I’m going to have to disagree with you here. House constantly gets called out for his behavior; he almost whent to jail, his father hates him, he lost the love of his life, his best friend Wilson is constantly trying to get him to change, the list goes on. Has there ever been an episode where someone didn’t tell him he was being a jerk?
I like House. I like him because he seem real. He’s complicated. I think deep down he’s a decent guy, but he just has a very tough time dealing with people. He’s damaged both in body and in spirit and for all his smart ass remarks the decent guy somehow shows through.
Now it so happens that in 20-odd years, I have run into my share of real Bob’s at work, too many to have any sort of sympathy for Bill Murray’s generally weird character. There are quite a few people out there who act that way, but they aren’t cute or funny or lovable. At all. Most of them are just annoying as hell, and a few of them are downright scary. It doesn’t take too long working customer service before you learn that lesson the hard way. I was feeling pretty sorry for Leo halfway through the movie, and by the end, I was asking myself why he didn’t just throw Bob in a lake tied to the chair instead of wasting good explosives on this privacy-invading creep.
I avoided watching Lilo and Stitch for a long time because I thought it would be the typical Disney kid. Then I finally saw it and when Lilo showed her friends her doll and said something had laid eggs in her brain I actually shouted out “that is the coolest kid ever!”.
Every character from The Sopranos, but especially Tony. I watched the show for the first three seasons to enjoy seeing those slimeballs self-destruct or turn on each other. When it became evident that the writers had no intention of killing off Tony, I gave up on the show.
I guess he does get in trouble from time to time (once or twice a season?) for the big stuff. My thought, when I typed it originally, is that in virtually every episode, he says something to a patient (often one of the non-storyline clinic patients he so hates to examine) that would get a real-life doctor fired or sued.
Miss Purl McKnittington, thank you for defending Jane Eyre. I’m curious to know how Dangerosa came to think of her as a wimp.
My nominations for the OP:
-Emma.
-Miscue got it right with the wife in Meet the Parents.
-Dorothea from Middlemarch - I love that book, and I think Dorothea is a really interesting character, but I do not like her.
-The wife in Shoeless Joe - I only read about 60 pages of this piece of crap, but in that amount of time the lead’s wife established herself as the most loathsome wife ever.
The word tool as I have learned it is much more specific than just someone you don’t like. You can use it how you like, but you might find people are a bit perplexed at it.
Well, but as the “Discussion” page briefly mentions, “tool” is another way of saying “dick”, at least in English usage, and it may have crossed the ocean.
I used to have the utmost contempt for Schwimmer, until I saw Band of Brothers, where he does a very very good job of playing a martinet officer. I was pretty darned impressed. Of course, it’ll take him forever to get past the typecasting from playing Ross for so long.
(Oh, and of the several lame characters in Friends, Ross was the lamest.)
Rose from the movie Titanic. At least old lady Rose I found really self-centered and annoying. Bill Paxton and his crew spend a fortune exploring the Titanic, and then spend a smaller fortune to bring Rose out to the ship for a trip down memory lane, and how does Rose reward them? By chucking overboard the Heart of the Ocean diamond (which, by the way, doesn’t actually belong to her). Ungrateful cow!
I am sorry I missed this thread’s inception as I was just thinking about this this weekend.
I agree with wholeheartedly:
The movie version of Mary Jane Watson.
Anakin Skywalker
Entire cast of Wuthering Heights
Scarlett
And would like to add:
Most every character from any Michael Crichton book.
Lois Lane, god I hate her.
Garp from the World According to Garp, which I just slogged through this weekend.
Nicole des Jardins from the Rama series by Arthur Clarke. It was obvious we were supposed to sympathize with her. But all I could think of was, and I’ll spoiler it since I know one person in the thread is reading it right now:
Here’s this woman who takes drugs from the old world and thinks the hallucinations are real. She slept with a prince and goes to her grave without telling her daughter who the real father was, thus denying her any chance of any kind of relationship with the father. She sleeps with the other man on the shuttle for “genetic diversity”, almost irrevocably hurting the man who loves her desperately. She’s opportunistic and mean. Ugh.
And while we’re on it, a hell of a lot of characters from Clarke’s books. I’m quite sure they’re true to life but oh they annoy the hell out of me.
At least she’s not a nerdy 12-year-old girl constantly whining about her abusive mother and incapable of telling her best friend she’s in love with him. Aren’t characters like that really annoying?
You might as well stop trying to figure out what this post means, folks. Anly Mika will understand.
To be fair, that’s pretty much all Gentry Lee’s fault, not Clarke’s. And I totally agree with you about des Jardins. Actually, I hated every single character in Rama II and the sequels.
Didn’t her fiance give it to her as a gift? I think it did belong to her. She feigned curiosity about the salvage operation to get out to the boat so that she, as her fiance did, could bequeath it to her beloved.
I think I’ve posted this before, but I think Lois Lane has potential to be a fascinating character, but I don’t think any actress/director has nailed the complexities of the character yet. Either that or Lois is just a self-centred manipulative bitch and Clark is a loser for loving her. One or the other.
The thing is, you are right on both accounts. Probably Lois could be something really interesting - a tough, strong woman, who is just as soft inside as anybody. However directors do less about casting her as a realistic woman and make her more into their own image.
