in the 70s that wouldnt just be socially accepted like that. Ugh, so vile.
The acceptance of him dating a 17-year-old baffled me as well. Did SHE not have friends? Where were all the normal people in this movie?
Seconding all the 80s teen movies.
The Godfather.
The Exorcist, which I don’t really understand.
Most of Woody Allen’s body of work.
I fell asleep during the first two Bourne movies (like 5 minutes in and I was out). I have zero desire to see those. (but am I really supposed to like those? IDK. People seem shocked that I slept through them)
I feel like I should love Jurassic Park. I mean, I love the gifs and Jeff Goldblum, and I’m cool with dinos but I’m ‘meh’ about the whole movie. It’s just a waste of my time.
O Brother Where Art Thou is awful. I don’t even know if I’ve ever watched the whole thing. It starts playing and I just lose the will to live.
Agreed about Dirty Dancing. I feel similarly about Ghost. And I cannot stand Sleepless in Seattle.
Sleepless in Seattle! Offensively stupid movie. Can’t understand its allegedly enduring appeal.
Yes, thank you, what a heap of flaming garbage that movie is.
Re Jurassic park, my Grandma summed it up well: “those kids should have been eaten.”
Pulp Fiction. I tried, you guys! I tried to watch it! I did not succeed. Just…shut up, John Travolta. And get a haircut, that thing’s hideous.
I have tried three times and it just isn’t working for me. I like Tarantino, generally, but that movie…it’s just not doing it for me.
My problem is the dialogue. Which, you know, is basically the point of Tarantino movies. But I really like all the parts of Kill Bill where The Bride just kills everyone! Those parts are great!
yup
I saw Reservoir Dogs when I was too young, and part of Pulp Fiction, and I now categorically refuse to watch anything that Quentin Tarantino has directed. I don’t care how many people love it.
Yeah, I basically hate all Tarantino movies but that one especially. I didn’t see it for a while after it came out and by the time I got around to it I had read a bunch of reviews swooning about the structure! and the complexity! and the brilliance! and I was just like “So they cut it together out of order, big deal”. Grrr.
I had an ex who loved movies, and he insisted I watch this.
About halfway through I said, “Did you seriously model your entire persona off of Vincent Vega?”
“Oh you noticed!”
uuggghhh, high school self, you should have dumped hiiiiim.
YES to Pulp Fiction. All my friends are crazy about it but it just makes me feel ill and I do not get it. Tarantino in general is a struggle for me. His more recent stuff (Inglorious Basterds and Django) is great but please keep Kill Bill away from me.
North by Northwest. Hard to root for characters who consistently make extremely stupid choices in overlit three-wall cutaway rooms.
I lost it when I realized the chase across Mount Rushmore was not, in fact, meant to be camp. That whole movie had me thinking something more/better would happen and then it just…didn’t.
A League of Their Own, sadly. Just watched it a few weeks ago and was so excited and was all YES WOMEN IN BASEBALL ROCKING IT LET’S DO THIS and then….meh.
Also Sleepless in Seattle. And Goodfellas.
YES to Sleepless in Seattle! I couldn’t get past the fact that there were two human beings in the world who would eat a sandwich that ONLY HAD LETTUCE AND TOMATO ON IT AND NOTHING ELSE.
I tried to watch A League of Their Own a few weeks ago basically because I liked the Femslash Friday post about it so much and I vaguely remembered enjoying it as a kid. I couldn’t finish it. Turns out it’s just entirely about Tom Hanks being drunk and sexist and gross? I assume later his proximity to women redeems him through the magical healing powers of womanhood or whatever but I had to turn it off cause I just hated it so much.
I tried to watch A League of Their Own not too long ago and made it about half an hour in before getting so bored that I started to have a mild existential crisis.
As for movies I will never like that other people think I should like (the actual subject of this post):
– Scrooged is ridiculously means-spirited and I don’t know why anyone would watch a Christmas Carol movie that doesn’t have Muppets anyway.
– I don’t get Caddyshack (I swear I like Bill Murray).
– Casino Royale is so, so, so boring. James Bond is supposed to be ridiculous. Why do you want serious gritty James Bond. I don’t care if it’s more like the tone of the books, have you READ the books, literally they have a lesbian cat burglar named Pussy Galore who turns straight for Bond and is only gay because every man in the South is a child molester apparently. The books are garbage.
– I’m on the fence about a lot of John Hughes’ teen movies. I love Ferris Bueller and mostly like The Breakfast Club, but I hate every guy in Pretty in Pink so much and I can’t stand Sixteen Candles at all.
The 1967 Casino Royale with Ursula Andress and Peter Sellers is far superior to the Daniel Craig version. Yes, it’s insane, disjointed, and has unfinished plot bits dangling around like dead squid, but it certainly doesn’t take itself too seriously.
Plus, David Niven.
I don’t know that this counts as a “movie I’m supposed to love,” but the conventional wisdom is that Terminator 2 is better than Terminator and it JUST ISN’T. Yes, Linda Hamilton is fantastic in it; everything else about it sucks.
I like Terminator 1 AND Terminator 3 better than Terminator 2.
TERMINATOR 1 IS BEST FOREVER. (I also prefer Alien to AlienS.)
ALSO CORRECT. I mean, I like Aliens pretty good too, it just isn’t as good as Alien.
Edit: Also, the last time I watched Aliens it turned out to be some kind of special extended cut that had a bunch of deleted scenes put back in, and, surprise, it turns out the reason those scenes were deleted in the first place was that THEY WERE BORING AND ADDED NO VALUE.
Wait, but what about the part where Ripley’s daughter is grown up and she missed the whole thing? There’s some bit about Ripley’s kid which added a little something…but really only a little.
No person can honestly prefer Aliens to Alien. Both are great, but only one is genre-defining and one of the scariest films ever made.
PREACH. People who say they like ‘Aliens’ better than ‘Alien’ instantly earn my irrational hatred.
YES! Terminator 1 is the best FOREVER!
Um, obnoxious, pre-teen Edward Furlong teaching terrible slang or Michael Biehn traveling across time to save the woman he loves? Terminator is 1000x better than T:2.
Also, Alien>Aliens and Evil Dead 2>Army of Darkness. These are my unpopular sequel opinions, thanks for listening.
Linda Hamilton is SO GOOD in it though.
Linda Hamilton cocking the shotgun with one arm is the single greatest thing ever put on film. It awakens something in me. (Mostly something related to sex.)
THAT SAID, yep. Terminator is fantastic and amazing, and 2 has Linda Hamilton cocking a shotgun with one arm.
I’m not even sure if I was supposed to love There Will Be Blood but Christ, I hated that movie.
Oh! Yay! You said it first! I HATE HATE HATE that movie and people who love it are all like “ooooh, well you must just not understand fiiiilllm” and I’m like WELL YES that is true but also the storytelling is garbage.
UGH.
I felt like I was going crazy after I saw it, because all the Serious People seemed to agree that it was a Very Serious Commentary, but all I saw was a lot of boring boredom punctuated by really cartoonish acting.
All I remember about it is that a) it is eight years long and b) at the end the one guy is drunk, sitting on a bowling lane, yelling “DRAINAAAAAAGE!!!” and that is not top-notch movie-making material.
THANK YOU YES.
There was something about straws and yelling? I remember an angry man and yelling but it wasn’t very interesting so I fell asleep.
I think I’ve watched Moulin Rouge! twice now, and I just don’t /get it/. None of these songs are related to each other! I don’t get it!
My whole family loves Moulin Rouge and it just gives me a headache.
Seconded!! It’s just sort of weird?? The modern songs have nothing to do with anything? I don’t get it either.
This is mine too! I love musicals but hate this movie, despite many people trying to get me into it. It is like a two hour long Madonna video without the charisma of Madonna.
Baz’s stuff is so over the top and takes itself so seriously it never crosses into camp territory. Fail.
Yes! Thank you! There is neither camp nor life in Baz Luhrman movies. Even as a wee one seeing Romeo and Juliet in the theater, I felt like was watching a music video, and then I was angry because he was shitting all over some pretty incredibly profound source material (I was a 13 year old girl. Nothing was more profound than Romeo and Juliet)
In hindsight, it’s amazing how that movie can have a drag queen as a main character, and still be entirely devoid of camp.
I actually watched Moulin Rouge with commentary (I was unemployed and bored), and this was their rationale for the songs and so on: The story is supposed to be a retelling of Orpheus in the Underworld. Orpheus is supposed to have been able to instantly come up with the most beautiful poetry/songs in existence off the top of his head, and people would fawn over it and his words and music would be beloved by all. The writers of the movie realized that they were never going to be able to write anything that good (nobody can), so they thought about it and realised that if they took some of the most beloved/highest grossing pop songs of all time, they are almost the same thing – words and music that are beloved by all, which people fawn over. So that’s what they had Christian (Orpheus) sing. The secondary reason they stated was that they didn’t want to play can-can music at the Moulin Rouge for two and a half hours, not just because the Audience would all go crazy but because it wouldn’t portray correctly how, like…edgy and exciting can-can music was in the bohemian period – so they played Nirvana and stuff instead.
Not that I’m trying to make anyone like the movie more (I am 50/50 on it myself), but that explanation made a ton of sense to me and I actually enjoyed watching the movie a lot more after that, because I wasn’t confused about wtf they were doing with the music.
I had to get high to watch Mpulin Rouge, after the first Nirvana track.
Inception. Yeah, the effects were nice and I *get* it, I just didn’t think it was that great!
YES.
I kind of liked it, but it totally WAS NOT THAT GREAT. Omg, if your mind was blown by Inception, you need to get out more (to the library, where there are books).
Exactly. It wasn’t bad, I was mostly just baffled by people fawning over it.
It’s just freshman-year stoner philosophy like, what if reality wasn’t REAL, man? I 100% do not care if that top kept spinning or stopped or if his wife is dead or if he’s in the Matrix or what.
And then what if there was ANOTHER reality?????? WHAT THEN?
Like, look, you fucking idiots, first of all yes we totally make up our own ‘realities’ and ‘reality’ isn’t real, let’s move on. Second, obviously YOUR reality is that you want to have shoot-em-up games in every dimension. My reality is that I have better things to do, but I will appreciate a good special effect now and then.
SO LONG. and not nearly as good as the hype
Yep. JGL was great, especially that part where he fights in the tumbling hallway, the rest of it was pretty meh.
Oh my gosh, I feel like you all are my PEOPLE.
Right? Everyone kept sending me explanations of it after I said I didn’t like it, and I was like, “I UNDERSTAND WHAT IT’S ABOUT. It’s just not good!”
I was going to second that, then I remembered it was Momento I hated for those same reasons.
I got it I just didn’t want to pay attention to it. It was not that great.
Same. I found it incredibly boring. All I remember about Inception is that I saw Tangled around the same time and enjoyed it way more.
this isn’t a movie, but FIREFLY. It’s not even entirely Firefly’s fault! I sort of feel bad about it!
Look, it was okay, I enjoyed it the first time around, but there are big glaring flaws with it, and it’s kind of racist. Whatever, so is a lot of media, I can deal.
But every time I suggested even a little that it’s not LITERALLY THE MOST AMAZING AND BESTEST THING EVARRRRR, I got a whole lot of WOW JOSS WHEDON IS THE GREATEST, HOW VERY DARE YOU CRITICIZE ANYTHING ABOUT THE GREATEST WORK OF ART IN THE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN RACE, DID YOU KNOW HE IS A MALE FEMINIST, I THINK YOU WILL FIND IT IS YOU WHO ARE THE RACIST!!! which is 100% the fastest way to make me go from liking something okay, to becoming increasingly hyperaware of its flaws, to hating it forever.
Reasons I almost never ever talk about Firefly ever. It was VITAL to my television education/high school experience, but after growing up and learning how to actually pay attention to stuff like racism and sexism, I’m actually kinda afraid to rewatch it. I mean, I’m sure I’ll still like parts of it, but I’m terrified to Ruin Something That Led To Me Discovering Good TV.
Aw, I’m sorry :c yeah, there’s stuff I read as a kid where I won’t read it again, I just want to hold onto the memory of how much I loved it.
I love science fiction the most out of any genre, and a lot of classic science fiction writers really didn’t think women were whole and complete people; I’ve gotten really good at sort of glossing gently over that, which actually is really depressing and sort of upsetting when I think about it for any length of time. Liking things: it actually kind of sucks sometimes!
YES I cosign this super hard for anything Joss Whedon.
(Ditto Neil Gaiman, who I am almost embarrassed to like still)
Cosigning with “anything Joss Whedon has ever done is terrible, ever, sorry I really don’t give a fig about BtVS”
Heh, it’s funny you say that, because as much as I dislike Firefly and Dollhouse, I hit Buffy at exactly the right age to imprint on it — it has glaring flaws (BOY DOES IT EVER), but I love it past reason anyway.
I liked the first three…four? Maybe four…seasons of Buffy, and the first couple of seasons of Angel. And then I realized that Whedon will screw over any storyline just to be able to claim that nobody guessed the “twist”, and lost interest in his work.
So…yeah. Not a Whedon fan. things he’s said since then have only reinforced that dislike.
I tried to watch it but oh my god, you are right, it is racist and sexist and the way Mal treats Inara will not make me believe there is some great love story there. And the plot holes!
Oh yes, the Inara thing was infuriating (and internally inconsistent to boot).
“Being a companion is not just legitimate work, but a respected, high-status job. Also I’m going to call you a whore as an insult a lot and get angry and upset that you are doing your job! GOSH I AM CHARMING.”
This is the hill I chose to die on as a High School Nerd. It’s amazing how defensive teenagers get over a simple question like “where are the ethnic Chinese people in this 50% Chinese society?”
I got bored the first time through and my sister is still amazed. But the lack of Asian characters is just too glaring now.
I agree with this 200 percent. Most of the acting was also terrible, I love Buffy but Whedon’s casting often annoys me.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuck Joss Whedon.
I liked Firefly but yeah the racism really bothered me.
Agreed! Actually I quite like the movie, although I still have serious problems with the concept and handling of Inara the Space Hooker. I just find that the show is mostly lightweight bullshit with stupid dialogue and improbable slang. I never understand why people think it’s so brilliant.
I have my issues with Whedon, but I liked the first three seasons of Buffy and most of the third and fourth seasons of Angel. I even liked quite a lot of things about Dollhouse. And I think my favorite thing about Whedon is that his shows tend to start out weakish and get stronger over time. Most shows these days don’t grow: they throw everything they have at the viewer in the first season and then decline steadily after that. Whedon is willing to start slow and build his ideas and characters over several seasons. Which is why, even though I am bored and annoyed by most of Firefly, I don’t think it should have been canceled so soon.
The Fifth Element!! It bored me to tears even though everyone I know adores it. I also bought into the hype and saw The Avengers in theaters and it was mildly entertaining, I guess, but I mostly just thought it was stupid.
And I have a longstanding disdain for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; I watched it on a family vacation when I was younger and my entire family is horrified at how openly I have hated it ever since.
Pineapple Express. And don’t give me that crap about not getting it because I don’t smoke weed, I saw Harold and Kumar and laughed at that so gtfo.
Mean Girls, as has previously been mentioned on threads of this nature
Most recently Gone Girl because I felt it was hella hella hella misogynistic, this is apparently very different from the book but I still have negative amounts of motivation to read it and it was so long my ass fell asleep
Also V for Vendetta, that was a regrettable few hours
One of my very last papers in college was all about how V For Vendetta is hot garbage. I tore it to pieces. It was very satisfying, would recommend. (I also got an A+)
I really hated American Hustle. was appalled when it got 10 Academy Award nominations, and gratified when it didn’t win any. I gave it 1/2 a star for Amy Adams.
I also hate Brokeback Mountain. Garbage movie with unrealistic and unsympathetic characters and more boobs than dicks.
AMERICAN HUSTLE YES. I was so confused in the movie theater when it was over. It was like a stampede of actors all trying to show how amazing they are and crushing everything and everyone in the process.
