Movies that just plain piss you off

Cafe Society
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I’m not talking about movies whose intent is to generate anger. I’m talking about movies in which some central part of the plot is based on something so stupid you get mad just thinking about it.

Two recent notables:

Christmas With The Kranks. We’d found the trailers exceedingly unfunny, so my husband was surprised when, during his group’s Christmas party at work, they watched the movie and said it was good (he didn’t see it then). My MIL had heard it was “cute,” so she wanted to watch it at Christmas. So we were stuck watching it.

The basic premise is that the Kranks (Jamie Leigh Curtis and Tim Allen) decide to forego the usual Christmas hubbub and take a cruise, since their daughter was going to be out of the country. They buy the tickets and start preparing, and as soon as they tell their friends, neighbors and coworkers, they start getting pressured to conform to everyone else’s ideas of what Christmas should be like. Instead of telling everyone to go to hell, they feel guilty for not buying people presents (who get mad when they learn they aren’t getting them), not putting up their outdoor decorations, not having their party, and not donating to every charity begger who stops by their house.

Then the daughter calls and says she’ll be home after all. And now, instead of telling her, “Sorry, honey. I wish you’d called before you arrived, because we’re leaving for a cruise in the morning. Talk to you when we get back,” they feel they have to rush around and try to do everything they were originally planning to do.

And it pisses me off to no end. The basic idea of the movie is that if you don’t do what everyone else expects you to do, you’re a bad person. Never mind that they had just spent several thousand dollars on cruise tickets. No one seemed to care if that money went to waste.

Just FYI: My MIL thought it was a good movie. She also liked the Garfield movie.

Second one:

Meet the Fockers. I couldn’t even finish this one, because it was boring me to tears after about 30 minutes. But, Meet the Parents pissed me off for one reason: Ben Stiller’s character should have long since told DeNiro’s character to piss off. Instead he spends the movie doing nothing but trying to please the guy. OK, a guy wants to impress his future in-laws. That’s understandable. (Though the fact that he didn’t dump his girlfriend about halfway through the movie was less so.)

But the second movie, which apparently took place a couple years later (because of the introduction of a cute nephew (a sign that a movie is lacking in plot)) shows Ben Stiller’s character acting the same way: DeNiro bullying him and Stiller trying desperately to please him. After dating the woman for this much time, he should’ve been more comfortable around the guy. The fact that he wasn’t was painful for me to watch.

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Another Christmas movie – Bad Santa. Okay, Billy Bob Thornton is a foul-mouthed crook, gotcha. Santa cussing? Not that funny. He managed to spew all this crap to all these kids and no one ever noticed? Not plausible. Stupid. Dunno if the movie got better – I gave up after about 20 minutes.

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Fight Club. “Anarchy is cool, kids!”

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Hell, Fight Club didn’t piss me off. It made me want to shoot the next credit card manager I met.

Meet the Parents was the one that immediately leapt to my mind. That point where…

the parents and such discover Greg’s real name is ‘Gaylord’ and they all start laughing and pointing at him

pissed me off so much I wanted him to leave that ditzy chick and start over with some girl whose parents and friends are shallow, meaningless, fools with bad hearts.

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I laughed my ass off. As described by you, normally not something that would crack me up, but in reality it was a riot to me. I could watch this movie twice a month. Sometimes a movie will just hit you the right way…

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Broken Flowers with Bill Murray. HELLO! I don’t need to see him do the brooding, humorless middle-aged man thing in Every. Single. Movie. And the ending? Well…that just pissed me off to no end. What the fuck was he thinking?

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That pissed me off a little, but to be fair, only two characters laughed. The rest were either pissed off or sad.

Go ahead, watch it again.

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Pretty Woman

Nothing says romantic love story like falling in love with a prostitute.

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I haven’t seen Christmas With The Kranks, but I knew it was going to be crap after hearing it was adapted from Skipping Christmas by John Grishman. Now, I’ve never read Grisham at all, but the title change was a dead giveaway that, even if the original book was a good one, the film was going to stink on ice. It went from an amusing concept to overkill: obviously the people involved thought the name “Krank” would evoke waves of laughter. It doesn’t (while I don’t necessarily agree with Ebert’s rule about funny names all the time, it’s a good principle). So you knew that, instead of humor, they would go for cheap slapstick.

