(Otherwise known as the Everybody Loves Raymond Award.
Yes! It’s time yet again for ostensibly sympathetic fictional characters whom you’d happily drop into a live volcano given the chance. Spoilers, I think, are inevitable.
For me, it’s the movie version of Mary Jane Watson.
F/X played the Spider-Man 2 director’s cut last night. As S2 is the greatest super-hero movie ever made, and as I am a geek, I naturally watched 30 minutes of it or so. Okay, an hour. Anyway, as I watched, I was struck (not for the first time) with the impulse to screen “Run, Peter, run! For god’s sakes, man, get away from her!” every time Mary Jane was on screen. It’s not that Kirsten Dunst isn’t a hottie, for she is; it’s not even that I can’t understand why Mary Jane might have serious self-esteem and commitment issues, for they’ve made it clear that her father is an orc. Nevertheless, has she failed to cheat on ANY of her boyfriends in the three movies so far?
Thus, I’d to give Sam Raimi a note: If you want us to root for your heroine to get together with your hero, try not making her a untrustworthy, self-pitying, whiner whose reaction to every emotional setback is to make out with the nearest guy who’s being nice to her. K?
Granted, I’ve only seen three or four episodes, but as far I could tell, every character on Grey’s Anatomy is an idiotic, infantile narcissist who has no business caring for goldfish, much less being responsible for the lives of other actual human beings.
Never liked Kirsten Dunst’s MJ either. Far too insipid and whiny.
I came into this thread to mention Mary Jane Watson as portrayed by Kirsten Dunst (the doper who summed her up as an “abrasive, self-absorbed ditz” was dead on), and everyone on Grey’s Anatomy except maybe George.
Now that everyone’s taken my ideas, I’ll add…Horatio Caine. The best word I can come up with for Caine is smugly. Yes, it’s a portmanteau.
what about this House guy? Sure, he saves lives, but he’s got issues … LOTS of issues. I can’t help but think the hospitals stats wouldn’t be affected much overall if they let House go, and then they wouldn’t have to put up with the old addicted curmudgeon.
My armchair hypothesis is that Gregory House is meant to appeal to viewers who secretly wish they were so brilliant and so important that they could treat everyone like dogshit and rarely, if ever, get called out for it. Vicarious enjoyment for the bitter and antisocial in us.
Well, Elliot is hot enough that a guy could put up with her for a weekend, but what the hell is it with JD or Zach Braff? JD is a nauseating excuse for a human and Braff is a lousy actor who is butt ugly, so why is he a leading man?
House appeals to people largely because he’s intensely charismatic and very, very funny. Some people are so compelling through simple strength of personality, that we manage to forgive the fact that they’re largely jerks.
Plus, his jerkishness is mitigated by three factors:
He’s constantly in pain, which both excuseshis jerkishness and punishes him for it.
He’s an actual genius - and they’re always fun to watch;
When all’s said and done, he actually does go around saving people’s lives.
Admit it: if you had some undiagnosed, life threatening disease, who would you prefer treated you - a nice but ineffectual everydoctor, or a brilliant asshole like House?
I don’t have any life threatening disease, but I’d still prefer House treat me. And if you could finagle Gordon Ramsay to cook for me while I’m dying, that would be fabulous, and if Liam Neeson sports a kilt and reads me stories and tucks me in to bed, I assure you, I’d be Munchausen all the way.
Kirsten Dunst drives me insane. I find her wholly unappealing, so much so that I am shocked on the few occasions when I don’t.
A character has to be believable for the most part. Not as in “someone you know” but rather “someone COULD be that way.” House is very humanized. It does show he suffers because of his choices. That is why we can like him anyway.
I suppose people that just like people to be assholes in general, watch Survivor.
Another Zach Braff movie, I can’t remember the name of it. He’s engaged to Jacinda Barrett, she gets knocked up and he turns into asshole-extrordinairre and I think we’re still supposed to like him but I kept hoping his character would get pneumonia and die on the front porch.
I’d guess the penultimate would be Zakalwe in “Use of Weapons.” The ultimate tool for dealing with violent barbarians in the hands of the Culture. A genocide, a mass-murderer and … the Chairmaker. And yet Iain Banks writes him as a sympathetic character. Riiiiiight.
Isn’t that kind of the point of the whole movie, that we’re watching a bunch of pretty screwed-up people? None of them are deliberately malicious, just a group of fairly realistic people who can’t get out of their own way. That makes them at least somewhat sympathetic. That’s my take on it, anyway.
Are we supposed to like Sophia Bush’s character on One Tree Hill? I’ve only seen a couple of episodes of the show and she seems perfectly loathable.
On the same network, everyone’s supposed to be madly in love with Special Sparkly Princess Lana Lang on Smallville. With all respect to Kristen Kreuk, I’ve yet to meet a fan who is.