AMERICAN HUSTLE WAS TERRIBLE. I literally was not interested in any of the characters at all.
It was so bad! I was excited because it was David O Russell & I’d loved Silver Linings Playbook so much! But it was so mean-spirited and cold blooded. The only character I cared about was Louis CK.
This is the best description of American Hustle I have ever read.
Agreed. Also seriously on the train just this morning I was thinking about what garbage it is that Jennifer Lawrence won Best Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes for that movie, beating Lupita. Not that she wasn’t good in it but it was just not a good movie.
I have to go one further and say that I don’t think she was any good in it. I don’t think it was all her fault, but I think she was terribly cast. She wasn’t believable at all! I mean, damn, I like the girl but you can’t just jam her into EVERYTHING and say it works. In Winter’s Bone she is perfect. In David O Russell movies she is YAAAAWWWNNNNNN.
Nah. American Hustle is entertaining for the costuming and soundtrack. That’s about it. Amy Adams is the brightest spot. Runner-up is Jeremy Renner’s hair.
Oh my god, YES AMERICAN HUSTLE.
As a subsequent thought, I hate everything David O. Russell has ever touched.
YES. I thought American Hustle was a very well-acted, well-set-designed movie about horrible people that I didn’t want to spend time with. Gah.
Some Like It Hot can just about go fuck itself.
…..so I’m guessing you prefer classical?
That was hands down the best comeback to any post, in this thread/forum or any other, ever. We must have the same type blood… type O.
The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. It was so long and so boring and so much silent shots of people staring at each other. Just not my kind of movie.
HERO. Two and a half hours of my life wasted. Boyfriend insisted “It’s a classic! it has a super high rotten tomatoes rating! I promise it’s just not a martial arts movie!” It’s just a martial arts movie. And a bad one.
Oh and Boondock Saints.
OH YES. I have friends who are really into it and I just cannot.
Dang, I was going to include that, but I figured it didn’t qualify for “supposed to love,” since everyone right-thinking recognizes it as putrid vigilante-glorifying garbage.
That’s my husband’s favorite movie of all time, and I feel the same way you do about it.
I did not laugh once during The Hangover.
Fucking Borat or any kind of movie Sacha Baron Cohen is in. I just hate his movies and his characters so damn much. Haha, you can do a vaguely Slavic English accent, hahaa, that is not fcking funny.
Ugh, Borat! So bad! What was even worse was that my dad thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever seen and would quote it all the time.
My husband keeps wanting me to watch Borat and Nathan For You and I put them in the same category of making people feeling shitty for not being in the joke and it all just makes me so uncomfortable.
Yessssss I try to be all “rich tapestries!” but I really HATE that style of humor.
Oh god, I was in high school when that came out and there was a fucking TIDAL WAVE of guys in my class sidling up to the girls and saying “very nice, how much?”
Thanks, Sacha Baron Cohen. Thanks for that.
Not to mention he paid the villagers $4 each in the actual poverty-stricken town in Kazakhstan where he filmed, and didn’t tell them what kind of movie he was making, but promised that it would call the world’s attention to the conditions they lived in and help spark change. And then he made heaps of money, none of which they ever saw, by ridiculing them.
Oof, for real? That’s horrible.
Further research indicates it was actually a poor town in Romania, not Kazakhstan. But yeah.
Yes! I think I got, like 10-15 minutes into Borat and I was like, “eeeeugh, this is the Eastern European version of black face.” Which, we are not that far from today. It’s basically a feature length Polish joke, which is totally not okay.
I like Ali G sometimes in *very* small doses and I liked Bruno in *one* small skit only, but in general, I hate Borat and the assorted characters too! And the kicker is that my husband is ACTUALLY KAZAKH and he LOOOOOVES Borat. I went with him to a premiere of that stupid movie. My husband was also going though this period a year or two after we were in grad school where he was stressed out and unsatisfied with his job and wanted to unwind every day after work by watching Borat videos on Youtube. I have this Pavlovian bored-nausea response to the opening music of the Borat show. I’m so glad he grew out of it!
The sketches on Da Ali G Show are so, SO much better than the movies. It’s like when SNL/Lorne Michaels really thought that the MacGruber sketches were worth turning into movies, which, I’m sorry, Ryan Phillippe came to my college town for the screening and I was sitting so close to the front of the theatre during Q&A that I could see his quadriceps through his jeans, but I still couldn’t be into it.
Back to the Future! I didn’t see it until I was in my 20s at which point I was like, this movie is super-dumb and I find its underlying themes morally suspect.
V for goddamn Vendetta fills me with rage, why did so many of my college friends love that movie?
Glengarry Glen Ross. Alec Baldwin’s cameo aside, my entire reaction to that movie was “wow, that was a lot of sadsack white dudes yelling at each other.” If I hadn’t already been familiar with all the actors I don’t think I could even have kept the characters straight.
People like V for Vendetta because it makes revolution *sexy* and also contentless, so ergo something they can get into without having to do anything about it (except maybe jerk off, figuratively and/or literally).
I want to punch V for Vendetta right in its smarmy masky face. It was so very bad. When he says how a revolution without dancing is a revolution not worth having, I swear I heard the sound of a million unoriginal teenage boys gasping at great philosophy and I threw up in my mouth a little.
I mean, I like weird ass comics. I greatly enjoyed The Invisibles. I like violent comics. I greatly enjoyed Preacher. I just. This was flat and annoying and tried to be deep. TBF, I cannot imagine how either of those two examples would fare translated to film. It’s maybe not a good idea?
“wow, that was a lot of sadsack white dudes yelling at each other”
Welcome to the Wonderful World of David Mamet!
A friend of mine was adamant that Glengarry Glen Ross was an amazing movie and was shocked SHOCKED that several of us (all women, shockingly) hadn’t seen it. So he rented it and had us come over to watch it, and all three of us fell asleep 30 minutes in and then left without finishing it. I will never finish it. It’s fucking terrible.
And (worst of all) V for Vendetta ruined my birthday!
NOVEMBER 5 WAS AWESOME. And now it’s not.
(but also also I hate the lesbian storyline.)
OH MY GOD I FORGOT ABOUT V FOR VENDETTA. Retroactively adding it to my own list. Whyyyyyyyy did everyone love it?
OH YEAH! Every movie Will Ferrell has been in, especially but not limited to Anchorman, and also that horrific car crash of a car racing movie.
One of my friends LOOOVES Will Ferrell, and does a hilarious “impression” of him (mostly just her quoting his lines and trying to sound like him, but not sounding like him at all, and laughing in the middle of the line). Even though I think he’s mildly funny, her imitations of him are always A THOUSAND times funnier. Some movies I’ve seen after hearing her quote for years, and I’ve been really disappointed!
The ONLY exception EVER:
Stranger Than Fiction. Because it’s not Will Farrell Being “Funny”. He actually ACTS and plays a real CHARACTER.
The rest of it, though? MEH.
YES
AGREED
I know you said EVER, but did you see “Everything must Go”? It’s not a comedy and like you said, he acts and plays a real character.
Pretty much any old musical except “South Pacific” and “West Side Story”. Which is weird, because those two are pretty up there in problematic territory. But at least the music doesn’t bore me to tears.
Also, all the old John Wayne movies. My college roommate LOVED them and watched them all of the time and jesus fuck are they boring.
Oh, and any Christmas movie ever (except The Nightmare Before Christmas). I grew up with Christmas shoved in my face when I didn’t want it and I have responded by loathing it.
John Wayne movies suckkkk. Everyone is all like “But no! You’ll like this one! It’s different! It’s a classic!” No. They’re all terrible. As are all of Elvis’ and Shirley Temple’s.
Haaaate It’s A Wonderful Life so much too. And i generally love cheesy old Christmas movies. Miracle on 24th St can take a hike too, but you will pry White Christmas from my cold, dead fingers.
White Christmas and The Muppet Christmas Carol are the only Christmas movies that exist in my universe. Okay, maybe I’ll watch the original Grinch (cartoon version only, please), but that’s it.
Yes! You are 100% right and correct!
I recently rewatched It’s a Wonderful Life and found Jimmy Stewart’s character to be whiny, an unnecessary martyr, and abusive of his family. Also there’s this totally weird Italians-so-dirty-and-ethnic-amiright thing that is so weird (but fascinating to me in a cultural history way).
THANK GOODNESS. I hate It’s a Wonderful Life.
I can’t stand It’s A Wonderful Life either! And Miracle of 34th St is treacly and dreadful! So many people do not see it this way 🙁
Yes! I forgot about my IAWL hate! It’s horrible and not Christmasy at all. None of those characters are interesting or make me care about them. Mary should runaway and torch that house as she leaves. Zuzu is a crime against humanity.
Whereas White Christmas is a goddamn delight.
I went to see A Wonderful Life for the first time as an attempt to cheer myself up after my cat died. It didn’t work, of course, and I now hate the movie forever. I’m wondering if I should give it another try (it’s been years! everyone loves it!) but reading these comments has made me decide to just watch the Muppets instead.
I watched Pet Sematary right after my cat died.
I don’t like “It’s a Wonderful Life”, but trust me, that was worse.
Sleepless in Seattle is the worst premise for a film and is not charming or romantic but terrifying and so so so so stupid.
I saw this for the first time last week! I didn’t know she would spend the whole movie STALKING him!
There’s a recut trailer on YouTube of this dumb movie as a thriller and it makes way more sense and would probably be a good feature film.
Came here to say the same. I was home sick a couple months back, it was on, I thought ‘why not?’ and it turned out to be this charming little tale of STALKING and BOUNDARY VIOLATION.
It is the most boring stalking movie.
harses harses harses harses
Napoleon Dynamite. I have always hated it.
YESSSSSSSS. I saw it after everyone else, so I already knew all of what they were quoting and was just like, “WHY do you keep saying that? It’s not even funny when they say it in the movie?”
yah that movie was one big idgi it for me in terms of humor
UGH YES. My BFF and I watched it when it first came out on video (so was still “cool”/somewhat in the zeitgeist) and were both like I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW BAD THIS IS.
VERY TRUE, also you should read this if you haven’t already: http://jezebel.com/i-rewatched-love-actually-and-… (or just reread it because it’s always time to do so)
that article so eloquently outlines all the ways I found that movie problematic. A++
Semi-related: Jezebel is definitely the worst.
Pretty much any 80’s movie that You HAD To Have Seen that is nostalgia fuel (the teen movies, Neverending Story, Princess Bride, etc…). I have not seen all of them, but those I have I first saw either in college or later, when the magic of them just isn’t there. I try to get through them, squint a bunch, go “really?” then watch a documentary about cave paintings or some shit.
Also, Gone With The Wind. Which I know a lot of people don’t love because it’s super awful and racist, but my mother LOVES Gone With The Wind, and the first time I watched it I was probably 5 or 6. And you know how long Gone With The Wind is when you’re 5? Roughly A MILLION YEARS LONG. IT HAS ITS OWN BUILT IN INTERMISSION. My mom is otherwise a woman of pretty impeccable taste and reason, but this fucking movie/book (which she has read probably over twenty times at this point).
I have seen basically none of the 80s nostalgia movies and the ones that I have seen I wasn’t especially excited about. I’m sure if I watched them on my own time I’d be relatively entertained but nothing ruins a movie like being forced to watch it by over-eager friends. I was once at a college party that ground to a halt when it came out that I had never seen Clue and everyone decided that I needed to watch it RIGHT THEN. Like, this is okay, but I’d rather go back to drinking.
I don’t care how romantic everyone says Casablanca is, I will always find it creepy that Humphry Bogart decides who Ingrid Bergman is going to end up with FOR HER. Like, she actually has no say in the matter! She has to stay with the guy she likes less because Bogey tells her to. Creepy as fuck.
WONDER BOYS
WONDER BOYS
WONDER BOYS
Also Silver Linings Playbook
Bridesmaids was enraging. My husband and I sat through the whole movie and after we left we discovered the other was trying to be respectful by not asking to leave. It’s facile, poorly written, and humorless. I felt like no one associated with this movie respected the audience enough to put something clever into it. I HATED BRIDESMAIDS.
I actually don’t mind superhero movies as silly action flicks, but I can’t stand the attempts angst/drama/seriousness that they keep on pushing lately. If they wanted me to connect with the characters, they could try not having them fly around in stupid outfits calling themselves by the kind of names unimaginative 5 year old give their stuffed toys (“this seal is named Flipperman, and my bunny is Bunnyface”). And yet, they insist on trying to make me feel for a villain dressed in a high-end Halloween costume because he felt unappreciated by his dad. Not happening. It’s like trying to watch Price and Prejudice acted out by rodeo clowns.
80’s teen movies. Pretty much any of them besides Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Most of the time I can’t really tell them apart so I can’t name specifics.
Frozen. It’s a paint-by-numbers film if I ever saw one, and completely lacks any emotional resonance after the “Do You Want to Build A Snowman?” song. Stop telling me it’s a new, bold, feminist version of the old fairy tales, because it’s none of the above and The Snow Queen is far more feminist anyway.
“It’s like trying to watch Price and Prejudice acted out by rodeo clowns.”
HAHAHAHAHAHAHDFAFasdfkjaslfh you are a god.
YES. FROZEN. I just watched this with my husband and we’re like “maybe we’re too old for this? maybe it’s more great if you have kids??”
Mind you we generally like Brave and How to Train Your Pet Dragon.
My 11-year-old is generally very MEH on Frozen (as are her parents). She has issues with the storyline, and much prefers The Wind Rises.
Your kid is great 🙂
I once told someone I didn’t like Napoleon Dynamite, and she said “Well, how many times have you seen it? I didn’t like it the first time, either, but after a couple of times, it’ll grow on you.”
No, it won’t. It won’t even get the chance.
I don’t understand movies like this. What, you think I have 6 hours to invest in watching this movie 3 times so I can finally enjoy it? Bruh I have so many other better things to do. If it doesn’t get me the first time through WHY WOULD I DO IT AGAIN. 3 watches worth of time??? I could watch 6 episodes of a TV show I actually like in that same time period. In fact, I will go do that instead. GOOD DAY, SIR.
(In response to Napolean Dynamite taking multiple watches to like, in case Intense Debate messes up)
Like mold!
Napoleon Dynamite was absolute dreck, and it’s one movie I didn’t like for a second (except when the brother slaps ND in the face because I thought, yes, good someone should get slapped for this)
Blue Velvet. Tried twice, felt only bored and/or annoyed that this is even a thing, let alone that anyone likes it. I think I made it through maybe 30 minutes, max.
Any David Lynch, really. Including Twin Peaks, why are they bringing back stupid Twin Peaks? Ugh.
you beat me to it.
My sister always insists that I will like Twin Peaks if I give it another shot. I have given it seven shots; I just don’t like it! I can’t help it! I don’t know how many times we’ll have to sit down and start to watch it before she leaves me alone.
You should make her watch Northern Exposure instead, and explain to her how it is a vastly superior show about a quirky small town.
Oh man… Blue Velvet is actually one where I feel like there’s something wrong with me for not liking it, but it was just a really brutally unpleasant film to me.
Slight digression. I read Horns by Joe Hill a few months ago. I thought it was pretty good, and I like Hill as a writer, but (vague spoilers) the violence against women (really one woman) in that book just hit me so hard, and I can’t even articulate why. I’m not even critical of it, exactly, I just read those parts and really felt the ugliness seeping into me. Maybe that was the point? Anyway, the violence against Isabella Rossellini’s character in Blue Velvet, and her humiliation, hit me the same kind of way. Like: is this necessary?
I have many friends who love David Lynch and try to explain to me how the unpleasantness and discomfort is what makes him good, but this makes no sense to me? And apparently not everyone feels the need for a coherent narrative thread (it’s just about creating a mood or like, the imagery, or something), but, um, I like to watch a movie that isn’t just a bunch of disturbing situations stitched together.
Then again I can’t even finish Blue Velvet so maybe there is a story to that one?