My choice (and I’ve written about this extensively) is Alien. The characters in it are just too stupid to live.

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I had to do a little thinking before I remembered Emerald Forest that my wife and I got up and walked out of after maybe five minutes.

If you haven’t seen it, don’t. If you have seen it, maybe you can assure me that nothing really happened after Powers Boothe realizes that “To-may” is really his son Tommy who wound up in the jungle. I can’t even remember if To-may ran away, got kidnapped, got picked up by a trash truck or was Fed-exed to a bad address. I certainly don’t care.

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Neighbors

I understand that Earl had a stiffling life, but was life with Vic and Ramona really going to be any better? These people were psychotic. And when Earl left, why oh why did he have to burn his house down? Did he hate his wife that much?

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Except that wasn’t the point.
Anyway…Apt Pupil.

The only movie I walked out of…

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Pearl Harbor. This movie had great cinematography. The recreation of the actual attack on Pearl Harbor was fantastic and even, in some parts, moving.

But that godawful plot with Ben Affleck, Josh Hartnett and Kate Beckinsale was nauseating. It might have been saved (at least to the point of making the movie merely mediocre) if, when it appeared Affleck was dead, he stayed dead. Then when Hartnett died and Beckinsale was pregnant and unmarried in 1942 (or whenever Hartnett bought it), that might have been poignant. But noooooooo …

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I like Fight Club, but there are so many things that piss me off about it that aren’t that. I don’t think that was the message. I think it was more “Desperation is now, kids!” If you mean Tyler’s speech about roasting game on the highways, I think that’s one of the best moments in the film, which is one with a strong moral core and which I do not read as advocating Tyler as a prophet. If you mean by “cool anarchy” the directed mayhem of the Project, perhaps, but those scenes don’t exist in a vacuum, and frankly, anarchy looks kind of cool sometimes. Fake gore does too, but that doesn’t mean slasher films are advocating serial killers.

What does piss me off: The equivalency of male identity and violence, set in a world where only literally castrated or feminized males cry and express emotions.

I’m sure I will have more to add to this thread later, but it’s too nice out right now.

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The part I hated about this movie was there was an entire fleet of Japanese bomber and fighter planes attacking. But if Ben and Josh can get to their planes they’ll be able to take on the entire fleet and chase them away.

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I always thought they were being ironic. After all, the anarchists were pretty brainwashed.

And the narroter sure as hell didn’t think anarchy was cool. If he did, he wouldn’t have gone to the police and then tried to defuse the bomb.

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Mean Girls; it’s a great set-up to a bleak, Election-like ending and then it blows off to be a standard happy-go-lucky teenie-girl movie. (Which, I suppose, was it’s intended viewership, but still…potential wasted.) It really pissed me off beyond proportion. I wonder if that followed Tina Fey’s original script or if that was a modification required by some studio exec who couldn’t handle a real ending.

Stranger

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other than Fight Club, I nominate a different David Fincher-directed movie: Se7en. I find this movie to be so unapologetically slimy, gross, evil and manipulative that I get angry just typing this. Fincher seems to enjoy engaging a level of trust with his audience and then betraying it, to my mind. After seeing a couple of movies, I now look at his director credit as a huge “not interested” sign…

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I too thought Fight Club was ironic. Tyler Durden isn’t exactly held up as a model to be emulated. By the end of the movie, he’s the villain. And the anarchists are pretty hypocritical, attempting to impose anarchy on others even while they obey a strict code of laws among themselves.

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I think they changed the title to avoid confusion with the Ben Affleck flick, Saving Christmas. (was it “Saving”?)

I read the book (it was only like 150 small pages) and it was a cute, but frivilous distraction.

I agree with the OP. At some point, they should have just told the town to suck it.

However, they also went a little far on the avoidance of Christmas when they wouldn’t put up their snowman.

If the idea was to save money, what is the problem accomadating the neighborhood when you have done so every year (and even the Jewish families on the street put up the same snowman to make the whole thing uniform).
But my entry into the “pissed me off” category is Magnolia. I won’t spoil it, but anyone who has seen the film knows my complaint.

I understand it. It just pissed me off.