What about movies that are based upon real people and events? I ask because Quiz Show and Tucker both made me want to stab people with a rusty fork.
It’s the only movie I’ve ever walked out of, and I’ve never understood why it didn’t bother more people.
(ok…I actually also left a showing of Pet Sematary…but that’s because I can’t take that kind of movie… :eek: )
Hilary Swank’s family in Million Dollar Baby. I wanted to slap them.
Yeah, this is a good choice.
Atticus gets the opposite vote - to my mind, the best portrait of a truly good man I know of in the movies.
What are you going to do? Cry?
[bounces basketball off of Obeseus’ head]
Are you going to cry?
Come on cry?
[bounces it agian]
Come, squirt some tears out for me.
Great movie.
I nominate all the kids from the Cobra Kai dojo in the Karate Kid.
Especially the ‘get him a body bag!’ kid.
Yeah, but Kreese, their teacher, was the biggest assneck of them all by a factor of about ten. I mean, the Cobra Kai all quit at the end of the movie (or was it the beginning of the second), throwing their black uniforms at his feet. For me, as a 12 year old boy, that made everything all right. Kreese was still a dick, though, so much so that they brought him back in the third movie, just to add some extra dickery to the main villain, who was an Olympic-level asshole in his own right.
Ok she pissed me off more in the book than she she did in the movie but I still wanted to see the pig faced bitc… Um, female dog die with a wand stuck so far up her, um, nose that she tasted wood whenever she farted!
Harry Potters very own, Dolores Umbridge
The Warden in The Shawhank Redemption was particularly nasty. He found out the main character was innocent, so he killed the only witness who could testify to it and locked the main character in solitary confinement, all so he could use the guy to help him CHEAT ON HIS TAXES!
Wow, I’m so upset about that. The only thing that settles my soul is knowing just how badly Andy screwed him over on the way out.
What pissed you off about Quiz Show?
“I’d like to think that the last thing that went through his head – besides that bullet – …”
Both the leads in Sideways. Paul Giamatti played a self-absorbed, Saab-driving wine snob who has to compensate for his inferiority complex by being smarter and better than everybody else and stole a shitload of money from his elderly mother. Then he couldn’t even act happy for his ex-wife when she got married, he had to shit on her wedding too. And his million-page ‘novel’? Did he really expect to find a publisher for that? Then he threw a bitch fit when it got rejected. “Oh, I have to drink a big bottle of wine RIGHT FUCKING NOW, poor little me!” What a deluded, self-important boor.
I know we were supposed to hate Thomas Hayden Church’s character, but I can see why the 2 of them were together. They’re both complete assholes with a huge sense of entitlement.
The claim, in the closing titles, that the guys responsible for the whole charade were still in the game show business, thirty years later, and still raking it in.
The Mexican villager in The Magnificent Seven that betrays the team to Eli Wallach’s bandits. That weak-kneed PUSSY.
Nobody says you have to like “Tue Lies” (I only gave it a tepid thumbs up myself), but you’ve got the whole scenario 100% wrong.
Arnold is not “jealous and paranoid”- his wife IS carrying on a flirtation with a man she believes (wrongly) is a secret agent. She’s doing so because she thinks (wrongly) that her husband is a boring businessman, and she want some adventure in her life.
Every hoop Arnold makes her jump through is to fulfill HER fantasy! He’s giving her the exciting adventure she craves. She WANTS to be a seductive spy seducing an enemy agent, rather than a middle aged housewife. She LOVES doing that striptease, because it makes her feel sexy and powerful, for a change.
Oh yeah, him too. All his whiny bullshit was annoying but when he stole from his mother-- who would have GIVEN him the money if he’d ask for it-- just to save face. What an a-hole. He deserved to live a loney life. Jerk.
I really disagree with this, although I recognize that your view is the one the movie wants the viewer to accept.
The point, IMO, is not whether JLC’s character is “carrying on a flirtation.” (which she isn’t…she is genuinely interested in intrigue, but there is no intent on her part to cheat)
The point is that Arnold’s character’s way of dealing with his suspicions is to kidnap, emotionally and mentally torture, and manipulate his wife in ways that are violent and degrading.
You’re certainly right that JLC’s character is written in a way that suggests that she ends up liking all the excitement, but are you seriously saying that having a “heroic” movie character anonymously violate his own spouse both emotionally and physically – all the while packaging it with a gee-whiz sense of “isn’t this fun, everybody?” – shouldn’t offend me?
I’m not saying it has to offend you. But I think it’s disgusting.
Okay, I dispute both of these. Enid, the character in Ghost World, torches every relationship in her life until she’s left with no choice but to leave town. It’s a metaphor for growing up. Giamatti’s character from Sideways: A lot of people complained about the scene where he steals a huge wad of cash from his mother. That was an important scene! You, the viewer, are meant to think about it later in the movie where he’s trying to convince Virginia Madsen that he’s not as awful as Thomas Hayden Church’s character. If we hadn’t seen him steal from Mom, we might believe him uncritically.
These are two of my favorite movies ever.
The character I most wanted to slap around was Steve Martin in Shopgirl.
The Cobra Kai sensai in The Karate Kid.
Although, “sweep the leg” always gets a chuckle out of me.
I’m not quite understanding your objection to the Sideways comments. You are saying the scene was meant to show him as an asshat, so why would you dispute people who find him to be an asshat because of the scene?
He’s not just an asshat in the “Nurse Ratched” sense; he’s the Universal Asshat Within Us All with a seed of redemption. Unlike most of the characters being mentioned here, he’s the viewer identification figure in the film, and we’re uncomfortable about it because he’s convincing, not because he’s awful.
Would the movie have been more enjoyable if he’d been more moral and above reproach? Or is his reproachability what makes him memorable?