I think it does have a pretty traditional plot, and I don’t remember any supernatural weirdness. But as I said, it’s just brutally unpleasant.
Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight.
Nothing. Happens. In. These. Movies.
Oh God, and the Disney version of Hercules. I HATE IT. I HATE IT SO MUCH. I WAS FORCED TO WATCH IT SO MANY TIMES IN COLLEGE AND I JUST. FREAKING. HATE IT.
LOL @ Zeus and Hera having a happy monogamous marriage and being afraid of Hades.
YES. Why bother telling this story if you’re going to cut out the good bits?
lol @ your college
No matter how many times you quote it at me, I will never like Mean Girls. I know it came out when you were in middle school and it has so many ridiculous memorable lines, but watching an entire film about high school bullies isn’t my idea of fun.
YOU CAN’T SIT WITH US!
It came out when I was in college and I was underwhelmed, having actually read the source material. Did Tina Fey even write anything? http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/magazine/girls-…
Oh my god, I used to love that movie as unreservedly as I love “When Harry Met Sally” and “You’ve Got Mail,” but I rewatched it last year and…eughhh. It has funny moments but the general premise is creepy and awful and it only even close to works because Meg Ryan is charming. (I do still love Rosie O’Donnell in it, and that scene when Meg Ryan is in the car listening to Christmas carols and singing “horses horses horses horses horses”)
ETA: Meant to be a reply to EdgarAllenPoBoy above, about Sleepless In Seattle. I have been having this problem all day!
American Psycho. I don’t even know if I’m supposed to love it but I thought it was GARBAGE and actually had to turn it off halfway through. I get it, he’s an asshole..
But is he really an asshole or is he a crazy asshole??? wooooooooooooooooooooo
(yeah I didn’t get it either)
congratulations you understand all of Bret Easton Ellis’s stuff!
Pretty much any historical epic. I’m viewed as a horrible human being because I didn’t care for Gladiator all that much.
Gladiator was terrible. I think that seeing that movie with my dad was an actual turning point in our relationship. Yep, so terrible it changed the way we saw each other.
Dad: That was fun! Did you see the horses? Wow.
NTA: That was not fun. Did you not even see that movie? Given the general tone of his scenes, I’m pretty sure that the reason we’re supposed to hate the emperor is not because he’s petulant or rapey but instead for his small facial deformity and for not being personally present at various mass murders. Also, what was with brutally murdering Crowe’s wife off screen? And then having him spend almost as much time mourning his horses and his farm as his wife and child?
Dad: Why can’t you let anything be fun?
NTA: UUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGH.
Sometimes my boyfriend will make references to Gladiator, because he knows I’ve seen it, and he seems to forget that I saw it once in high school and mostly remember that I spent a chunk of the movie having problems with the liberties it took with Roman history. I do not remember the names of any of the characters.
I actually really like Roman Empire stuff as a rule, but Gladiator is so freaking BLAND. For whatever reason, it’s my husband’s favorite movie ever, and he watches it ALL. THE. TIME. Against my will, I have ended up memorizing the entire “My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius” speech.
I am a historian. I hate Gladiator, and I hate it doubly for all the terrible, oppressively male, ultra-violent-yet-somehow-bloodless sword and sandal epics it has spawned.
300 AND ALEXANDER ARE BOTH YOUR FAULT, RUSSEL CROWE.
This one time, at band camp, we watched Gladiator on a TV with bad color, so all the blood was, like, bright fuchsia. That was pretty fun.
YES! I have tried to watch Gladiator 3-4 times but I have fallen asleep each time! And I love history, I SHOULD like it.
I love history too, but that doesn’t mean I have to like every historical epic that comes down the pike. I mean, by that logic I’d have to like Anastasia. *shivers*
Me and You and Everyone We Know! I spent a lot of it being like, “oh yes I see his black wife/partner didn’t UNDERSTAND HIM but you’re weird and kooky so you do yay for you” but maybe I missed the point?
I want to throw everything Miranda July creates into a fire.
I agree with this and feel like we could make a very nice garden party out of it.
There is this angelina jolie move where she is the head of a family of assassins and they get their secret instructions woven into cloth and then they know who to kill next and what the hell is that about? WTF weaving assassination instructions?
I would have loved to have satin on the pitch meeting for this movie
Is that the one where she trains Office Douche and he gets all badass and kills people and then at the end he looks at the camera and says “what have you done lately?” and I very nearly smashed my television? Because I hated that movie, but it might not be the one you’re talking about.
Oh God, Wanted. I was forced to go see that with my parents even though my mom and I wanted to see Wall-E but my dad refused because he “doesn’t like animated movies.”
That was a horrific two hours of my life.
This is one of the movies that was so bad I really enjoyed it. It got to Morgan Freeman intoning “THE LOOM OF FATE” dramatically and my friends and I all just cracked up. Fond memories.
A+ wordplay, there 🙂
Umm “Angelina Jolie is an assassin and also there’s a scene where she gets out of a tub.” DONE. There’s your pitch.
Oh sweet christ I’d repressed the memory of that Angelina Jolie movie and now it’s coming back to me. Also I think Atonement man was in it. WHHHHYYYYYYY
“a family of assassins and they get their secret instructions woven into cloth”
“I would have loved to have satin”
Typo, or BEST TYPO EVER??
Is this the movie where Angelina Jolie says the line “It’s a letter from my father. He wrote it before he died.” ?I’ve heard there’s such a film but hadn’t seen it (or wanted to).
anything by david lynch. sorry/notsorry
Fargo.
American Beauty.
The Godfather (all eleventy-billion hours of it).
UGH
American Beauty. I watched it in theaters and was all, “so this is really about how hard it is to be a straight white man? Wow, I have absolutely no interest in that problem.”
That’s another Crash–voracious critical acclaim when it came out, then a sudden backlash that has left it as a laughingstock (or a hatingstock, if that’s a thing).
My brother warned me that “it’s about this guy trying to fuck this teenage girl, seriously that’s the whole movie” and I watched it anyway. I should have listened.
oh also The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover.
Oh my GOD how could I forget A Clockwork Orange!! So many mansplainers have told me how wonderful and amazing and groundbreaking that film is and yet I absolutely despise it. Never made it through the whole thing because I had no doubt that nothing that came later could possibly redeem the first 30 min of that piece of garbage. So *many* debates with male film buffs about this one.
Someone insisted that I watch this, because they were certain I would appreciate it, blah blah blah. I forced them to turn it off. I have never regretted that decision. Thanks, I don’t really enjoy watching the patriarchy/rape apologist culture in action. All set here.
I had to watch that for a class, and I was HORRIFIED. I ended up not being able to get through it at all, and just relying on a plot summary. If I hadn’t been such a meek freshman, I might have actually complained to the professor about it.
YES. That is what I came here to say. I also have a bunch of lady friends who defend it, too and I just can’t stand it. Makes me sick and angry when I watch it. I like some Kubrick (Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket are two of my favorite films) but Clockwork Orange is him going way too far. It’s upsetting and painful to sit through and I wish we would stop paying it any attention because gross.
It might be, there are so many awful assassination movies.So, so very many, made by men, about badass Angelina Jolie being queen of assassins. Oh PLEASE
Taxi Driver – Jodi Foster is great, but the movie is straight up terrible.
Amadeus – Boring. Like watching paint dry without any of the stimulus.
La Vie En Rose – Waste of a pitch-perfect Marion Cotillard in a terribly structured poorly paced movie.
I think “La Vie En Rose” has pretty much soured me on biopics for good. Oh the TORTURED ARTIST.
Inception.
All Christopher Nolan movies, if I’m honest. The only exception is The Prestige and I STILL can’t watch the last 10 minutes because I DON’T NEED YOU TO HOLD MY HAND THROUGH THE ENDING, CHRIS. I GET IT.
GOD YES Inception was so fucking boring.
EDIT: OH and Memento is legit great. That and Dark Knight are the only Nolan movies I’m into, and the latter is like 95% because of Heath Ledger.
I generally like Nolan movies, but I can’t take them as seriously ever since a commenter on TNC’s blog was like “GOD, Nolan, we get it! You have friends! If you want to see them, have a bbq like everyone else instead of just making another movie.”
That’s all I think about every time a new Nolan movie trailer comes out. “JUST HAVE A BBQ INSTEAD”
ETA: on second thought, maybe I’m at best mildly amused with his work.
Yeah, I really loved Memento when it came out, but every single movie of Nolan’s I’ve seen since then has disappointed me. He has a terrible Women in Refrigerators problem (which was already there in Memento, but became a pattern in all his movies after that).
ET, I just felt so manipulated at the end, it’s stopped me from watching any other Spielberg movie willingly. I still haven’t seen Schindler’s List.
Disney movies. I don’t like any of them for either the same reason I don’t like ET and/or for horrible stereotypes. I don’t really understand why people love Disney.
DO NOT SEE SCHINDLER’S LIST. Sentimental cheap emotionally manipulative self-aggrandizing bullshit of E.T. times a zillion. Harrumph.
I dislike most Disney films. I remember having to sit through them as a child and thinking “this is stupid and unfunny, why does everyone like it?”, and it’s no better as an adult.
That movie qualifies for one of the single worst book-to-film adaptations I have ever encountered.
I like the Jeopardy-style puzzles created by these Intense Debate malfunctions. I’ll take a stab: What is Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita? (Shit, can’t believe I forgot to include that in my other comment.)
That is an excellent spin to put on the comment situation, and a very good stab at the puzzle. But I was replying to a comment about The House of Mirth, a slow plodding film that is far more boring than Edith Wharton should ever be.
A quick google tells me that it was directed by the same guy who directed The Deep Blue Sea, a movie that opens with naked Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston yet STILL manages to be boring.
Also notable for disappointing everyone who expects it to be Deep Blue Sea (a cinematic classic).
That’s how I got my girlfriend to watch it! ha
It’s A Wonderful Life
*ducks behind chair*
Here’s the thing. Potter gets away with stealing their life’s savings! No one holds him to account. I know my heart is supposed to be warmed by the community coming to the rescue, but I just end up angry, and then empty-feeling.
Not to mention Mr. Gower the druggist slapping George until his ear bleeds, George’s angry verbal abuse of his family, and a series of other moments where people behaved badly and were never called out.
…I don’t like It’s a Wonderful Life either. It’s a Christmas Eve tradition at my in-laws. :/
It’s a terrible fucking movie and I have no idea how it ended up as a Christmas classic!
Oh, it’s SO SO TERRIBLE, and ridiculously slow-paced, but it did let me discover that I do a hell of an “angry Jimmy Stewart” impersonation. See also: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
YES! THIS MOVIE IS THE FUCKING WORST! HOW IS THIS A CHRISTMAS CLASSIC?!?! THANK YOU FOR SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER
The uncle (how could you not remember meeting The Antagonist in the last place you had the money??), the rich prick who goes ‘Hee-Haw’, and that one man in the savings and loan who takes out all his money (fuck you, everyone else in the community is trying to get by on as little they can without taking their FuCkIng HOneyMOon money until the banks open again!!!!!) …er, those moments send me into a rage until I can barely watch the film (calming breaths)
Also, the signifier that Bedford Falls has collapsed into absolute moral disrepair is…it has jazz clubs?
Dead Poet’s Society.
NO. STOP IT.
TOOOOOO SOOOOOOON
I’ll jump right on that bandwagon for The Big Lebowski. And A Christmas Story–it’s super dumb, the characters are all annoying.
Ooh, yes. I have so many, and they (I) always start fights in the AV Club comments.
Also The Big Lebowski, and less so also Raising Arizona. I am a big Coens fan in most respects, but those two do nothing for me.
Zodiac. Pick a story, bub. If it’s an unsettling, elegiac mediation on the nature of obsession, you don’t get to cheat and put in a bunch of Exciting Murder Scenes that have nothing to do with Graysmith’s perspective. And also? It’s boring. And also? It spawned David Fincher’s reputation as a great director, when he is actually just a perfectly competent director.
The Usual Suspects. Really dour for an crime caper movie. The twist lacks any punch. And yeah, it’s super overrated, which magnifies my dislike for the film itself.
American History X. Actually, I’m not sure if I’m even supposed to like that one, but I definitely do not like it. It features the least convincing character transformation in film history. (Violent white supremacist –> anti-racist in the course of one five-minute scene of mild jokes and general good humor by a black character.)
The Untouchables. Okay, I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to like this mediocre late-80s Costner vehicle, but seriously, what trash. Score is thuddingly unsubtle, Costner is bad, Pacino is ludicrously over-the-top, the characters are all stock types, it celebrates police violence and Prohibition (?), ugh. It is truly sad, an injustice even, that Sean Connery won his sole Oscar for this movie. It would be like if Bill Murray won an Oscar for Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties.
YESSS to The Usual Suspects and the Untouchables. Terrible.
Ah shit, I don’t know how I totally dropped the ball on bashing Woody Allen here. Midnight In Paris: in which Rachel McAdams’ character is literally* named “Shrewish Harpy.” And even after Allen stacks the deck in Owen Wilson’s favor that much, I still hate his character. “Oh, I’m just too thoughtful and mopey for the 21st century. I wish I could go back to a simpler time, when totalitarian regimes were about to dismember the global order and kill millions.”
Blue Jasmine: In which no character behaves like a human being, and no character can maintain a consistent attitude towards anything for more than the length of a scene. Just the laziest collection of plot devices on legs.
*Figuratively.
OMG YES. My husband and I haaaaaaaated Midnight in Paris and we literally (LITERALLY) haven’t found anyone else who didn’t like it. I mean, Owen Wilson actually SAYS the theme (a theme? who cares) of the movie out of his mouth like we are idiots. Ugh. I could go on forever. And when I rant about this to other people they say “well yeah but…it was such a fun movie!” No. no it was not. I reluctantly accepted my mom’s excuse that she liked seeing Owen Wilson playing Woody Allen, but I will accept no others. Ugh. Hate.
Blue Jasmine I tolerated because I live where it was filmed so…I was obliged.
I mean, the thing is, a time travel story played as a low-key dramedy is actually a great, fun hook! But the execution and the characters are so, so bad.
Lebowski is a weird one for me, because I thought it was GENIUS the first time, and then saw it a few years later and was just like… huh? I enjoyed this at one point?
My family tried to convince me that I was just entirely humorless for not “appreciating” Raising Arizona. Which is just total bullshit.
The Coens can be absolutely hilarious. See Burn After Reading. But neither Raising Arizona nor The Big Lebowski is particularly funny; they both over-rely on people acting odd rather than funny.
Leaving Las Vegas was horrific and boring and just terrible.
I will gladly cosign on that slow motion train-wreck
Oh God, yes. I refuse to be the kind of person who pats herself on the back for bravely watching so miserable and depressing and soul-sucking.
As a southern woman, I get some side eye for not liking Steel Magnolias. Ouiser was cool? Otherwise… ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Also got shit for not having cried while watching it. I cried during Pumpkinhead and during The English Patient, I’m not a monster or anything!
Can’t believe nobody’s mentioned Crash yet.
Also Little Miss Sunshine.
Crash is widely acknowledged to be absolute garbage in retrospect, that’s probably why nobody has mentioned it.
Little Miss Sunshine: my suspension of disbelief came crashing down when the son discovered… at the age of seventeen … that he was colorblind. Take it from one who knows: you cannot live that long in America without learning several times over that you are colorblind. For one thing, you’ll be tested for it every year from like first to fifth grade.
I actually worked with a guy who didn’t know until he was 19. He was just colorblind enough to fail a vision test he had to take. (He wanted to be on whatever the National Guard calls their bomb squad. I guess it’s possible he said something so stupid to the person administering the vision test that they just quietly put “colorblind” on his results to keep him from getting any farther. If so, to the vision-test person: thank you for your great service to your country. Because I watched that guy kick a live cottonmouth once.)
