Sorry if this has been done recently but I wasn’t sure how to search for a relevant thread without quoted-phrase searching capability…
Shrek (or maybe Shrek II…the one with his homely love interest)…it just went on and on; I watched maybe two-thirds and pulled the plug
Pirates of the Caribbean w/Johnny Depp…(see #1)
Shogun (novel)…a co-worker loved it and wanted everybody else to read it. I did a chapter or two but just couldn’t get involved in it.
What are some of yours?
World Without End by Ken Follett. Surprising because I really like Follett. But this one was a clunker. I’ve tried to force my way through it twice and just couldn’t do it.
Movie: Hannah and Her Sisters
I should have given up on The Story of Mankind and the movie with The Bionic Woman actress that had nothing to do with Bionics.
Henceforth if I’m wondering when a movie’s going to get good, I’m gone.
Books: Lord of the Rings (don’t hate me!), the third Chalion book, Blue Mars (want to get back to that). Special category: Journey to Fusang - my copy has mold, when I read it my sinuses close up. Still worth another go.
LOTR (the books, the movies were fine)
Gleaming the Cube (walked out on a free preview!)
Big Trouble in Little China (snuck into the theater to see it, but walked out)
BOOKS
Ditto the *LOTR *books. I feel like a heretic but I tried several times- can’t get into them at all and think Tolkien desperately needed an editor.
Tom Wolfe You Can’t Go Home Again- I love some of Wolfe’s prose but he’s far too wordy.
MOVIES
How to Make an American Quilt
Crossing Delancy
Although I’m not guilty of the heresy committed by several posters above–Lord of the Rings is great!–I did have a heck of a time with The Silmarillion. Couldn’t slog my way through it as a kid. Couldn’t slog my way through it as an adult.
Moving out of the world of elves and orcs, I had a little trouble getting to the end of Sophie’s Choice, even though it’s supposed to be one of the best movies ever. As for the book–it’s impossible. Way to long. Far longer than anything Tolkein ever wrote. You would think it would be easier to move through one of the best books ever.
I would’ve loved to walk out on that, but I was about 35,000 feet up at the time, well rested, and unfortunately, sans book, and I wasn’t desperate enough to read the airline magazine.
Gravity’s Rainbow. I just can’t deal with page-long sentences.
James Michener’s Alaska. I read Centennial and liked it; Alaska is the same idea, different state. It was interesting, but I got bogged down halfway through (on page like 5000!)
I loved E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and World’s Fair. So when I saw City of God at the thriftstore, I excitedly bought it. It was very WTF. Couldn’t get through more than a couple of chapters.
Wow, I came in here to mention ‘Alaska’. Might as well add ‘Poland’ in there as well.
mmm
War and Peace. Started it at least a half dozen times, never finished it.
Ulysses. I really tried.
I gave up on Pynchon’s Vineland the other day. It had been okay up to the point where I stopped, but it was due at the library and I just decided I’m not really in a Pynchon mood.
A couple months ago I gave up on Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction. It was a very different book than what I’d expected, pretty much targeted toward philosophy doctorates and no one else. I’ll give it another try eventually, but for now it was just a bit too dense for me.
Books[ul][li]LOTR[/li][li]Stranger In A Strange Land: Somehow, the tone and the sexism got to be too much for me. Maybe the book doesn’t age well.[/li][li]Gödel, Escher, Bach: At some point, the math got away from me[/ul][/li]Movies[ul][li]Twister: Too stupid. I walked out of the theater.[/li]The Spirit: After 15 minutes, I didn’t feel like I was going to “get” it. And I loved Sin City. But I just wasn’t feeling this one.[/ul]
Books:
The Trial - just never connected with it
War & Peace - couldn’t keep it all straight
Movies:
Dune - see both of the above
Passage, by Connie Willis.
A novel about the sinking of the Titanic combined with a science fiction aspect of scientific analysis of near death experience wherein the heroine found herself on the Titanic.
At about page 150, I thought, “Y’know, if this was by anyone but her, I’d give up about now.” At about page 250, I gave up.
Sorry, Connie, that book stunk.
The Satanic Diaries. The flyleaf description looked interesting, just couldn’t get through it. Turned it back into the library the day the fatwa was announced.
Creepy.
For myself, I loved Shogun. Clavell’s Tai-Pan came highly recommended to me by a friend who was a history buff. He said it was a great novel and very good history. I could not get past the fact that the main character was an OPIUM DEALER. :barf: I know it was history, I know the reasons for the opium trade were explained several times in the opening chapters. I did not want to read about it.
I luuurrrves The March of Folly, but I could barely start Tuchman’s Guns of August. Years of pointless trench warfare is too depressing for me.
The last time we had a thread about the LOTR books, the word “slog” came up often. IMO the movies were the exact opposite. The first two movies went by very fast - felt nothing like three hours each.
Lisey’s Story by Stephen King. Because of the recent spate of SK threads a few weeks back, I decided to reread a number of his works and, in particular, give this one another shot 'cause I gave it up when I first tried reading.
I’m proud… I guess… to say that I did make it further into the story on the second attempt, but still gave it up around page 150. And it wasn’t just the “smucking” (which actually isn’t used all that often, it just seems to be), it was her entire way of thinking. I kept having to go back to reread parts just to figure out what she was saying (for example, there were a number of abbreviations that she would use, and I had to repeatedly flip the pages backward to remind myself what the abbreviation meant - and then realize I wasn’t too sure what the originating phrase meant).
There was also a couple of minor errors that kept on recurring throughout the portion I read which bugged the hell out of me - SK/Lisey/other characters kept referring to the University of Tennessee as “U-Tenn”, which, in my decade of living in the state, nobody referred to it as “U-Tenn”. It’s UT, pronounced “You-Tee”.
He also set UT in Nashville, while the actual school is in Knoxville (and there’s not a UT branch in Nashville). Accident or not, you’d think the man could spend 2 minutes on Wiki and learn this. However, this didn’t bug me as much as the “U-Tenn” references did. Go figure.
The most recent book I gave up on was The Flamenco Academy, which our book club was reading. As I explained to the club, I just felt like the characters and situations in the novel were like characters and situations in a novel. Contrived, in other words. I didn’t feel like I was reading about real people.
Movie-wise, I Love You, Man got the off button halfway through. Now, when Judd Apatow makes movies with Paul Rudd and Jeremy Segal, they’re almost always great, even if a bit on the vulgar side. Unfortuantely, though, as I didn’t realize until afterward, Judd Apatow had no involvement with this flick. It showed.