Saving Private Ryan". I like war movies but Tom Hanks as a soldier is as miscast as they come.
I once recorded “Schindler’s List” off cable but there was a lot of snow so I gave up after 10 minutes. Maybe try again someday.
When compared to how it sounds… 
That new James Cameron film, Sanctum. I have no idea why, but for a long time underwater scenes have made me anxious (all of them, from discovery channel specials to the Star Wars prequel with one) even when they’re supposed to be peaceful, and I’d never force myself to sit through a movie full of them.
If it has Meryl Streep in it, I probably won’t watch it. I simply don’t like watching her style of acting.
Same thing for Al Pacino.
And yes, I’ve seen several from both in different genres, so I really do have a good sample on which to base my feelings.
ymmv
I guess I totally misunderstood the question. The examples people are giving are movies that they don’t want to watch because they have some unpleasant scene or idea in the movie itself. To me that doesn’t fit the category of a film that looks good.
I thought the thread was supposed to be about films that really did look good - a movie that had nothing in it that the viewer would find objectionable. But one where something external to the movie made the viewer not choose to watch it.
Examples I was thinking of were people who refuse to watch any movie with Jane Fonda in it because of her Vietnam War protests. Or maybe refusing to watch an old western because some horses were injured on the set. Or refusing to watch any movies with a Scientologist in the cast.
From the OP: “I want your responses to be films whose premise you find interesting, but that you won’t watch due to squeamishness or other emotional triggers.”
Yes, I know. I was just expecting something different from the thread title.
I wouldn’t have seen Pan’s Labyrinth if the trailers reflected the actual movie more. The trailers made it out to look like a dark, almost Tim Burton-esque fantasy. Instead we got people killed with broken bottles, children in grave danger and a father that wasn’t just a Captain Hook-ish villain but a real villain.
I totally disagree, which is a statement I’m qualified to make as I’ve seen the movie.
Yeah, I’d say Capt. John Miller is of Hanks’s best roles. Very human, quietly but powerfully portrayed.
I on the other hand am very impressed that Jim’s Son has correctly anticipated the problem of casting Hanks as Miller: Like, casting Hanks as a soldier, that would have been fine, I guess. But casting Hanks as Miller? 
… :smack:
The whole glorious miscasting of Hanks is exemplified in the scene [spoiler]where he tells his men what he did before the war. As you may remember, it had been a running plot point throughout the movie that his men wonder what kind of job their mean-son-of-a-bitch Captain held as a civilian. And when he finally tells them that he’s actually a teacher, this is met by disbelief and almost shock. Because to them it is inconceivable that such a hard-ass could be possibly working with children.
The problem here is obvious: Namely, that it is not at all inconceivable to an audience that Hanks had been a school teacher before the war. Quite the opposite in fact, when I first saw that scene, I thought: “Sounds about right”. Because really,* why wouldn’t Tom Hanks be a school teacher?
*
It seems pretty clear to me that the Miller role must have been originally written in mind for a Lee Marvin type of actor. Someone who could really embody “mean-son-of-a-bitch”. But Hanks ain’t it.[/spoiler] And therefore the entire scene (and subplot) falls completely flat.
Now granted, SPR had much bigger problems than Hanks (who in fact does a decent job with that part), but this one really is glaring, especially when Hanks’ sidekick is being played by Tom Sizemore of all people. To this day I still wonder why this subplot hasn’t been given to his character.
You make an interesting point I hadn’t considered before, Aeon. I agree with what you say - the role would have been better cast with somebody who wasn’t normally cast as a “good guy”.
But quite frankly, Saving Private Ryan had already lost me long before we got to the revelation of Captain Miller’s background. I thought Saving Private Ryan was higly over-rated - it was a good movie but by no means a great one.
At the risk of participating in a hijack, Tom Hanks did a great job in Saving Private Ryan. Captain Miller sort of summarized the American Fighting Man of WW2. He was a schoolteacher who answered his country’s call and became someone completely different along the way. Miller wasn’t fresh-off-the-farm at Normandy, but had seen action in North Africa and Italy - the fighting at Anzio alone being more than enough to take the polish off a humble schoolteacher and turn him into a lean, mean, combat machine. But by the time of the Ryan mission, Miller’s crusty exterior is starting to crumble under the strain of prolonged fighting, and perhaps the nature of the mission is prompting his humanness to reemerge too. The film has some problems, but the casting of Hanks and his performance are not among them.
Well, I can’t really disagree with most of this. Yet this is precisely the reason, I would argue, why Hanks doesn’t really work in the role.
Miller’s arc is presented in a way [spoiler]that the audience is at first only supposed to see the exterior of this figure, the jaded combat veteran. The way the “I’m a teacher” scene is written & directed (and after all the build-up to this point), it’s supposed to be both a surprise and a reminder that even ruthless Miller is at his core one of us, our neighbour, our friend, our teacher. It is supposed to underscore the point that anyone could have been in his place, become what he has become, done what he had to do.
But Hanks embodies that Everyman quality right from the start. Because he’s Tom Hanks. There’s simply no pay-off to that scene where he tells his background because it simply confirms what (who) we’ve already seen the whole time.
Now, Hanks as an Everyman right off the bat actually works in its own right, if only as a grown-up, stable counterpart to the Jeremy Davies character. But again, this is not what the movie had been going for. It was going for the “big” revelation scene. [/spoiler]
And the result is a key scene in both his character arc and the film as a whole that is just not working. The movie cuts itself off from its own legs here.
Like I said, Hanks acting by itself is fine, but he is miscast nonetheless.
Despite being not religious, religion interests me, and I went as far as to just buy The Passion so I could watch it.
Yeah…
It’s been years, and I have yet to make it past the first few minutes. I need to just coaster it; the violence is just stupid.