Being contrary by nature and doubting the movie could be as bad as what everyone had made it out to be, I put *Gigli *on my Netflix queue a couple months ago and finally got around to seeing it today and having just finished it a couple minutes ago, I have to say, it’s really not all that bad.
Sure, the dialogue is pretty atrocious in parts; the characterization, when there is any, is pretty spotty; and the acting caused me to wince a couple times but, overall, I don’t think it’s much worse than most of the other typical Hollywood fare and, as I suspected, most of its criticism was based largely on it being a Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck vehicle.
With that being said, the “Gobble, gobble” scene *was *as bad as everyone said it was and there was another line, about fifteen minutes before that that was awe inspiring in its bizarreness: Brian, the boy that Affleck and Lopez had kidnapped, was sitting in the car watching Ricki (Lopez) talk to her girlfriend and then told Gigli (Affleck) that they “make [his] pee sneeze”. I wasn’t sure I heard him right and was replaying the line in my mind when just a moment or two later, he stared down at his crotch and said “God bless you”.
*Completely *stupid but yet I laughed. Hard. And then I rewatched it and laughed again.
This movie is by no means the next Casablanca (or even the next Showgirls if that’s your thing) but if you don’t mind shutting off your mind for a couple hours and aren’t repulsed by the idea of Lopez or Affleck on your TV, there are worse ways to kill time.
I saw Gigli. I thought, no way it’s as bad as everyone says. It’s just people being sick of the whole Bennifer thing.
It was that bad. It wasn’t just the Bennifer thing, which I never cared about one way or the other. The situation was horrible, the dialogue atrocious, and it tried to be both a gritty crime drama and a screwball comedy, and failed misreably at both.
When we came to Pacino’s scene, the DVD totally conked out. Wouldn’t play more than five seconds at a time for more than five minutes. To this day, I believe that the sheer awfulness of he movie, inspired my DVD player to develop sentience, and then try to re-edit the fim in order to preserve its own infant electronic sanity. Such is the power of the awfulness of the movie. Alas, to no avail. The film went back on track. The new life snuffed out by the very horror that created it, and I wasn’t spared to see the end of the movie.
I watched “Gigli” for the same “can it possibly be as bad as all that?” reason. Sure there are a lot worse movies. (The speech that Jennifer Lopez makes to the “tough kids” about her martial arts abilities to poke out someone’s eyes was very anemic.)
The Al Pacino scene in which he portrays a crime boss who is definitely totally unwilling to go to jail is a real surprise. (I never even knew he was in the movie).
Personally, I think this movie was pre-ordained to get completely destroyed because people in general (and especially critics) like to see people fail. Even if this movie were the equal of “Citizen Kane”, it would have failed.
Thinking back about 40 years, remember how Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were the “darlings” of Hollywood? Then as “Cleopatra” was being filmed, rumors surfaced about the high budget and how it was going to be a disaster. I think people were waiting for any chance to see Liz and Dick fail. The same applies to Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck.
What did Don Henley sing? “People love it when you lose, they love dirty laundry”.
Shortly afterwards, yeah. The whole argument her and Affleck had about the virtues of the penis versus those of the vagina was what I was thinking of when I said the dialogue was atrocious in parts.