Have you read Film Crit Hulk on Little Miss Sunshine? If not, allow me to fuel your hatred. http://badassdigest.com/2012/02/21/film-crit-hulk…
Any and all Star Wars, oh man, so boring and stupid. My husband has filled our entiiiire guest room with boxes of unopened Star Wars toys from his child/teenhood. I cannot. I CANNOT.
Yes. My Dad made me watch the entire trilogy when I was so young and easily confused that I couldn’t tell Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo apart, so now I hate those films, which gets a bit lonely when half the Internet is made up of memes about how great they are.
I rewatched it recently out of morbid curiosity. It’s very very bad, but Tom Wilkinson is the other person who is obviously enjoying himself and turns in a great performance.
What was the name of the movie Geoffrey Rush was in, where he was the piano player? Shine, I think it was? The only lines I remember from it were “Rach III?!! You can’t play Rach III!! No one has ever played Rach III in its entirety!!!” And guess what? He plays RACH III! Wow! Rave reviews all around!
Oh! Oh god I forgot about that insipid piece of crap! He’s jumping on a trampoline in just a trench coat because he’s charmingly and artistically insane! Shut uppppppppp
All I remember about that movie is he poops in the bathtub? Or someone does. I’m not sure. My only take-away!
I feel kinda bad about this one, but… Indiana Jones.
Don’t feel bad. Indiana Jones is a profoundly racist movie.
Racist against Nazis! I mean Germans!
I can’t tell how sincere you’re being, but anyone who hasn’t seen those movies in a while and goes back for a rematch will find it’s actually really racist against Arabs and South Americans. Indiana Jones probably made Edward Said cry.
I cannot get behind “She’s The Man,” Ferris Bueller, or any LGBT movie starring white homosexual men and “I don’t care about labels” women. This includes Brokeback goddamn Mountain.
Based on the breathless reviews it got (by dudely reviewers, obviously), I think I’m supposed to’ve loved Her, but it is straight-up AWFUL.
That movie was so fucking boring. One dude’s navel-gazing feeeelings very loosely dressed up as social commentary.
THANK YOU I could not make it through that. The writing in his fake letters was just. OUCH.
Check out Richard Brody’s review:
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/ai…
Key quote: “The film, with its dewy tone and gentle manners, plays like a feature-length kitten video, leaving viewers to coo at the cute humans who live like pets in a world-scale safe house.”
Goonies. Just don’t get the appeal.
I was coming here to say exactly this. Why oh why do people love it so much?
I moved to a new town before 7th grade, and all the kids at my new school had gotten SUPER into Goonies and Newsies in like 6th grade, and I will never not relive those feelings of awkward exclusion when someone quotes either of those movies, so I’m glad you hate Goonies. It’s giving me strength.
I didn’t hate it, but I also didn’t really like it, and I was in a similar situation as Maddy above wherein EVERYONE in my school fucking absolutely ADORED it and I just did not understand.
Haven’t seen it mentioned yet, so I have to add Four Weddings and a Funeral – everyone said how wonderful it was, darling, and I can’t bear to even imagine the stereotypes being peddled from the little clips I have seen. Love, Actually also. Ugh. The preciousness of bourgeois England…
And how bad is Andie McDowell’s acting? So bad.
She tries, bless her heart. In every movie she has every been in, she has tried to act.
In theory, Chinatown should be a movie that I love. Instead, I have fallen asleep while trying to watch it no less than five times.
I’M BORED OF SUPERHERO FILMS. There like this generation’s western, there’s going to be six billion of them, and when we’re old, there’ll be channels, showing them 24/7 and our grandkids will say ‘oh, grandma’s fine, they’ve put an ‘Avengers’ marathon on again, all 12 films!” Agents of Shield is our Bonanza.
aaah you are absolutely right! I will never be able to un-think this now!
(thank you, thank you, thank you)
Fuck yes. I’m sure some of them are good on an individual level, but the extent to which they are sucking up all the blockbuster resources in Hollywood just makes me hate them indiscriminately.
THANK YOU
Omg, yes! I’m sorry, I know people love them and the actors are really, really handsome and all that, but they’ve become interchangeable at this point. And also, I’m an adult, so NO.
yes yes yes. I think the last superhero movie I truly liked was Spiderman 2, and I was something like 14 at the time.
Brilliant! Ha!
Nearly any comedy. I love sketch comedy, I flove sitcoms, and yet nearly any comedy movie of the last ten years or so — with a few exceptions, maybe? — tends to leave me underwhelmed.
BRAZIL UGHHHHH.
Okay, Terry, I GET IT. Bureaucracy! Dystopia! Why do you need over two hours to tell this boring stupid story? Although I’ll admit the only Gilliam stuff I like is Monty Python, so.
ETA: this was supposed to be a response to mochi289 up above…? But it still stands.
Many people assume I am the type of person to like Wes Anderson movies. I am not the type of person. I do not hate them, per se, but I do not enjoy them. Please don’t tell me about your favorite one. The Life Aquatic was boring overlong garbage, I am sorry to tell you. Fantastic Mr. Fox ruined a perfectly good Roald Dahl story.
I watched A Nightmare Before Christmas for the first time several years ago at age 20, and I didn’t get it or like it. I remember somewhere around 2003 it was promoted to like, Modern Classic for Dark Adults and Children, but no. I guess I should’ve watched it as a kid. (On the other hand, I really like Edward Scissorhands, so. -shrug emoji- )
I mostly just don’t give a damn about A Nightmare Before Christmas. But I also far prefer Christmas to Halloween.
My friend and I went to see Fantastic Mr Fox without knowing it was Wes Anderson. We thought, it’s just a kids movie of a book we like.
It was an EXTREMELY disorienting experience. We were like, “WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS CHILDREN’S MOVIE?! WHY IS IT SO ODD?! IT FEELS ICKY AND CREEPY!”
And now I think about how…if you watch a movie and it requires a disclaimer as to who made it so you don’t feel like the skin on your body is crawling away…I don’t know if that’s the least or most successful example of directing ever.
Silver Linings Playbook. Finally saw it now that it’s on Netflix, HATED it.
IT’S SO BAD!!!!! The dialogue is like bad fan fiction, and I fucking hate the “everyone is crazy in their OWN WAY” message.
THE WORST
I haaaaaaaaaaate that fucking movie.
I haven’t watched it, butI read it for my book group recently and loathed it. All of the characters were so unlikeable.
YES THANK YOU. As someone who deals with mental illness it made me so angry. Also the plotline with the bookmaking or whatever was dull as paste.
THANK YOU. I watched and was what, this guy FINALLY figures out that she’s messing with his head, and that makes him fall in love with her??? I ended up hating them both.
Guardians of the Galaxy. I felt like I was watching someone pointing at the screen and telling me that I needed to love the movie because of THAT and THAT and THAT instead of watching a movie about people I could care about.
I hate that movie, a lot. I think Cap 2 raised my bar and GotG went in and ordered a whiskey on the rocks to be cool. I have friends who loved it and I look at them like, “But HOW?”
EVERYONE I KNOW loved that movie. I am trying to keep quiet around them so as not to depress them all. But the whole thing just felt contrived to me!
EXACTLY.
Wait, for some reason I was under the impression that you loved it too! I’m so glad I was wrong!
I thought it was SO BAD! And consequently was accused of being a pretentious movie snob. But it’s just so formulaic! Also I cannot get over the fact that they decided to make that movie before they made Wonder Woman. I saw it opening weekend feeling all optimistic because it got such good reviews, but ever since I did I’ve felt like I’m living in a crazy world. WHY DOES EVERYONE THINK IT IS THE BEST??
YES. It was not as good as it wanted to be, the women were superfluous (THE RACCOON HAS MORE BACKSTORY THAN GAMORA) and Chris Pratt has baaaaaasically the same character arc as in the Lego Movie, with more swearing.
100% Love Actually. WHY DO PEOPLE LIKE THIS MOVIE. All of the stories are actually really depressing and/or really creepy. Most of the men exhibit stereotypical gross RomCom Hero attitudes, though in varying flavors: Hugh Grant and Colin Firth have some weird power imbalances and stalkery moments in their relationships that make me feel not okay, and that kid who goes to America just to Bang Chicks, well, it’s right there in the description.
The whole Keira Knightley and her husband’s best friend story line is the most obviously creepy: just fucking get over it and stop being the worst friend ever.
Emma Thompson’s storyline might be the WORST because WHO CHEATS ON EMMA THOMPSON? If you’re going to cheat on Emma Thompson, maybe you should just stop breathing instead, I don’t care if you’re Alan Rickman.
Listen, I could keep going (Liam Neeson, whose wife is dead! His son who chases a girl who has never shown any interest in him through the airport because his “chances at love” are worth more than her comfort or privacy!) but I will spare you all any further tirade. Ugh this movie.
Kenneth Branagh?
Which is why I hate everything he does on principle.
I was going to post just that but I couldn’t remember how to spell his name.
The only pass I can give to Kenneth Brannagh is his adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing and that’s mostly for casting Emma Thompson and Denzel Washington, and, weirdly, Keanu Reeves who is so hilariously awful that it loops back around to amazing.
I definitely had to google his name.
Much Ado sort of cancels out (though his face still annoys me in it).
I love it when Keanu gives this speech: “I cannot hide what I am: I must be sad when I have cause and smile at no man’s jests, eat when I have stomach and wait for no man’s leisure, sleep when I am drowsy and tend on no man’s business, laugh when I am merry and claw no man in his humour.”
Bahaha. Hilarious. He delivers it like Siri.
AMEN.
yes. that movie is the worst movie.
it’s a good movie as a HORROR MOVIE ABOUT LOVE.
Holy SHIT. You are so right.
YES finally. I was so surprised it wasn’t mentioned earlier; it is the Worst. All of my normally sensible feminist friends are all about this movie cause it’s supposedly the best rom com but no it’s just horrid.
Wes Anderson films. Like, I like the aesthetic but at some point now I’m like “oh god, I’m tired of these 95% white casts and these psuedo-magical realism plots.”
Almost Famous
Fargo
Burn After Reading (I guess the only Coen Bros movie I like is O Brother Where Art Thou)
Ghost Dog (one of my professors has this on his best movies list, and I hated it but was watching with acquaintances who I thought were into it and I was being polite, and they thought I was into it and were being polite, and it was just a huge waste of time all around)
Notting Hill? The terrible movie with Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. I had to sit through it twice.
Meet the Parents. Meet the Fockers, too, at least the 14 minutes I was awake for it.
Anything with Will Ferrell or Ben Stiller, except parts of Zoolander.
Michael . . . something – the lawyer movie with George Clooney.
GOOD WILL HUNT-*zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz*
The only things I remember about that movie:
1) they say “fuck” about a bazillion times, like I think there might have been only three other words of dialogue
2) at one point Minnie Driver and Matt Damon are eating sandwiches and then they kiss with their mouths full and she says “I think I got some of your pickle” * and I’m not a squeamish person, but GROSS SO GROSS, she is not a baby bird to be fed with your masticated soggy mouth-food.
*Okay, eight other words, and these are them.
Minnie! Noooooo!
I re-watched that this weekend for the first time since it came out (I’m on a Robin Williams nostalgia kick), and you know what was unexpected? Stellan Skarsgard’s assholish-but-cool math professor was the only character in the movie I ended up caring about. Also, it was hilarious listening to him lapse back into a Swedish accent every time he raised his voice.
*bellows*
GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY
*hisses*
frrrooooozzeeennnnn
EDIT: OH MY GOD and The Lego Movie.
LOL everyone was like SEE THE LEGO MOVIE IT’S SO GOOOOOOOD.
And like, no it wasn’t. The only upside is that now I can harass my boyfriend with that dumb song whenever I feel like it.
Right? I should add these were all movies I entered fully prepared to ADORE. But the Lego Movie was gross, patronizing, glib instead of clever, and a little bit sexist.
It’s also weird, because I LOVED The Avengers, Tangled, and Wreck-It Ralph, which are definitely the three spiritual/financial predecessors to these respective movies. So it’s not (as I have to frequently explain to whining fanboys) that I don’t like kid’s movies or superhero movies. I just want them to be good!
Guardians of the Galaxy was lazy and phoned in on every level and EVERYONE I KNOW LOVES IT. I wanted to love it too, so it’s worse that I didn’t because now I feel betrayed.
The Muppets. yes, I went there.
I hate anything with Muppets in. Partly that is because they scare me, but I also find them deeply irritating. When we studied A Christmas Carol at school they made us watch the Muppet version (how is this helping us learn?) and I was so angry.
I finally watched Clue for the first time a couple months ago, after being told for years that I NEEDED to see it. And it was fine? Like, I didn’t hate it, and it was amusing, but I totally do not get the cult fanaticism over it at all.
I also was expecting way more from the “Flames…on the sides of my face” moment. Total letdown.
Pretty much anything by Stanley Kubrick, and the negative sentiments only become stronger with each person who tries to argue me out of my opinions about these films!
The Lion King.
COME AT ME.
I always feel like I have to hide my dislike for the Lion King. I like Hamlet, why don’t I like the Lion King? But it’s… just not good. And Scar still kind of scares me.
How about the fact that Scar is clearly meant to invoke both gay and Jewish stereotypes?
Now that we’re on the third page…
I do not care for The Princess and The Frog. I do not like jazz music, and my enjoyment of a soundtrack is directly proportional to how much I like the movie. I did not like the firefly. But I constantly worry that my dislike of this movie is racist.
Willow and The Dark Crystal. I don’t know why, but I have always hated both. They feel like the darkness is closing in.
Moulin Rouge I just can’t get past the plot to enjoy the aesthetic. I should like musicals and technicolor sets but..,.Lead character is deeply whiny and obnoxious and turned on by tuberculosis and this is supposed to be so romantic.
The Big Lebowski An ex boyfriend loved this movie. I just don’t get the love. It’s just not worth obessively requoting and memorizing.
LOTR Tolkien is so boring, I could barely finish the Hobbit, ….<falls asleep>…huh…epic battle?
Star Wars I miss nothing by not finishing the original trilogy. That’s heresy to guys my age.
The entire ouevre of Woody Allen. Aside from his personal life, it’s like wish fulfillment for deeply unappealing neurotic men who write themselves tons of babes. Boring.
Almost Famous Rented it three times but just didn’t see it. Do not care about some magical teen boy’s 60’s coming of age.
Most teen flicks set in high school, especially John Hughes movies. They don’t age well and even when I was a teen they were about strange teen shaped aliens. Let’s go hang out at the mall as a thing to do in our free time! WHUT.
Anchorman: meh.
Rocky Horror Picture Show: ???
Anchorman: meh.
I hate Will Ferrell and everything he does with a fiery passion and no one understands me
Oh god yes on RHPS
Like, it’s…
…campy?
But…no.
The Big Lebowski, It’s A Wonderful Life, any of those Molly Ringwald movies, Woody Allen crap, and that Hobbit series that drags on and on.
Pretty sure I fell asleep while watching The Matrix at a gathering.
Definitely fell asleep in the theater while watching No Country for Old Men (I do not normally fall asleep during movies, but I had a migraine).
I also fell asleep during a number of movies an ex of mine tried to show me, but I think that was due more to the timing of when we started the viewings than the movies themselves.
I was not impressed with Pacific Rim, but I blame that on the fact that we saw it in IMAX 3D and the sound was too loud. Also the fight scenes were really hard to watch with all the rain. I didn’t hate it, I was just ready for it to be over.
My cut of Lord of the Rings would be a lot shorter, but again, I didn’t hate it (though I’ve only seen each of them once and have no desire to watch the director’s cuts. Again, fight scenes are long and boring and mostly provide convenient opportunities to use the bathroom or get snacks.
I’ve definitely fallen asleep while trying to watch the Matrix! Also with V for Vendetta! Not bothered by this at all.
My hatred for Love, Actually runs deep. Such saccharine nonsense mixed with the creepiness, as you said. Colin Firth can’t even COMMUNICATE with his lady love, and she WORKS FOR HIM. Uggggggggggghhhhhhhhh.
