For me (and excluding animated films):
Crash
Gosford Park
Magnolia
The Player
The Graduate. Pretty boring. Maybe it was a baby boomer thing.
Unlike some people, I’ve watched the movie that’s my nomination -
Pulp Fiction. It was, you know, OK. Some good lines, and Samuel L. Jackson, but not really all that impressive.
A third vote for Lost in Translation. It wasn’t a bad movie, but an oscar winner (or just nominee? I forget)? No way.
Bill Murray’s character I could empathize with to a fair extent, but Johansson suffered from ‘90210 Syndrome’: spoiled rich kid in a funk because the world around her just isn’t entertaining enough. It didn’t help matters that it was a spoiled rich tourist moping about in my backyard.
Can I add a high-hyped writer/director that’s made me go ‘meh’?: Luc Besson. After Leon, his name on a film was an instant eye-catcher for me. But somewhere along the way of watching The Messenger, Wasabi, The Dancer, Taxi, Taxi 2, Yamakasi, **Michel Vaillant ** and Danny the Dog, I gave up on his films being anything but brain candy with the all plot twists of a third-grader’s book report. They’re not really bad films (well, The Messenger was pretty awful), and Besson’s big enough to attract actors that can rise above the script (Dustin Hoffman in The Messenger, Bob Hoskins in Danny the Dog, for example), but none of these films ever manage to surprise or impress beyond the occasional camera angle.
Agreed. I’d rather shoot myself in the head than watch the first 30 minutes of that movie. The rest wasn’t bad, but those first thirty…
I’ll second Gladiator, but my nominée would be Forrest Gump, that glorification of stupidity. And everyone apparently loved it. Yuck.
I wouldn’t agree that The Matrix was over-hyped (and I’m not that far from you geographically, Panurge), but the sequels certainly were. The first sequel was actually so bad I haven’t been able to watch the original since and I used to love that one.
Maybe the sequels were hyped more than the original one, and The Matrix certainly wasn’t hyped as much as many films nowadays (LoTR, Spiderman, Pirates of the Carribean, etc.). Maybe I was reacting to the amount of (pseudo-)intellectualism that surrounded it. Kind of a “Da Vinci Code”-syndrome on a (much) smaller scale.
And a new one: Dances with wolves. Well - pretty much anything made by Kevin Costner, I guess. Not everything starring him - he does quite well as an actor occasionally.
ETA: Qualifying the Costner comment.
I think the second half of the movie more than makes up for it.
The Horse Whisperer.
Dances with Wolves.
The Big Chill. Boring, turned it off after 20 minutes.
Mind you, I was born in 1967, so I’m not part of the film’s target demographic.
I agree with The Matrix hype - I thought the first movie was pretty fair as a standalone, but I despised all the bullshit commentary on all the philosophical/religious/cultural references, particularly as so many of them seemed very shallow or trite. I mean, who cares if you have a character named ‘Trinity’ or named ‘The Merovingian’, if the name is pretty much all there is to the reference?
300
I missed it in the theater, bought it the day it came out on DVD.
Within 10 minutes I wanted to turn it off. Within 20 minutes I was just angry at how horrible the movie was. Within 30 minutes I resolved myself to watch the rest of that crap-tacular film so I could find a thread on the SDMB* and bitch about how bad it was.
At the end, I wanted to beat 300 red-headed step children with 300 fetid slices of bologna. Just thinking about it now makes me mad for buying it on DVD based on all the “OMIGOD THIS MOVIE IS THE GREATEST MOST AWESOME KICK ARSE MOVIE EVAH!”.
- Can’t search for threads on 300 because you can’t search for three-letter/numbers. That made me even more mad at this stupid movie.
MeanJoe
Oh, and I have tried. I swear to Gawd I have tried. I do not like The Big Lebowski. shame
Oh, yeh! Up through the truck smash, it held me. After that it just get more and more annoying. Take it from a hose person – the horse stuff was just as boring and irritating as the human interest stuff. The friend I’d gone to see it with agreed.
Star Wars. The first one. I fell asleep in the theater.
What? You didn’t force yourself to stay awake through the whole thing? Why, that’s… that’s… as ExTank would insist, that’s “chickenshit”, sirrah! You had a duty to artistic appreciation to tape your eyelids open and watch the entire movie before reaching any conclusion! 
***The Star Wars ‘prequels.’
***The Horse Whisperer. Another horse person here who read the book, saw the movie and went ‘meh’ to both.
***Field of Dreams. I guess you have to be a guy to get into this movie.
Independence Day.
I was pissed!
Well 90% of your complaints were you know…wrong. There’s a slight difference between saying “I fell asleep during this movie” and “I have all these nitpicks that are actually explained during the movie that I never gave the movie a chance to explain so it’s a bad movie”. Ya know?
I doubt anyone is taking issue with you being bored by the movie it’s your time and if you feel it’s being wasted it’s your business but to bring up problems you had with the plot when you didn’t see the whole plot is pretty silly.
‘‘The Graduate’’ rocked my face off, and I’m 24 (saw it for the first time less than a year ago.) So probably not just a baby boomer thing. My husband loved it too. I would own that movie.
Which brings up the following question: Is it really necessary to watch something like, um, say… Sled Dogs in order to comprehend it’s a piece of filth? This is a serious question. My husband and I have an ongoing discussion about this.
Yes, actually, I do know, and given your courtesy in framing that observation, I’ll respond in kind.
I did actually observe that the crew members were corporate peons, worried about losing their bonuses, etc. That was part of the character development which, as I say, left me not caring about any of the characters. By the time the plot started developing into a recognizable shape, I’d already lost whatever interest I had in their fates, and the things I complained about annoyed me because I just didn’t give a rat’s ass about them, or how the whole story would play out. In short, the narrative wasn’t holding me in that willing suspension of disbelief which a work of fiction requires in order to succeed.
Would Lib have liked Star Wars if he’d made himself stay awake through the whole thing? Maybe as the plot unfolded he would. Maybe not. Would he have been happier if he could have exited the movie when it was plain it didn’t appeal to him and spent his time more productively? I daresay he would (unless he really needed that nap. ;)) Since I was awake I could make the choice to do something else when I reached that point.
If you liked Alien, sure, it’s a good movie – for you. If you cared enough to follow it through to the end and enjoyed it, that’s fine; you saw a film you liked and it was good – for you. For me, it wasn’t, and that’s entirely a matter of personal preference.
Take this hypothetical: You’re given a two-hour tape of FEI-level dressage. You watch half an hour or so and by then you’re bored speechless, having concluded that it’s all just a bunch of pooftahs riding in circles – the same damned circles over and over again. Should you watch the entire two hours to see if your opinion changes? After all, later on the tape they do the Kur, the freestyle to music! Wicked cool stuff! Except that, if you’ve already come to the conclusion that watching paint dry would hold more suspense for you than dressage, you’re not going to like that, either.
Now, me, I could watch upper-level dressage for hours. But that’s because it appeals to me. I’d understand without rancor anyone who watched only a portion of such a tape and fled before it ended.