I have fallen asleep during watching The Rock every…single…time. At least 4 or 5 times.
I gave up. 
Stephen Donaldson’s Lord Foulsbane stuff.
I really just don’t care for it at all, but I keep trying 'cause everyone says it’s so great!
Well, the first book isn’t, not even the second time I read it thinking I was missing something.
I give up.
I couldn’t get through Nick Hornby’s book “How to be Good.” I just didn’t like the main character.
Another “please don’t hate me!” because I couldn’t get into the LOTR series, and believe me I’ve tried! Same for Stephen Donaldson’s stuff, and anything Laurell K Hamilton wrote in her Anita Blake and Misty Gentry series after the first 3 or so books.
The movie Sin City. We got about 45 minutes into it, I looked over at my then-bf and said “do you care about any of this?” He said “absolutely not,” and we ejected the disk.
Everybody always assumes it was because it was so “graphic,” so “brutal,” but honestly, it was so damn BORING.
Just a few hours ago I tried to watch the GI Joe movie. I got to the point where Duke was at GI Joe HQ (in Egypt for some reason) for the first time and that was all I could take. I might have to have a bad movie night and watch it with a bunch of friends.
I don’t think I could list all the movies I’ve walked out on, but the first was Flashdance. I still haven’t seen the ending, but I did see every scene with Lee Ving in it. Except for Miss Beal’s beauty, he was the only reason to watch that movie AFAIC.
I have 2 books I still have never been able to finish, and I really don’t see what others find great in either Robert Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast or John Kennedy’s A Confederacy of Dunces. I’ve owned TNotB since it was first published, I’m a huge fan of the man’s work, and yet I can’t get thru this piece of crap. ACoD I got in high school or college because everyone told me it was just my kind of book… apparently they think I like trite, boring, plotless books filled with loathsome characters. I don’t. They’re wrong. Again.
Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I have tried five or six times and each time I get closer to the end, hoping the protagonist leaves the spa. And each time I walk away from the book it is because I get to a point where I don’t give a damn if Hans leaves or not. I will probably die, never knowing…
No, it doesn’t age well at all. What’s more, for its time, that was a pretty sexually enlightened book. I read it when I was a tween, and I adored Heinlein, though up to that point I’d only read his juveniles. And I took to heart the statement that a woman who was raped was asking for it, most of the time. Since someone tried to rape me very shortly after I read that book, I kept wondering how I’d led him on.
I gave up on the Wheel of Time series much earlier than many people did. My daughter liked the series, and would buy the books, so they were in my house and available to me…but I didn’t read them. This is Very Serious.
I’ve given up on the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter books, and also Kim Harrison’s The Hollows books (starts with A Fistful of Charms). Both started off fairly interesting, but in both cases, I got tired of the romance elements of the series. I’m starting to feel that the Southern Vampire series is going the same way. Oh, and Evanovitch’s Numbers series. I know that these books are written primarily for the romance audience, so I guess I shouldn’t bitch about the romance elements. I’d just enjoy reading about the supernaturals without quite so much romance (is the werewolf or the vampire going to win Our Heroine?). I have yet to even bother picking up any of the Twilight books.
I TRIED to read The Satanic Diaries after the author was sentenced to death. Dear Og, that was painful.
I rented Brokeback Mountain and tried at least half a dozen times to watch it. Couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t sit through the start of the movie. Maybe it picks up later on, but I made a face and put it back in its envelope and sent it back to Netflix. I’ve had a pretty hit-or-miss experience with rented movies…I sometimes rent something because it’s something that’s made its way into the popular culture, but frequently I just can’t stand it. Other times, it’s a case of my tastes changing over the years. I remember enjoying the old Basil Wossname Sherlock Holmes movies, but I rented one, and couldn’t keep my attention on the TV.
I gave up on the Ender’s Game series. I read the summaries at wiki, and they all sounded incredibly boring. No military battles, no strategy, nada.
I gave up on Stephen King after Gerald’s Game. Psychological horror is nothing compared to real horror. Sobriety claims another great writer.
I gave up on Twilight and the Marked series almost immediately. Great ideas can’t trump bad writing.
Someday I hope to get the collection of Lemony Snicket. I bought the first book and loved it, but I also read the summaries, and it’s very formulaic. In my area, only the hardcovers are available, so they’re too expensive atm.
I couldn’t even begin to list the number of books I’ve given up on over the years. I’ve always read a lot, and have been willing to pick up almost anything and give it a shot. But it’s just as easy to say “hell with this” and move on to something else.