Right?? Nearly all of the women in the movie are agent-less love objects in the men’s stories, and the fact that she literally can’t communicate with the man pursuing her is such a laughably overt example of this. I don’t understand how anyone finds that romantic.
“Love Actually” is a movie-hatefuck. I think Emma Thompson being perfect in Everything She Does, Ever, is what keeps me from setting it on fire.
Pulp Fiction. To be fair I’ve never seen it all the way through. I HAVE, however, Seen the first half twice.
Goonies. I didn’t see it until I was in my 20s, clearly I’m missing something you get from it as a child.
As a kid, I LOVED Spaceballs. I tried to watch it on Netflix at some point in the last year. I turned it off after about 30 minutes. I don’t know specifically what changed, but apparently the Spaceball-part of my brain died.
HATED “Black Swan.” It’s “OOOOOoooOOOOoooHHHH she’s so PRETTY and FRAGILE and maybe she’s CRAZY but instead of slapping her horrible teacher and her horrible mom and taking the first Greyhound to anywhere else, of COURSE she’ll die quietly, helplessly and artfully arranged, because I dunno, something about beauty and power or whatever.”
Magnolia. Oh my god, fuck you Magnolia.
The frogs were the only part worth watching.
The Godfather.
Absolutely agree with you about Magnolia. The rain of frogs was wonderful, too bad it couldn’t have happened in an actual decent movie.
Ditto on Magnolia.
This reminds me of that scene in Gilmore Girls when Rory tells Dean about how much her mom hates Magnolia. “She sat there for three hours screaming, ‘I WANT MY LIFE BACK!'”
Tangled, Edge of Tomorrow, Pacific Rim. My friends wouldn’t shut up about them when we walked out. I enjoyed them all but no where near as much as the rest of the world seems to.
Lost in Translation. I don’t understand why we don’t revile that movie as much as we now do Garden State – like, why on earth am I supposed to feel sorry for anyone in this movie but Anna Faris’s character? I can’t believe how long it took people to figure out Sofia Coppola was a Mean Girl.
uuuuuuuuuuugh I hate Lost in Translation so much
I <3 you. And hate that stupid, boring ass movie. OH LOOK RICH WHITE SAD PEOPLE. BY FAR THE BEST POSSIBLE STORY TO TELL ABOUT PEOPLE IN TOKYO IF YOU HAVE THE BUDGET AND ABILTY TO FILM A MOVIE IN TOKYO.
MAN I hated that movie. One of my wanabee-filmmaker exes (I dated not one but TWO of them) was obsessed with it and never understood why I always fell asleep whenever he put it on. (It’s boring, everyone in it is terrible.)
I have had so many random encouters at parties over the last 10 years for some reason, I think I’m among friends and I’m just going OFF about this movie and everyone just starts staring at me coldly. “Um, that’s my favorite movie.” Looks great! Soundtrack is great! ALL OF THE HUMANS INVOLVED ARE SMUG GARBAGE.
I have been going through this whole thing looking for Lost In Translation! So excited to find you!
Hate this movie. Its about mopey people being mopey and sneering at their alienation in japan, using actual people who are different from them as prop representations of actual “aliens” for alienation. Gross.
If I knew these guys in real life, I’d be like, SUCK IT UP JERKS.
YES. Boo to Japan as backdrop for white tourists’ alienation. (One of the reasons I’m not a fan of Lena Dunham is that in a poorly written essay about a trip to Japan she whines about Sofia Coppola having beaten her to this premise).
Also, the weird sexual tension between Bill and Scarlett and his attitude toward his wife.
OH GOD YES. This is my (white male) friend’s favorite movie and I can’t even think of a single part of it that was decent.
I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST ME.
And Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antionette. Meh.
I just…Sofia Coppola gives us rich, pretty, misunderstood people. Meh. MEH.
I always end up struggling to explain why I hate this movie at parties. So glad to know that someone else shares this hate!!
The last mainstream movie that people (and critics!) assured me I would love (and I was gullible enough to believe them) was “The Devil Wears Prada” Yes, good actresses, nice to see women as icons of ambition and power but God, what a shitty waste of my time. Now I just don’t go to most mainstream films anymore and I’m a lot happier for it. Also when Robin Williams died I watched a short clip of “Good Will Hunting” and it was just about unbearable: really terrible script.
I only made it through the first chapter of Devil Wears Prada, so I knew no power on earth could make me watch the movie.
THE TERRIBLE NUGGET OF HACKNEYED, SEXIST CINEMATIC SHIT THAT IS ‘LOVE ACTUALLY’.
I need a whole thread for “let’s talk about movies we loved when we were innocent teenagers but re-watched post-feminist awakening and were horrified’. God I wish I had let “Say Anything” stay a beautiful and distant memory.
…I hate Love Actually SO much more since it fooled young teen me into liking it the first time I saw it, despite the issues even pre-feminist awakening me could see. I hate all of the creepiness with great fervor, but the worst part for me is that the soundtrack managed to dig its sugar-coated claws in deep. The two main offenders: the soaring music when Colin Firth creepily arrives in Portugal (it is what I hum absentmindedly when I’m looking for STEREOTYPICAL SOARING MUSIC) and Bye Bye Baby (which has actually made me cry because I associate it with the movie funeral. Still hate Hate Actually I PROMISE).
I rewatched that recently and was so totally upset about all of the story lines. “Hey, let’s let everyone be totally disrespectful to every female character and treat them terribly but it’s cool because Christmas!”
I’m too bored by him to feel anything resembling fiery passion, but I do not understand why people spend hours watching him do stuff on purpose.
I would probably cool into apathy if I weren’t surrounded by people who love him and just want me to give Elf a chance
I hated ‘Raising Arizona’. I also loathed ‘Annie’, which felt weird at the age of 10. Feckin’ *hated* that flick.
I never liked Annie either! Pretty sure I slept through it at more than one elementary school sleepover and, having heard most of the songs over and over by now anyway, I have no desire to actually watch it to see if 10 year old me was just very picky. Because I very much doubt it.
Pacific Rim. I’m not especially deep, my favourite genres of movies are Things Explode and People Have Feelings, and I love Guillermo del Toro, but this just didn’t do it for me and I’m still sad about it.
I love monsters, and giant robots, and Guillermo del Toro, ad I fucking hated that movie.
It is deeply stupid. You know the worst possible way to kill something is? WRESTLING IT. Wrestling is a really terrible way to kill giant, city-destroying monsters. Plus, the last minute sword, the “analogue” giant robot, the whole drifting thing, the main character’s hideous Amero-Australian accent and ear-hurting Japanese the fact that Charlie Day is playing his SUNNY character but as a scientist. And the worst part is, people are like, “well it’s supposed to be dumb like a Voltron/Ultraman episode.” But, like, IF YOU SPEND HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS ON A MOVIE, IT NEEDS TO BE SMARTER THAN A FUCKING EPISODE OF VOLTRON.
I mean, I hate the whole “YA is ruining the Tolstoy Book Club that was our adult culture” convo, but what I really hate about it is people shit on YA and then turn around and vomit praise on PACIFIC RIM, which is exhibit A in “nostalgia for childhood garbage blinds people to how dumb some pop culture shit is.”
I sat through Pacific Rim because I thought it was Battleship, which I’ve been dying to hate watch. Pacific Rim isn’t even good enough to hate watch.
A long-ago ex, whose favourite movie genre was Deeply Politically Significant, characterized all my movie choices as Sensitive English Dramas, which I now realize is just a sub-set of the genre People Have Feelings.
Ditto on Pacific Rim: underwhelming. All the fannish gushing raised my hopes up so high that I was giddily prepared to be blown away. My friends, this movie is just. Not. That. Good. Despite ostensibly highlighting some of my Favorite Things (giant monsters; epic battles that involve punching and/or swords; Idris Elba), I enjoyed it about as much as I would a mediocre shounen manga. Jax Teller/Lloyd is a beautiful English rose who can barely act and definitely cannot carry a movie. The Mako Mori character is neither particularly interesting nor ground-breaking (she’s fine, just…the slavering praise she elicits is baffling, idgiaa). Excellent visual effects, everything else = pretty meh.
E.T. – I hated it as a child, I also hated it as an adult, I have no idea what the contents of it are other than the stupid mini commercial for Reese’s Pieces and the bike chase, don’t tell me which saccharine bullshit movies I have to love as a child, WORLD (and my parents). The only good thing to come out of that movie is that sweet Universal Studios ride, but that’s basically the Peter Pan ride from Disneyworld anyway.
Vertigo – I love Hitchock. I love Jimmy Stewart. I love icy blondes. I love being a pretentious wank. I tried so hard. I have tried so hard for so many years and I have to throw in the towel: I do not get this movie and I think it is boring and it sucks and if you want to see a good Hitchcock film, please watch the homoeroticism of Strangers on a Train, thank you and good night!
I HATE E.T. that alien is so creepy
Labyrinth. David Bowie sure is David Bowie and I just 100% don’t get whatever it is that made every girl I knew in college love this so hard.
probably David Bowie?
Definitely David Bowie.
Kill Bill
Pricess Bride
all of that Brat Pack garbage
The Princess Bride is a film I loved as a child, but I rewatched it couple of years ago and thought jeez, how did I not notice that the titular character is barely a person?
OH MAN, I have not watched Firefly because I have been told TOO MANY TIMES that it is an amazing magical wonderful perfect show that will change my life, but I don’t generally like Whedon projects that much (:shifty look: last time I said that on the internet literally 80 people yelled at me, I get it, I’m wrong, but I still don’t like Whedon projects that much).
I really just don’t want to watch it, not get it, and then be angry about it.
(ETA: WHOOPS that was supposed to be a reply to Atalanta_Is above, sorry.)
I like Firefly, but it isn’t a magical wonderful perfect show that will change your life and the fans need to stop pretending that it is. I will watch pretty much anything Whedon makes, and I would send that man my naked selfies if he requested them, but if you don’t like Whedon projects in general, you won’t like Firefly.
I… I would really like to read your reviews of Whedon’s work based solely on that last sentence.
The dialogue is SUPER Whedon-y (you know what I mean) and the guy who plays Jayne on the TV show is a total diap IRL.
Evil Dead. I watched up until the part where it starts to get tree rapey and then I said I wasn’t going to watch any more of it and I feel great about that.
I have to admit, I really love Evil Dead 2, but I won’t watch the first movie again because of that scene. The whole thing is just an inferior version of the 2nd film anyway, but the tree rape scene was too much for me. 🙁
I keep coming up with movies I left out of another comment. Since we’re all getting our hate in on classic Christmas movies: Christmas Vacation. Fuck Chevy Chase forever and ever, you only get to be the biggest asshole in show business if you’re talented, and he’s not.
I haaaaaaaate the Nolan Batmans because it’s just a watered down endless recast of Frank Miller’s ideas. Just straight-up make The Dark Knight Returns – complete with teenage girl Robin – or stop fucking it all up.
Pretty much any Jean-Pierre Jeunet film that isn’t “A Very Long Engagement”.
“City of Lost Children” is just awful, “MicMacs” is endless, and while I don’t have NEGATIVE feelings about “Amelie”, it’s never made me feel anything beyond MEH.
Much ado about Nothing is my favorite Shakespeare play and I appreciate a fair amount of Joss Whedon’s work, so I was expecting to enjoy his adaption. But it was teeeeerrible. All of the actors were like “I am a serious ac-TOR! Hark! as I declaim Shakespeareeeee.” (With the exception of Nathan Fillion; he was great)
And I felt like the portrayal of Beatrice was rather toothless.
see, I hate the Nathan Fillion parts, but I think that is Shakespeare’s fault and not Fillion’s, because I pretty much hate everyone’s version of Dogberry. He makes me cringe in sympathetic embarrassment.
Now, I generally dislike the Dogberry parts, but they were actually the only part of the Whedon version I enjoyed. Maybe I would’ve still disliked them if the rest of the movie were better?
I actually thought Amy Acker was fantastic, but Alexis Denisof was only OK. That disparity actually kind of ruined it for me.
I’m always late to the hate threads and it makes me sad! And I’m never as hate-filled as I think I’m going to be, but this one I can join in on. You’ve Got Mail. What a piece of shit. I think I just generally dislike Nora Ephron and Meg Ryan movies, but especially when they’re remakes of beloved classics.
Every time I remember that movie I like it less–the whole plot and the characters and the smarminess… ugh.
UGHHHHHH what a fucking awful garbage movie The Squid and the Whale was
I understand that the point of the kid-masturbates-in-library scene is to make people uncomfortable but can you just
think for a minute about how about half of us spend 90% of our lives being made uncomfortable in EXACTLY THAT WAY on the regular? GOD, ew. Fucking EW.
I am mostly a fan of movies, and I will tolerate and even enjoy some not very good movies, but I also avoid movies that I am pretty sure I am going to hate, so I was having a hard time thinking of movies that I hate that everyone loves; at worst I am indifferent to the ones I don’t like.
I don’t know what the general feeling towards The Patriot is, but it made me think that the colonies should have just paid the damn taxes, and I’m pretty sure that that was not the intended result.
I cannot hate Tarantino movies, because I refuse to watch them. I have not watched one in its entirety in over 15 years.
I don’t know that I would say that I hate fight scenes, but mostly I consider them to be too long and not very interesting. I often find them very difficult to follow visually. Some friends were complaining about how bad the fight scene in whichever Three Musketeers movie it is that they used “period lighting” for, and so we pulled it up on YouTube, and it looked pretty much like all other movie fight scenes as far as I could tell.
I don’t know what the general feeling towards The Patriot is, but it made me think that the colonies should have just paid the damn taxes, and I’m pretty sure that that was not the intended result.
I mean, that’s pretty much how I view the American Revolution anyway. “Oh, cool, a bunch of rich white dudes didn’t want to pay their taxes. How novel.”
I am positively *tickled* by how often The Godfather has shown up on this list. Tickled! It’s mine as well.
I enjoyed The Dark Knight, but I’ll share this little gem. I went to film school, and hence have endured the most pretentious of conversations about every movie you can imagine, but WORST was overheard between two film school bros, about The Dark Knight.
Bro 1: did you hear about Christian Bale flipping out on set?
Bro 2: He’s a method actor. YOU DON’T MESS WITH THAT
Any and all Tolkein films, Fight Club, and most Tarantino films, Cohen Brothers’ films (ESPECIALLY No Country for Old Men), and Woody Allen films. And I am really just saying “most” there to cover my ass because I can’t remember all of them and it’s possible I liked one of them.
It’s a Wonderful Life. Possibly because of overexposure when it was out of copyright.
My Best Friend’s Wedding. Full of terrible people treating each other awfully, nope!
The Tree of Life. Critics were like “TERRENCE MALICK IS A GENIUS, LOOK AT THIS MAGNIFICENT TRANSCENDENT SPECTACLE.” And I was all “Your baby boomer angst does not a universal story make, even with beautiful cinematography, and also WHY ARE YOU WASTING SUCH GOOD ACTORS?”
Also, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Hated that one so much that I avoided anything starring Jack Nicholson for years afterward.
TREE OF LIFE is three hours of my life my friends and I will never get back. The best part was ranting about how awful it was after. Will never willingly watch a Malick film ever again.
OH WAIT, also As Good As It Gets. Like I have no interest in seeing an awful, old misogynist eventually come to the conclusion that hey, women and gay men are people! and then get rewarded for it by a relationship with a beautiful woman 30 years his junior. Just die alone and quickly, please.
I pretty much hate most Jack Nicholson movies, though. I find him overrated as an actor and utterly lacking in onscreen charm.
Okay, this isn’t about a movie but about a TV show, but since you all mentioned Firefly I think it’s okay to say:
I irrationally and passionately hate Gilmore Girls.
Me too! People keep telling me I should like it because it’s about women and the dialogue is snappy but it’s not snappy. It’s twee. That whole show is just so fucking twee and I JUST CAN’T STAND IT UGH.
