Still haven’t seen that one. I found his character in “A Few Good Men” kind of obnoxious, though. Actually, I think I found everyone in “A Few Good Men” obnoxious. Especially Tom Cruise’s character.
Which brings me to Tom Cruise’s character in “Rain Man.” Yeah, yeah, they bonded at the end. So what? He’s a manipulative freak who kidnapped his autistic brother for jollies. I do like the movie, but I just hate watching him berate Raymond. He just doesn’t get it. Granted, Raymond is hard to take, but whose idea was it to take him, hm?
And I’ll agree with Kevin Spacey’s character in “American Beauty.” I found the whole movie overrated, but him especially.
The mayor in The Color Purple. His wife was a pscho-bitch, but she was crazy and everybody knew it. It was the mayor who let her get away with driving like a maniac, taking Sophia home for 2 minutes, getting her on work release, etc… (And of course Mister, but at least he redeems himself [even moreso in the book].)
Another vote for Tom Hanks in You’ve Got Mail- he was a creepy stalker, period.
Louis Jourdan’s character in Gigi. You’re bored- boohoohoo. Maybe making the girl you’ve known since she was a child your sex worker will help and then all those people unable to feed their kids after working 80 hours per week will quit weeping for you.
Scarlett O’Hara- there was much to admire about her but nothing to like. Rhett should have left her ass, taken Bonnie, and married Belle when he still had the chance.
Pretty much every character in Rent except for the “villain” (Benny- Taye Diggs) for reasons discussed before but summarized as “get jobs and quit whining you bunch of entitled hippies!”.
The husband in Dolores Claiborne, though it’s a bit hard to keep hating him when he got what he deserved. I also hated the rich-bitch whose name eludes me until her famous “sometimes an accident can be a lonely woman’s best friend” turnaround.
Beau Bridges and Jerry O’Connell as the duplicitious father-son in Jerry Maguire.
OK, I’ve got to disagree about Jenny, but only on meta-story grounds. Of course, we’re supposed to despise her, with her abusive boyfriends and drug addiction and suicide attempts, all when Forrest luuurves her. But the manipulation is just too transparent to me. If she’s really so scummy, why does Forrest love her? It’s such a transparent notion of the screenwriter…“That girl should have loved me instead of rejecting me! I was clearly better than the guys she chose. And to prove it, I’ll write a movie about a girl who rejects the saintly good guy in favor of various assholes, and everyone will hate her! She’ll finally be sorry, but by then it will be too late, she’ll die of AIDS as punishment!”
I hate characters who are only assholes because the writers lazily make them into assholes. So you have that businessman yell a racial epithet, and that establishes him as an asshole, and then he deserves everything the hero does to him. You have the husband slap his wife, so he deserves everything the hero does to him. You have the popular girl insult the plain best friend, so when the heroine embarrasses her at the prom and takes her boyfriend, she deserves it.
I just hate the transparent manipulation of “Well, this guy’s the antagonist, so we have to make him an asshole so the audience will cheer when he gets his comeuppance.” It’s phony, it rings false, it ruins my suspension of disbelief.
I can easily believe any number of amoral, evil, vicious, disgusting, depraved, malicious characters. I just hate it when they’re evil just because they were written that way, when they are transparent puppets. I can much more easily believe rotten people who treat the protagonist rottenly when they aren’t caricatures, but rather ordinary everyday rotten people who do the ordinary rotten things that rotten people do every day.
…creating the archetypal slacker anti-hero protagonist of virtually every teen/college film of the 40 years since. I mean, can we not draw a line straight from Ben in The Graduate to Largeman in Garden State?
I felt utter rage at (and I haven’t watched the movie in years) the hospital worker that displays Merrick as a freak to basically get laid. I remember screaming at the the tv.
For what it’s worth, Jenny does NOT die in the book- she does give birth to Forrest’s child, though. She even introduces Forrest to the boy. But she has no intention of marrying Forrest.
Christian Slater’s smirking-asshole character in Home for the Holidays. Never before or since have I wanted to reach right into the screen and punch someone right in the mouth!
The Natalie Portman character in “Garden State.” She was just a little too precious and cutesy…and her habit of making weird sounds when she felt unoriginal did NOT impress me.