But I only remember once leaving a movie theater before the film was finished: From Hell.
I went with a woman I was dating and a mutual friend who had asked us to go with him and had been looking forward to seeing it. About an hour in, he was asleep in his seat. She and I were wishing we were that lucky. We woke him up and told him we were heading out. He actually tried to get us to stay. Even though we had just awakened him, he was convinced he liked this film!
And yeah, I know a lot of people think it’s great. Maybe there was something in the air that night, and maybe I should give it another shot. But right then, that was the most boringly convoluted drivel I’d seen in a long time.
The only book I’ve dropped and remember something about was the one my mother’s Book Club is currently reading. It’s by an Italian author that’s currently very much in vogue. After dropping it, I gave her my opinion about her thusly: “it’s like the shitty romance novels that teen magazines would give away when I was fifteen. I read one of those once, kept waiting for it to get better, it never did. I’m not bothering wait for this one to get better. Not-so-good-girl-from-richish-family meets bad-boy, he treats her like shit, they fall in love. I mean, Mom, the last scene I’ve read had him and his pals crashing a party, stealing everybody’s money and valuables, destroying half the house, and Mr Romance grabbing the girl and taking a shower with her, oh wait, he didn’t take her clothes off, I guess that makes him a gentleman or something. And this is the Romeo she’ll play Juliet to, u-hu. Piece of shit.”
I walked out of Dark Knight, and I refuse to hand in my geek cred card over it. It wasn’t exactly rocking my world up to that point, but the CGI on Two Faces was just puke-able and I figured I’d rather go outside and enjoy the Scottish sun.
ETA: remembered that as a teenager I refused to read Delibes’ Five Hours With Mario, which was a class requirement. As I told the Lit teacher, I’ll be happy to read the guy’s complete bibliography excepting that brick (I had read well over a dozen of his books by then). I offered to do a write up on three other of his books instead of that one, the teacher accepted. Next year he let people choose any Delibes book to read and write up.
Same here. Read The Hobbit, and enjoyed it. Tried to get into LOTR, and just couldn’t do it. I don’t really like the fantasy genre, but The Hobbit was entertaining enough, and I enjoyed the idea of Tolkien’s invented languages and stuff like that. Still, I couldn’t get past the first book. I tried, and tried, but it bored me to tears.
Speaking of sexually enlightened books, I tried to read Tropic of Cancer and couldn’t get further than 50 page into it. There is a book that was more famous for what it was than what it is.
I watched The Cable Guy for about twenty minutes before realizing that it wasn’t going to get any better and walked out of the theater.
I’ve tried to read John LeCarre’s last few novels, but I just can’t get into them. He needed the cold war for a good story. He’s just gotten preachy since then.
The Fellowship of the Ring the first time I tried to read it. I tried again a few years later and managed to slog through the trilogy.
The Departed
Books:
I’ve read the LoTR series. I’ve read all the Aubrey-Maturin books. I loved the entire Hornblower series. I’ve even read all the Sharpe stories.
I gave up on the Honor Harrington books.
Movies:
Both my wife and I fell asleep about 3 minutes into Good Night, and Good Luck. It might have been the margaritas we had before the theater. Either way, we woke up to the final credits. I sometimes snore so I wonder what it was like for the other viewers?
I decided years ago that I wasn’t going to read any more of them until the series was finished. I think I’d made it up to the seventh book (Crown of Swords).
Since the the penultimate book comes out next month, I decided to start reading the series again, anticipating that I’d finish them up just as the last book was being released. I jumped the gun though. Given the rate at which I’m reading, I’m going to be done way too early.
Oh well, at least there are plenty of websites now that can get me up to speed again (not so in 1996).
Both of Follet’s cathedral books. I made it through most of Pillars of the Earth, but skimmed the end bits (I had to get it back to the library). Then I checked out World Without End and after determining that it was basically the same story, skimmed bits and pieces to get most of the story and turned it back in early.
The books were OK, I guess - don’t really see what all the fuss was about.
I’ve posted this before, but time for an update. Still haven’t finished And Another Thing… by Eoin Colfer. An attempt to re-start The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Just checked it out of the library again. Haven’t gotten around to it, again. (And I can finish just about any book, no matter how bad.)
Seconded. I tried it two times, but after reading several hundred pages each time, I recognized I hardly hadn’t understood a word. Maybe when I’m older and wiser, I’ll try it a third time, but I really can’t imagine to be able to get it anyhow.
The Dark Tower. I read The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, and about half of The Waste Lands. The story was going nowhere fast and my patience ran out.