I really hate the idea that I should like something just because it’s about women. IT ALSO HAS TO BE GOOD!
Playing poor is fun when you can visit your parents once a week and they’ll bankroll your daughter’s ivy league education…
I love Gilmore Girls overall, but this was one of my biggest problems with the story. Maybe Lorelai’s occasional money problems would have been more compelling if there were ever any reason to think that maybe this time Emily and Richard wouldn’t bail her out by the end of the episode. Or if she didn’t live in an incredibly charming house with all kinds of nice stuff and a fridge full of takeout.
I always wonder if the series wouldn’t be more interesting set when Lorelai and Rory were younger, because by the time it starts Lorelai is fairly established and the feud with her parents seems fairly ridiculous for an adult woman with a grown child.
2001: A Space Odyssey and pretty much everything Kubrick put his overrated, malicious little hands on.
In general, I hate any movie that is pretentious enough to convince people that if they can’t understand the film, it must be TOO DEEP for them. It’s not deep, it’s not intellectual, it’s bullshit. Stop buying into it.
I have the same feelings about Me & You & Everyone We Know as I do about The Squid & The Whale, which are a pale specter of the feelings I have about Léolo which no one told me I was supposed to love but which I FEEL IT IS MY DUTY to warn other people about.
I probably should have stopped watching after the first scene, which was a man masturbating into a pallet of tomatoes but I thought “no, surely this will get weirder in a less gross way and it will be great for keeping my French comprehension well-oiled” and I was SO WRONG and SO NAIVE. Netflix promised me a surreal adventure of a boy who increasingly has trouble differentiating between dreams and waking life but what I GOT was, among other things:
boy climbs roof and masturbates watching through skylight as his babysitter/neighbor takes a sex bath with his grandfather
boy steals family organ meat, cuts slice in it, fucks it, later replaces it (family eats it)
boy goes to smoking/drinking party with other 10-year-olds and they all collect their funds so another boy will fuck a cat. The cat is lying on the table panting. I mean probably no cats were actually violated in the making of the film but that cat was certainly traumatized, and apparently THAT is my hard limit for turning off a fucking garbage awful movie.
So I guess Léolo fared better than How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, which I turned off after 15 minutes when the punchline to a joke was literally “hahahaaaaaaa transwomen.” But it definitely had a more lasting psychological impact.
Very recent: This is Where I Leave You. Yes, it’s very sweet and loving and funny and whatever. It’s also yet another movie where a dude with a gorgeous wife and a beautiful apartment and a dream job has a bad thing happen (his wife cheats on him with his boss, because beautiful women are evil), so he loses his job and his apartment and has to live…in a different apartment, alone (not with a roommate, not with his parents, not with friends, not on the street), and when he goes home to sit shiva for his dad, he finds out that the girl (because she’s always a girl, not a woman) that he loved in high school has suffered a Vague Tragedy that prevented her from leaving their small town and sullying her innocence, and she’s still the quirky (but not too weird!) girl he loved, and she still thinks about him, and also the man his wife cheated with leaves her when he finds out she’s pregnant, so he gets to feel superior and forgive her without thinking about his own behavior, and the lesson of the whole movie is that the absolute worst thing you can do is sacrifice your dreams for practicality (which he demonstrates by taking an impromptu road trip to Maine. So whimsy. Much spontaneous.), and I HATE when that’s the moral because when you don’t have a safety net, you have to be practical, and it’s not a sin against yourself.
So, you know, some Feelings there.
I feel like the genre of “Privileged White Guy Has Bad Things Happen to Him and is Redeemed by a Road Trip/a Miracle/a Good Woman” has been thoroughly examined and thus no more movies of this ilk need be made every again.
Donnie Darko. I watched it with a bunch of friends about 5-10 years younger than me, all of whom had seen it before and loved it, and just sat there thinking “WHYYYYY?” and “THIS PERSON NEEDS ANTIPSYCHOTIC MEDICATION, LIKE, SERIOUSLY.”
“But what if like, antipsychotic medication hides how the world really is?”
“THAT IS A COMMON DELUSION OF PEOPLE WHO NEED ANTIPSYCHOTIC MEDICATION, AND YOU ARE NOT HELPING.”
I hate hate hate hhhhaaatttttteeeee Animal House.
ugh.
just ughhhhhhhh I hate it you guys i hate itttt
Oh, hey, and fuck my ex-boyfriend for telling me that I absolutely hated Straw Dogs because I’m a girl and “didn’t get it.”
Was that the paper bag discussion movie?
No wait it was a western, wasn’t it. In college, in an attempt to become A Movie Person, I took a course on violence in film and we watched so many movies that I hated that they all blur together. I wonder what the fuck that stupid paper bag movie is though.
Yep, the “consensual” rape scene is just so edgy!
Two Towers and Return of the King are boring junk.
They did not age well. They are very of the early aughts.
The English Patient was some boring ass bullshit.
Elaine, how could you not love that movie?
Should have went with Sack Lunch!
Brokeback Mountain. My friends and I drove to the nearest bigger town to see it in the theater when it came out (we lived in a small college town where you couldn’t see any first-run movies), and they were completely blown away by the movie. I was really left with a feeling of meh afterward… And nausea from eating so much candy/popcorn. But mostly meh.
Ditto. PLUS the fact that it got an Oscar nomination for cinematography bothers me so much. Y’know why the mountains look pretty? ‘Cause it’s Wyoming. That is how Wyoming looks.
Yes I couldn’t get over how it was a romance but the women were treated so badly.
All Wes Anderson.
I had to restrain myself on that one. Fantastic Mr. Fox was great and I think Grand Budapest is my favorite movie of the year still. I love everything he does*.
*with the exception of Darjeeling.
EDIT: This comment meant to be in the “Holding your judgement” thread.
Hot Fuzz was boring. WHY was it over two hours long?? I might have liked it if it was a fifteen minute sketch.
I have a theory on that, but it’s only a theory.
I thought exactly the same thing – WHY is this movie so goddamned long? Turns out it’s exactly 2 hours and 1 minute long. As the credits ended, I thought, This is obviously a send-up of blockbuster, Michael-Bay-type action movies, all of which are notoriously Too Goddamned Long, so what if Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright pushed it juuuuuuuuuuust long enough to tip it over that 2-hour mark as a kind of final nod and/or fuck you to the genre?
If that’s the case, I admire their commitment; but it’s still too goddamned long.
Drive. I like nearly all of the actors in it, but honestly have no clue why it got such raves. I did watch it in a plane mind, but…meh.
I fell asleep during The Assassination of Jesse James, during the actual assassination. When I woke up I asked husband if I missed anything. The answer was “Nope”. One of the least engaging films I’ve ever watched.
I also second the votes for “Big Lebowski.” I was forced to watch it by a guy who was so absolutely pee-your-pants obsessed with it that he kept pausing the video to explain his favorite parts to me. Literally the only thing about it that I liked was when they’re trying to barricade themselves in that room and they prop a chair under the doorknob and then it turns out the door opens the other way. I laughed at that for like an hour. The rest of the movie is garbage.
I have maintained for years that “Titanic” would be improved approximately six thousand percent if it were just three hours of undersea excavation footage with a cameo by Kathy Bates. I would watch that literally once a week.
I got dragged to both “Magnolia” and “American Beauty” in college by friends who were LITERALLY IN TEARS by the end with how amazing and beautiful and world-changing they both were and I was just like “ehhhh” about both of them.
Others I hate for no clear reason except that I my best friends lost their ever-loving minds over them but they just made me go “meh, would rather just have watched ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ again” –
American Splendor
Juno
Broken Flowers
Lost In Translation
Virgin Suicides
Anything by Quentin Tarantino (except for that three-episode arc of “Alias” he did, that was pretty good)
Anything with Drew Barrymore, sorry! She seems like a great person and I would love to be friends with her but watching her act is like nails on a chalkboard to me
Garden State
I was so bored during Broken Flowers I had sex in the theater and somehow the boringness transferred to the sex, I couldn’t believe it.
Oh and! The Kiera Knightley Pride & Prejudice. The ONLY thing it did right was the casting of Jane and Bingley. I hated every single other damn thing about that movie. It was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Jane Austen is not supposed to be gothic. Fuck off with your looks of anguish and your manfeels in the rain. Gaaaah.
yeah that movie is 100% done by people who don’t get Austen. The New Yorker critic said it best “Jane Austen has been Brontefied”
Jane and Bingley were good though. Caroline wasn’t bad. And I liked the visceral nature of farm life.
FEELINGS IN THE RAIN though. ugh.
Ugh. Rain feelings. Austen must be turning over in her grave about that. (At the very least, she’d have some bitingly sarcastic thing to say.)
I focused a lot on Austen in undergrad (wrote my thesis on Austen/film/costume design), which meant I had to watch that movie too many times. In one of my classes we called that the Disney version of P&P because it ignores a lot of Austen’s social commentary and keeps everything about the romance/provides a happy ending for even the characters who don’t deserve one. Like…I guess I appreciate it as an adaptation, and there are things I have grown to like about it, but the people who think it is the most honest interpretation of her work are WRONG. I love, love, love the soundtrack and Rosamund Pike. But it is not the perfect adaptation people make it out to be. (And the RAIN. No. Hated it.)
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I’m doing a PhD in International Relations and I still had literally no idea what happened by the end, who was spying on whom, what was a flashback and what wasn’t, and which trench-coated dude with dated hair was which. Also Benedict Cumberbatch had blond hair and it looked ridiculous.
I watched it with three friends when we were all in the first stages of Bumblebee Cumberpunch fangirling, and we were so, so confused. One friend fell asleep halfway through the movie–but after that, somehow, the movie started making sense! We understood it! Sleeping friend didn’t believe us when we told her. (It was still terrible)
Watched about 5 minutes of this movie before my partner and I both looked at each other and asked..are you kinda bored? like really bored? and then turned it off.
Watch the 1979 BBC mini-series. Infinitely superior in every way, including the absolutely amazing Alec Guinness.
I watched this and halfway through realized I could not tell one serious white gent from the other. This only added to the general bafflement… (I have read the book twice, but still did not really get what was happening).
I have that problem with a lot of movies, especially if there’s a bunch of politicians, or a bunch of plainclothes cops. White guys in suits, who can tell them apart?
ME EITHER. I was so very confused by that movie. My gentleman friend tried to explain what of it he’d managed to parse and it just made it worse.
That’s because it accurately represents the same qualities in the book, which sucks. And the reason it sucks, I believe, is that John le Carre is trying so hard to make it not completely fucking obvious who the mole is that he makes everything as impenetrable as possible. Which doesn’t even work, because it’s clear who the mole is the moment he makes his first appearance. A, he’s obviously based on Kim Philby, and B, he’s supposed to be charming and likable but we’re clearly being invited to hate him.
It is a fun show. It is not an amazing magical wonderful perfect show that will change your life (well, I mean, it COULD, but the odds aren’t THAT good). If you don’t like Whedon projects, then it will be even more likely to not change your life. I think it is SO lauded because of the meta-Firefly story (the fandom who conquered public opinion to get a movie, etc) and BECAUSE there isn’t much of it, so there wasn’t the same opportunity for it to get too convoluted as there was for other Whedon projects.
I know this is the commenting problem, but I kinda love it floating free like this.
Until now, I have agreed with you so often I thought you must be, like, my spirit animal. But now, we must part ways. My heart breaks. I’m sorry I let you down, but YOU LET ME DOWN TOO.
I have this theory about Natalie Portman, which is that any time Natalie Portman is in a movie, everyone will expect me to love it a thousand times more than I actually do. I hated V for Vendetta. I hated Closer. I hated Garden State. I hated the shitty Star Wars prequels. I refused to see Black Swan because I knew how much I would hate it. Basically Natalie Portman is my kryptonite.
I think you’ll REALLY like this.
https://screen.yahoo.com/snl-digital-short-natali…
I’m iffy about her, but surprisingly she was the best part of the movie Your Highness.
Did you know she was supposed to play Somni-451 in Cloud Atlas? That this iconic character who was also Korean was to be played, not just by a white actress, but by Natalie Portman? Let us take a moment to thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster that did not come to pass.
So, slightly different tack: the Godfather, I actually completely expected to hate it 100% (oh, Italian dudes vying for power with guns and dick-swinging, and the closest thing to a real female character is a wide-eyed Diane Keaton who kind of just goes along with everything? sounds terrible), BUT THEN I ended up really enjoying it and I don’t know why.
“Being John Malkovich.” Yeah, I said it. I hate “Being John Malkovich” and I don’t care who knows. I would never watch “No County for Old Men” or “Inglourious Basterds” again, either. I quit after the first 15 minutes of “World War Z” because fuck fast zombie bullshit.
Oh! I forgot Se7en. That was just awful and torturous and awful.
300 looked like it was going to be interesting, but it turned out to be the trailer stretched out for two hours. A Christmas Story was the only holiday-themed movie that our school board approved for in-class viewing, so my loathing grew a little more every year.
I don’t get the universal love for Snowpiercer. It’s awful and reads like white people were like, “Oooh, what if we made a movie about a time that WE don’t get to sit at the front of the bus?” Also the editing and scene transitions were really awkward and extremely distracting. I also hated Crash because it’s a reductionist piece of garbage.
Do you mean Crash about racism or Crash about car collision fetishists?
You know what? It doesn’t matter. They’re both garbage.
I spent a very long time being confused about the difference between these films – I initially assumed there was just one, but couldn’t work out why I kept hearing such different descriptions of it.
Oh man, Neil Gaiman. Loved Good Omens and American Gods, but he’s married to literal garbage heap person (whose name I’m leaving out because I feel like she’s the type to Google herself and start fights), so all his everything is called into question
OH MY GOD I was going say the exact same thing and then was like, oh dearie me better not, I don’t feel like getting into a fight about her today.
In retrospect, a lot of his female characters have always been MPDG-y slash functioned more as archetypes than as actually developed characters. Aside from Coraline, I can’t think of any major female characters that feel fleshed out to me.
Woooow – I’m a bit of an AFP fan-type person, so I’m interested in this vitriol. Is it about the asking for volunteer band members on tour? Other stuff? Enlighten me!
Chasing Amy. Oh my god I can’t. I think the lowlight is when she tells Ben Affleck how unique and unlike other men he is. Because Ben Affleck isn’t the most standard issue white guy ever or anythig.
Oh god yes. And my college friend who didn’t understand what was sooooo problematic about it. We are no longer friends, and I should have paid attention to the dudebro warning signs.
Chasing Amy was my favorite movie when I was a tiny teenage bisexual. I rewatched it the other day at the ripe old age of 24 and I could not believe how awful it was. I can’t even write out everything I hated about it because my fingers are tired.
Anything by Wes Anderson
Rushmore. So underwhelmed. It is completely inexplicable to me why this movie is so highly praised. And the only part I enjoyed of the Royal Tenenbaums was when Angelica Huston slugged Gene Hackman on the street. Otherwise, utter waste of time.
why Anjelica Huston, actual goddess, puts up with Wes Anderson, I will ne’er know.
Maybe he’s one of those directors who are really fun to work with, even if the finished product is dreck
.And agree totally on Anjelica Huston — actual goddess, living among us.
WES ANDERSON RELATES MORE TO STOP-ANIMATION PUPPETS THAN HE DOES ACTUAL HUMANS AND ALSO HIS HAIR IS DUMB. Anjelica DESERVES BETTER.
I loved Hero in high school, but hated it when I tried to rewatch it this year. I like martial arts movies and that was not a good one.
Lunchtime poll: Why would anyone watch John Hughes when Heathers exists?
Avatar and Gravity; two movies where pretty was supposed to make us overlook flat stories.
AMEN ON GRAVITY
Haven’t seen Gravity but Avatar is bloody racist.
THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY. Admittedly, I loathe it because last year at a film festival a male critic spent TWENTY FREAKING MINUTES mansplaining the movie to me. At no point would he allow me to speak. Didn’t matter that I, y’know, have a film degree, or that I’ve written thousands of words on genre theory. Nope. I am a Lady, and therefore Do Not Understand Westerns.
If he’d asked (which he didn’t) what my favorite Western was, I’d have said JOHNNY GUITAR. Two words: ‘Lesbian Gunfighter.”
FINALLY, someone else who liked Tangled and didn’t like Frozen. Frozen felt like a huge mess, the characters had all their emotional revelations sung *at* them and the snowman was beyond annoying.
Tangled – so much better than Frozen!
I can’t stand the Nolan ones because I hate hate HATE extra gruff voice that Christian Bale uses as Batman. I understand that it is likely intentional to protect himself from being outed as Bruce Wayne but it is over the top and cornball and I can’t get past it.
He uses his BATMAN voice when talking to, like Morgan Freeman at one point. He flippin knows you’re Batman, babe. You can stop doing the gritty action hero voice for a few minutes
Very recent: This is Where I Leave You. Yes, it’s very sweet and loving and funny and whatever. It’s also yet another movie where a dude with a gorgeous wife and a beautiful apartment and a dream job has a bad thing happen (his wife cheats on him with his boss, because beautiful women are evil), so he loses his job and his apartment and has to live…in a different apartment, alone (not with a roommate, not with his parents, not with friends, not on the street), and when he goes home to sit shiva for his dad, he finds out that the girl (because she’s always a girl, not a woman) that he loved in high school has suffered a Vague Tragedy that prevented her from leaving their small town and sullying her innocence, and she’s still the quirky (but not too weird!) girl he loved, and she still thinks about him, and also the man his wife cheated with leaves her when he finds out she’s pregnant, so he gets to feel superior and forgive her without thinking about his own behavior, and the lesson of the whole movie is that the absolute worst thing you can do is sacrifice your dreams for practicality (which he demonstrates by taking an impromptu road trip to Maine. So whimsy. Much spontaneous.), and I HATE when that’s the moral because when you don’t have a safety net, you have to be practical, and it’s not a sin against yourself.
The Sound of Music. It’s so boooooring.
ugh yes the fifth element.
everything surrounding leeloo felt super icky and infantilized and ugh. i liked bruce willis’ orange tanktop and chris tucker’s penis-shaped coiffure, though.
Yeah, I pretty much hated how Leeloo was supposed to be this great savior and most of what she did was tear up and get rescued by Bruce Willis.
The only thing I liked about that movie was that in the future, the cigarettes are about eighty percent filter, twenty percent cigarette.
Serenity. No one’s a bigger Firefly fan than me, but it didn’t retain ANY of the show’s spark! It can’t stand alone without the series and worst of all, watching it, I just felt nothing. Such a huge disappointment. I’m still not over it.
Also, pretty much all the classic “bro movies”, such as:
The Godfather
Fight Club
The Matrix
and any romantic comedy where a woman is charmed by a man’s asshole-ish behavior, like You’ve Got Mail. He spends the entire god damn movie lying to her and when she finds out she just smiles and kisses him!!!
Serenity isn’t canon. It’s a fan project that happens to be made by the same person who made the original series.
Watching La Regle du Jeu I got so bored I started, um, doing pelvic floor exercises. Sorry, everyone in Introduction to the Language of Cinema.
Milo and Otis. All of my friends love it and we’ve actually gotten into fights about it. I think it’s a) boring, b) cutesy in an annoying way, and c) genuinely unfair to the animals in it. They seem distressed to me!
Well, you’re not wrong. For what it’s worth, there have always been some pretty dark rumors surrounding the fates of the animals in that film. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Mi…
Oh god, that was my favourite movie as a kid. No. 🙁
Those are all Joe Wright films. He cannot stop casting her in literary adaptations for some reason. Coming soon to a theater near you: “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” starring Keira Knightley as Huck!
AGREE AGREE AGREE. Keira Knightley isn’t funny! Rosamund Pike is the best thing in that movie. Jennifer Ehle is so much better than the Jane in the BBC one that my only beef with it is how the tits we’re supposed to believe that Jane is the town beauty and Lizzie is “the smart one.” Physically, the contrast between Keira (small, angular, dark haired) and Rosamund (tall, curvy, blonde) made much more sense, since Rosamund straight-up looks like a goddamn painting, so you buy that she’s the sister that fits the beauty ideal of the times.
P.S. I worked for about eight years with high schoolers and the first time I said something about Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy and some fucking kid said “What? The dad from that Amanda Bynes movie? He wasn’t in ‘Pride and Prejudice!'” I died inside.
I always thought if I could just mash the adaptations together, and have Jennifer Ehle and Rosamund Pike together in the 1995 film, that’d be my favorite adaptation of P&P. I did grow to like Keira as Lizzie after watching the movie 100000 times for my thesis research, but initially I wasn’t a huge fan of her as Lizzie.
I don’t like most Wes Anderson movies. I feel like the women are accessories to the men. I feel like the characters of color are accessories to the white characters. I feel like there’s a painful amount of “Look at me”-ness. No thanks.
My friends in high school were all obsessed with Boondock Saints, and I convinced myself I liked it too, which was probably because I was desperate to stay friends with them (they were my Only Friends). Looking back on it, though, ughghghghh no. I haven’t watched it in years, but my inner monologue still quotes it all the time, which I sort of resent.
I love old movies, I love French movies, I love upstairs/downstairs movies set in country houses.
And yet I tune out of “The Rules of the Game” every time I try to watch it. I feel so ashamed- they saved it from the Nazis and painstakingly reassembled it just for us so we would understand the corruption of French society on the verge of World War Two.
“Citizen Kane” never did it for me either. I only watched it because of Agnes Moorehead. And I know I *should* have loved “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day” but the book is so much better and everyone’s performance seemed off except for Frances McDormand.
I love the book (Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day), and when I read the summary of the film and found they’d changed the ending, I was furious. Good work, 21st century, doing a less feminist ending than the original!
Velvet fucking Goldmine. I *wanted* to like it, I intended to like it, I was all set to like it; but uuuuugh what a cloying, self-indulgent, maudlin piece of tripe. I like some other Todd Haynes stuff all right, but that one is just godawful.
I’m relieved to see so many others hating Moulin Rouge. I can’t count how many people have told me I’d love it. It ended up viscerally repelling me in a way few other movies have managed to do.
I don’t know what Velvet Goldmine is, but it sounds like it ought to be a film biography of Lou Reed.
This is a lovely, safe place in which I can say that I did not enjoy Nightmare Before Christmas.
Also Princess Mononoke.
And A Christmas Story and John Hughes films except for Ferris Bueller and that Miranda July movie actually made me throw up in the literal sense in that I vomited already digested food onto the floor when the guy lit himself on fire while his children watched from the window.
Also I’ve never been interested in re-watching “Roman Holiday” because I felt so betrayed by the ending when I first watched it as a child. She should have abdicated. And the fact that, when she finally got to wear pajamas, she couldn’t appreciate them because she was drugged bothered eight-year-old me almost as much as the ending.
YES THANK YOU, I feel like Sabrina has the adventurous offbeat ending that Roman Holiday should have had.
Whoops- this was supposed to be a reply to Hipster Rasputin: I’m quite fond of Audrey Hepburn (especially for a Toastie) but when it comes to liking both her and the movie I think I’m down to “Charade”, “Funny Face” and “How to Steal a Million” (“Two for the Road” has her married to a jerk, “Wait Until Dark” is terrifying, “Robin and Marian” has another disappointing ending, “The Nun’s Story” and “Green Mansions” are kind of boring, we won’t talk about “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” except that there is a catalog that sells a Holly Golightly Halloween costume for little girls and I am horrified…)
I would really love it if one of the many geniuses on this site could extrapolate the most commonly occurring titles, multiply by ‘additional plus votes’ and see what comes out on top – I would guess the Big Lebowski, because dudes, but various Batmans, Wes Andersons and Tolkeins all seem to be well up thre.
“various Batmans” reminds me of this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_deta…
RENT
RIGHT?? My college roommate looooooooooved it so much that I finally gave it a shot, and I could neither finish it nor comprehend what on earth she saw in it.
I admit to riding that bandwagon for a bit when it first came out because MUSICALS and EMOTIONS and like approx. 1.5 of the songs in the movie but honestly now I can’t stand it and think it’s garbage. None of the characters are likeable and it really doesn’t have a plot and that bothers me.
Oh that movie is TERRIBLE.
The most sterile and sanitary version of RENT around.
OH GOD, I was working in a movie theater when Rent was in heavy promo rotation and we had a promo screen in the lobby. The whole RENT pitch was just “Seasons of Love” and it played in its entirety once every fourteen minutes for my entire eight-hour shift for two weeks. IT IS THE SOUNDTRACK OF MY NIGHTMARES.
this is how much I hate the sound of that
This one I can get behind. That fucking Minutes song. Jesus Christ.
I went to theatre school during the Rent era so all my classmates were always singing those fucking songs. Such pap. and it’s just a La Bohème remake and the original is always better.
All musicals are terrible,* but that movie was particularly bad.
*They are, not sorry, no musical is good except Les Miz, which is perfect.
I feel like a jerk saying this so soon after Robin Williams’s suicide, but I hate Mrs. Doubtfire with a passion.
I had really fond memories of that movie from childhood (distant, blurry, but fond) and re-watched it a few weeks ago and was APPALLED. It’s HUGELY transphobic. And also collates being transgender with cross dressing? And generally has awful, weird gender politics.
Also I totally agree with Abed, in basically every movie he’s in Robin Williams is persecuted by an authority figure for being funny and it’s boring. Love him, love him in other things (Fern Gully ftw), but Mrs. Doubtfire was pretty awful. The only thing I liked about it was that he and his wife didn’t get back together in the end, which was the only vaguely realistic thing about it.
Having liked Mrs Doubtfire is my secondmost embarrassing thing from my teen years, from my perspective now as a trans ally with all sorts of trans/genderqueer/genderfluid people in my life whom I adore. The first…. Funky Cold Medina. Which is also appalling from an anti sexual assault/pro consent perspective. What the hell was wrong with me?
Home Alone and Amelie. Still haven’t made it through any Home Alone movie. I fell asleep a little during Amelie. It was one of those movies my friends would GASP and say “YOU HAVENT SEEN AMELIE I THOUGHT IT’D BE YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE?!?!” and now I wonder why they think I’d love that movie.
Also, not necessarily a mainstream classic but a movie I am still mad about having to watch: MY DINNER WITH ANDRE. NEVER AGAIN. I semi-knew the plot but I thought SOMETHING more would happening eventually besides two dudes talking highfalutin’ nonsense for two hours, but NOPE. That’s it, that’s the movie.
Sorry, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It leaves me cold for so many reasons, one of which is that Holly Golightly was arguably the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl? And I resent that I’m supposed to adore Audrey Hepburn. I find her about as interesting as a saltine and in possession of roughly the same amount of talent.
I love a number of Audrey Hepburn movies, but Breakfast at Tiffany’s is just the worst. I had read the novella before I saw the movie, so I was completely taken aback by the changes. Like, the narrator is clearly a stand-in for Capote’s young self, but in the movie, he’s the heterosexual love interest? And Hepburn was completely, completely unsuited to the role. She was always too much of a lady to play a down-and-dirty character. Hearing her say lines like “That squareball jazz!” in her perfect elocution just makes one cringe.
1) The Godfather. I have no idea if it’s a good film or not because I couldn’t follow anything that was happening, and the reason for that is – and I know it’s ridiculous – I couldn’t tell any of the characters/actors apart. I had no idea who was who.
2) Forrest Gump. I fucking HATE that film with a burning passion.
3) Any of the Lord of the Rings films. Bores me to death. Plus the whole premise is that ugly people are bad and pretty people are good.
ALSO this is TV and not movies but Twin Peaks. I slogged through the first two episodes and thought it was boring and uncomfortably trippy. I just don’t believe that it ever gets funny.
28 Weeks Later. I’m not a zombie movie person myself, but I kept hearing that it’s the “best zombie movie ever made!!”….No. No it is not. The atmospheric music and some pretty great actors cannot save the story, which involves characters making rock-stupid decisions and dying in pointless idiotic ways.
The only zombie movies I like are the romantic comedy ones.
Requiem for a Dream
American Beauty
Garden State
Ghost World
Pi
You & Me & Everyone We Know
Basically anything I watched with my college girlfriend that wasn’t The L Word or The Cosby Show reruns.
“Forrest Gump” is so terrible that it makes me angry. And “Do the Right Thing” is self-indulgent, toxic, and awful.
Everything and anything Cohen Brothers, everything Woody Allen, anything that has ever come within breathing distance of Laurence Olivier. Also all the Tarantino. Most of the Scorscese. Paul Thomas Anderson, except for There Will Be Blood.
I think I just don’t like critically acclaimed man directors.
I live in Iowa and I hate that stupid Field of Dreams movie. GOOD GOD, I HATE THAT MOVIE. KEVIN COSTNER CAN KISS MY ASS.
Which reminds me. Tin Cup is worthless.
The Silver Linings Playbook. I was excited by the trailer because it looked like we were going to get a frank and realistic movie about being in a psych hospital and dealing with mental illness (I have done both over the past few years and most of the movies about it are stupid), but SLP was so boring and irrelevant and pointless. Its depiction of mental illness was bull. Argh it makes me mad just thinking about it.
Anything Mel Gibson. ANY OF IT. Especially Braveheart. Yes, I’m half-Scottish; no, I don’t like that horrible movie.
The John Hughes ouvre. Likewise, Not Another Scary Teen Sport Movie.
This is part 1.
Pitch Perfect is aca-inexplicably bad. It’s a movie that should have been made in the 80s, back when half-baked plots were kind of acceptable, but it wasn’t and therefore can never really work.
Withnal and I. I barely remember it, except that everyone was obnoxiously drunk, and there was some homophobic subplot, but I do remember it being one of the most unpleasant movie-going experiences ever.
Titanic
Back to the Future. I am a horrible human being, I’m told. Great vest, though.
MOULIN ROUGE
skin-crawling loathing, not helped by the fact that i was a theater kid and so there was no escaping improptu sing-a-longs from it
I can’t stand the Madonna version of Evita for the same reason: the sing-a-longs. UGH, NO.
God Bless America. Yes, I’m a liberal. Yes, I love dark humor. No, I don’t find it funny that they’re killing people for having different political views and liking different music. No, I don’t find it cute that the underage girl keeps wanting to fuck the middle aged man while he turns her down.
(Cecil B. Demented was a movie that took a similar premise but used it correctly- the joke wasn’t wish-fulfillment, the joke was how DEADLY SERIOUS the characters were taking their artistic gripes. In GBA, we’re supposed to think they’re right.)
Varsity Blues. If you love this film, we officially have nothing to say to each other.
Also the TV show “Friday Night Lights”.
Because high school football jocks just aren’t worshipped, ass-kissed, made the center of attention, and given a free pass quite enough in real life, right?
Control, that movie about the singer of Joy Division. All my friends at the time were like BEST MOVIE EVER – SO DEEP and I was just like… did we see the same movie…?
ALSO DAVID LYNCH. When I was 18 I was telling some classmates about how I didn’t like Lost Highway and some dude disdainfully said “you just didn’t UNDERSTAND it” and my eyes filled up with red hot rage (this was years before I ever even heard of the word “mansplaining”)
Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita- turned a beautiful novel about a human monster into a celebration of sexual predators.
Steven Speilberg’s Empire of the Sun- the book was about a child unraveling under extreme circumstances, and the moral ambiguity of war, yet Spielberg, while following the plot closely,made it into “Hurrah for the British Empire!”
It’s an achievement of sorts.
“Stand and Deliver,” that film about AP calculus at a bad public school in Cali. Between 6th and 12th grades in my very good Connecticut public school system, we watched it about four times (“Don’t know what to do with the kids? Stand and Deliver!”) It got funnier every time. It’s not a comedy.
GREASE!!!
Thank you for Dirty Dancing. I still cringe at all the nostalgia it inspires among people my age.
Pretty-much any rom-com that wasn’t When Harry Met Sally or L.A. Story. I loved those two, hated all the others. Sleepless in Seattle was probably the nail in the coffin of that genre for me.
Reality Bites, which was supposed to “speak” to me as a Gen X-er; I’m not sure if I even made it to the end. Another case of insufferable characters I know I’m supposed to empathize with but can’t.
Grease.
One of the few good scenes in “Family Guy” was a parody version of “Dirty Dancing”:
Johnny: Nobody puts Baby in a corner.
Dad: I do, because I’m her father, and she’s 16. How old are you?
Johnny: 34.
*prison bars slam shut behind Johnny as “Hungry Eyes” plays in the background*
All DC superhero movies since the 1979 Superman, in which Margot Kidder eclipsed Carrie Fisher as my adolescent crush.
*Titanic (which my favorite uncle loves and wants to put on whenever we visit him. He also loves Pretty Woman, Dirty Dancing, and Dr. Zhivago. I think he might actually be a teenage girl at heart.)
*Anything by John Hughes. Maybe I’m slightly too young (between Gen X and Millenials), but they did nothing for me. Also, I didn’t like the racism or the creepy rape culture stuff or the way Andi’s wimpy rich boyfriend backs out and then says “you didn’t believe in me.” What??)
*Neverending Story and Princess Bride. I watched them a lot because I liked fantasy and so did my friends, but I actually hated them and thought they were dull and silly. I was thrilled when I discovered The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth.
*An Education. Anti-Semitism, anyone? It seems (from what little I’ve read by the author) that the author saw him more as a horrible person who happened to be Jewish (which I can live with), and the movie presents him as this charming, unsavory Jew-man corrupting the fair flower of innocent English girlhood.
*The English Patient (selfish colonialist people cavorting and angsting in front of an amorphous backdrop of colorful locals in wartime–or any time–is just not my thing).
*V for Vendetta.
*The Passion because of the anti-Semitism and the interminable length. It and Aviator are the only two movies I’ve ever walked out on.
*Back to the Future. I just didn’t care.
*ET. This came out when I was a kid and I had no cultural background at the time that would condition me to find it charming. I just thought ET was kind of scary.
Wow, I’m so negative.
Huh, no one’s said Watchmen yet? Maybe because it was sort of a critical flop, but it’s the only not-intentionally sad movie that made me cry. I found parts of it just deeply deeply unsettling. And I loved the graphic novel. Also, Sin City actively repelled me on levels I can’t articulate.
Also, yes, fuck Wes Anderson. So glad not to be alone there.
I don’t know why the comments system won’t let me respond to the Love Actually person… That movie is terrible. Out of, like, a dozen stories, there’s only maybe half a decent one.
American Hustle SUUUUCKKKEEDDD. Wtf was that movie even about? The movie sure had no interest in telling me.
Memento. It made no sense! And every time I say this, someone male is like, “No, it does make sense if you really pay attention, it’s just complicated.” And I have to explain that no, actually, this is not my feeble female brain failing to cope with backwards narration; I paid attention and it actually contradicts itself to the point where none of the events in the story are possible. I hate pretentious movies, but I especially hate movies where the pretentiousness is designed to mask the gaping plot holes.
Pulp Fiction is my least favorite movie of all time.
The Hangover. Any of ’em. I haven’t watched Bridesmaids yet because one unwitting friend told me it was “like The Hangover but for girls!” thinking that somehow that would convince me.
Every once in a while I think, “Maybe I should give The Godfather another try, Important to Cinematic History et al.,” and then I think about how much I would rather just take a nap.
Or eat a sandwich.
Or knock myself in the head with something large.
The Lion King.
I had to watch Rome, Open City for a European Cinema Module last year and everyone in the class raved about it and… it’s ridiculously melodramatic, and fuck the whole making the Nazi woman into an EEEEVIL lesbian in a film set in a time when the Nazis were sending actual LGBQT people to concentration camps bullshit. I also have a special loathing for any film that’s billed as a ‘classic comedy’ and then turns out to be about as funny and engaging as doing photocopying. I’m looking at you, Duck Soup, Kind Hearts and Coronets (although I did love The Ladykillers), Groundhog Day, Dazed and Confused, Rushmore.
moonrise kingdom. so an audience is expected to be able to suspend their disbelief when a kid gets hit by lightning, but when i’ve pointed out that i felt alienated from the movie because there were no people of color in it at all, dudes just slap me on the wrist and say, oh well you know, it’s an accurate representation of the time period.
also se7en was gruesome and awful,and still makes me feel bad when i think about it.
Ohhh, so late on this, but I had an Elaine Benes reaction to The English Patient when I saw it in a grad school film class. I didn’t feel the romance, seriously, and since I saw it after coming off of a long flight where I was severely airsick, that isn’t helping. But the charms of The Fifth Element and Lost Highway, also seen in film theory seminar, were also lost on me. I don’t love David Lynch. I’m just glad that class didn’t require me to see Eraserhead.
I had a friend growing up who was obsessed with Legends of the Fall, but I barely remember it, I found it so boring. I was 20 when it came out, so I can’t possibly have been too young for it. She differed with me about Clerks, which at the time, I thought was brilliant. She is also a huge Twilight fan. Draw your own conclusions.
Ugh, Reality Bites. I chalk my distaste up to being a bit too young for Gen X, but it’s on my list, too.
Fuuuuuck the Avengers. Fuck all the Marvel movies – Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, you name it. They’re so boring and infested with white dudes named Chris.
The Breakfast Club. Seriously, that scene where they “share” and bond is not only stupid but boring. I hate the movie with a passion. This is probably in reaction to the inordinate amount of love it receives. (Same goes for all John Hughes/80s teen films – Pretty in Pink, etc., so boring, so shitty.)
American Beauty. It was playing on HBO a while ago and I called in late for work because I was so AGHAST that such self-important, fake-meaningful shit is considered a “CLASSIC!” by people (including my friends).
Drive. I couldn’t make it past the first 15 minutes, of which 10 minutes were long shots of the actors’ [non]reactions.
The Notebook, for obvious reasons.
Never understood The Big Lebowski.
AND! As a person of Indian origin, I hate all those kinda-Indian movies people ask me about – fuck off, no, Slumdog Millionaire wasn’t AMAZING, The Namesake was OKAY, no I haven’t seen Monsoon Wedding, no, just no, don’t ask me that, maybe I’ll respond in turn and ask if YOUR life was American Beauty because that would be a proper insult WOULDN’T IT.
I hated Slumdog Millionaire. I just found myself wondering why it was meant to be heartwarming – one kid makes it out of the slums due to winning a game show! Great! Who cares about all the other ones?
I would like to add my list of movies that I have never seen that I do not feel in the least compelled to see, based on what I know of them from references in other media and their fans:
-The Sound of Music
-Casablanca
-Love Actually
-It’s a Wonderful Life
-probably so many more, I really enjoy not watching movies that everyone says I have to see, especially if they’re like “you would love this!” First of all, you don’t know me, I’ll like what I want. Second, I telling me I have to see something really brings out the contrarian in me. But most importantly, I wasted a lot of my life watching movies and reading books that I didn’t actually get anything out of when I was younger because they were considered classics or someone I misguidedly admired liked them. No more!
Pretty Woman, Dirty Dancing, and oddly, The Nightmare Before Christmas – which I’m not sure if you’re supposed to love, but a lot of people do, and it scares the hell out of me.
I hate Goonies pretty passionately, and The Dark Crystal puts me to sleep every time I try.
I don’t get The Goonies at all, either.
For the longest time people told me I didn’t like Starship Troopers because I didn’t get it. Nope. Pretty sure it just sucked.
I was rooting for the alien bugs.
I realize that this comment stream is now so long that it is more or less useless to be contributing to it and I am shouting into the void, but SIDEWAYS IS A TRASH GARBAGE FILM FULL OF PEOPLE I HAAAAATED. “Oh, I am important and deep because I care a lot about wine!” “You should give a shit about me even though I’m demonstrably the worst! After all, I am a middle-aged white man, so my angst is IMPORTANT.”
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAATE!!!!!!!
I hate Ghostbusters. There are maybe two funny jokes, and the rest of it is nonsense. And I love noir, but I absolutely can’t stand the Maltese Falcon, although I can’t quite articulate why. It’s probably because I hate Sam Spade.
I didn’t exactly hate Casablanca, but I didn’t understand why we were supposed to want Rick and Ilsa to get back together. I thought he was a lout and much preferred her husband.
Blade Runner
*puts on gas mask, scuttles into trench*
I hated Inception. I think I might just hate Christopher Nolan, you just know he’d corner you at a party and start telling you about his thoughts on contemporary women’s literature.
No joy, no pain, no exquisite rapture could ever possibly match how much I loathed Slumdog Millionaire.
Don’t know why I didn’t think of this one earlier, but The Piano. This guy forces the female lead to have sex with him, and she falls in love with him. And she only likes her husband after he chops her finger off. I did not get this film AT ALL.
Same! I find that either the characters/plotlines are dull in which case I get bored and stop watching halfway through, or they are delightful and 2 or so hours is not enough. I find that books are much better at hitting the sweet spot of interesting,short AND satisfying.
I don’t know that I’ve ever met anyone else who hates Slumdog Millionaire!! Urrgh, so emotionally manipulative.
I didn’t hate it but based on the hype I was massively disappointed.
Mean Girls. I loathe Mean Girls. And yes, I’ve watched it more than once, and I STILL hate every second of it.
Before Sunrise, Before Sunset.
Amelie
Mulholland Drive
There Will Be Blood
The King’s Speech
Spring Breakers
GRAVITY. I didn’t get it at all.
I find myself astounded and delighted at the amount of movie hate listed here.
I don’t like any movie. I feel so comforted knowing things I dislike or hate are on someone’s list of hated flicks. Thank you all.
I hated, hated, hated “Fight Club”.
Suburban white guys whining about how they can no longer assume a life of effortless power and privilege as a given.
Suburban white guys devolving from mindless corporate drones to mindless followers of rabid dog sociopath Tyler.
Neo-Nazi fat shaming (making soap out of fat people) — apparently they’re not rebellious enough to defy mainstream beauty standards.
Fistfights and bombing portrayed as “empowerment”.
False dichotomy that one can only avoid being a victim by victimizing others.
Oodles’o’misogyny.
And a paint-by-the-numbers “materialism bad” sermon overlay, so the filmmakers can pretend the movie had a deep meaningful message.
Even Brad Pitt with his shirt off could not make this pile of puke watchable.
Oh, hell yes.
To say nothing of the infuriating assumption that because I didn't like it, I "didn't get it".
No, I got it, and I *still* didn't like it. You gonna let me have my own opinion, or what?
“It’s a Wonderful Life” should be called “It’s a Co-Dependent LIfe”.
The best part of that movie is that it inspired a classic SNL sketch where the George Bailey character beats the snot out of Mr. Potter.
“Lost in Translation”.
Am I missing some important philosophical message, or is this a movie about how a woman who looks like Scarlett Johansen wants to fuck a man who looks like Bill Murray?
To be fair the kiss at the end was improvised by the actors, it wasn’t in the script.
Frozen. FROZEN FROZEN FROOOOOOOOOOOOZEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEN. I watched it. It was, at BEST, okay. It was moderately pretty to look at (though I think Tangled was much prettier, personally) and I’ll be the first to proclaim that Idina Menzel sang the hell out of her big diva song. HOWEVER I felt like the plot was a giant mess, the characters were REALLY thin, and nothing anyone did made any sense at all. Also, the reindeer was SUPER just the horse from Tangled with antlers.
Titanic-I cheered when Jack died and can’t even listed to that horrid song.
When I was 18, my mother and a friend of hers were going to a costume party. Her friend decided to go as Scarlett O'Hara, and the day beforehand realised that she should probably watch Gone With The Wind before putting on the costume. She arrived at our house, video in hand, to discover my mum was out. She decided that I had to watch it with her as a bonding activity. She proceeded to realise that she *is* Scarlett and that Scarlett is not a good person to be, sobbed uncontrollably until my mum got home, then went to the party and got passing-out-drunk and vomited all over both herself and my mother.
So a movie that I didn't enjoy anyway has left indelible scars.
The Great Gatsby. Fuck you, Luhrman.
American Beauty ~ Not only is it the 57,352nd movie about amoral suburbanites who are secretly miserable, but bonus points for being super-pretentious about it.
Beetlejuice ~ Not even remotely my kind of “humor.”
Easy Rider ~ Soooooo slowwwwwww
The Firm ~ Typically far-fetched and convoluted John Grisham plot.
Forrest Gump ~ Wall-to-wall lame humor and faux profundity. That scene with John Lennon…I…I have no words for how stupid that was.
Frida ~ Adultery is only wrong when the husband does it, apparently.
Gone Baby Gone ~ Typically far-fetched and convoluted Dennis Lehane plot.
Heat ~ Decent crime movie, but there’s a reason thrillers usually aren’t three hours long.
Life of Pi ~ Either give me a whimsical fantasy movie or give me gritty realism. Stop trying to have it both ways.
Locke ~ Fantastic presentation wrapped around utter banality.
Seven ~ How many crime movie cliches can we fit into one movie?
The Station Agent ~ It’s supposed to be a comedy, but has nothing that remotely resembles humor.
Sunshine ~ Can’t seem to decide what genre it wants to inhabit. Also, religious people are CRAZY. And crazy people are VIOLENT.
The Thin Red Line ~ Super-pretentious cinematography wrapped around yet another hackneyed war movie.
The Shining, Toad Road, The Matrix, Donnie Darko, most of Joss Whedon’s stuff. Egh. And I really, really don’t like Beauty and the Beast. I don’t get why it got so much attention in comparison to some of the other Disney movies that came out during that era. It’s boring.
silence of the lambs because, holy shit, hannibal lecter is the only fictional character other than dolores umbridge that terrifies the crap out of me
the shining because i hate steven? stephen? king
THE MOVIE VERSION OF A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS MAKES ME SOOO MAD I LOVED THOSE BOOKS
Anything with the following actors who I have always been afraid of/creeped out by since childhood:
Bill Murray (yes, THE Bill Murray everyone inexplicably loves), Jon Malkovich, Danny DeVito, Chevy Chase, Dan Ackroyd, John Candy, Will Ferrell (except Elf, which I liked unexpectedly), and probably way more. I get creeped out a lot.
Movies though: Delirious. Saw it when I was a tiny kid, had nightmares for ages. I don’t even know what it’s about (and refuse to find out)…..
More recently, Adaptation. First 3/4 of it was annoyingly realistic and boring as heck, last bit was insane and totally unrealistic. I read online it’s supposed to be that way, but man, way too hipster for me.
Lastly, Lost in Translation. Dude was a douchecanoe to his wife, the whole attractiveness thing was so unbelievable (and justifying to the world once again that an old unattractive man can ‘get’ a young attractive woman if his story is sad enough to lure her in, just UGH)
Vent over. Though I probably hate a lot more movies LOL I’m super fun to be around I’m sure
I also hated Lost in Translation. She tags along with her husband on his working trip, and then whines and sulks the whole time that he's busy working and she's all alone and it's boring in Japan when she just sits in the hotel and doesn't go anywhere. Seriously? You INSISTED on coming! Plus, the only jokes seemed to be in the first five minutes, so I got suckered into sitting through the rest of it waiting for it to get funny again, which it never did.
“Up” because of the irritating child and random sled dog chase scenes. What plot? There is no plot after the first 15 minutes of this thing. What is it with pixar and annoying dogs; a dog doesn’t need to talk in this human centric movie, leave him alone. Even “Bolt” is better than “UP” and it had the neckbeard hamster in it. 5 minutes of story does not a good movie make. I felt bored and depressed before and after watching this movie and I’ve heard enough from the pixar hipsters who adore it.
“Fight Club”, boring and inane and only vaguely passable as a social satire.