I started Pineapple Express but never laughed once in the first 40 minutes or so, so I turned the DVD off. I really wanted to like it but it did nothing for me. Similar experience with Napoleon Dynamite. Pretty unusual for me. I can’t think of any other movies I didn’t finish watching.
Most recently,* Eat, Pray, Love.* Gah.
The ones I can recall:
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Ben Affleck’s Brother: Long and slow, but I was actually enjoying it. Got about 2/3 through and never restarted it, mainly because my wife was bored.
Four Christmases: Awful, awful movie. Robert Duvall should be ashamed.
I gave up on Jarhead. I was far enough into it that you’d have thought I’d be sufficiently invested to finish, but I just didn’t care about the characters. I also gave up on Spider-Man. I think that I wanted to watch an episode of Without A Trace, so I switched channels, operating on the assumption that Spidey was probably going to win.
I’ve seen gay porn that was less gay than Jarhead.
First off, I’m appalled by people who are bored by Casablanca and/or Godfather. But to each their own.
I have several favorite movies, all 3+ hours, where it actually turns out that I really just love the 1st half (approximately). The 2nd half is boring, depressing, or it’s just that all the good stuff is front loaded:
Gone With The Wind (wander away when Rhett & Scarlett get married)
Fiddler on the Roof (at the wedding/Sunrise, Sunset/pogrom)
West Side Story (after the rumble)
Lawrence of Arabia (after the 1st train attack)
The only three that come to mind are Secretary, The Fountain, and Broken Flowers. All three I got from Netflix and just didn’t grab me in the first half hour or so. I turned them off and within days realized I wouldn’t put them back on so I just sent them back.
Ed Wood’s Glen or Glenda.
It’s not entertainingly bad in the way that Plan 9 from Outer Space is. It’s just boring and drags (heh) on forever. After watching for about three hours, I looked at the clock and discovered only 45 minutes had passed, so I turned the thing off.
I want to do this. Usually, it’s the other way around, where I come in halfway through a movie on TV, and watch the end. If it’s good, I’ll try to watch the beginning some time, but the next time I’ll come in maybe 1/4 way through, and it’ll take several times before I see the beginning.
Often, two or three hours is just too much investment in something I might not even end up liking.
So my thought was to watch the beginning, say, hour of movies when I catch their beginning, then later, when I come across it again, watch the end. Whenever I’ve tried this, though, my wife ends up watching too, and then I can’t just turn it off. So I gave up.
I like the Godfather, but can completely understand if someone is bored by it because it’s not everyone’s taste/genre. The post above said that it was pretentious, which I do not see at all.
I couldn’t get through The Assassination of Jesse James either. I can’t remember why I turned it off, but it wasn’t because I hated it. In my case it was only 30 minutes or so in. Maybe I’ll pick it up again, I just look at the runtime, add more due to constant pausing, and put it off until I have more time.
I couldn’t get through Tideland. I don’t know if I’ll bother trying again later. I like Gilliam, but that was really hard to watch. Also, it has no subtitles, which is normally a fail for me. Add to that that squeaky Jennifer Tilly and gruff Jeff Bridges aren’t even the hardest to understand characters, and I could not follow it at all. That and the cinematography made me want to take a shower.
I’m a huge movie buff and I find I like most movies. Even those I don’t like, I don’t dislike; I just think they’re “all right”…So my friends know that if I actually don’t like a movie (as in, enough to say “this movie is horrible”), it must be pretty bad.
So that being said, I had to stop watching two movies in the last week alone out of them being nothing but (in my opinion), sheer stupidity.
The first was Inspector Gadget 2. I liked the first one just fine, but the 2nd one was just far too hokey and silly for my tastes.
The second was a film called Who’s Your Caddy?, which was so terrible, I’d be amazed if anyone with half a brain could sit through 15 minutes of it, let alone the hour I was somehow able to.
Nominee: Hot Rod I watched all of, but was tempted to shut it off in numerous spots. It had its funny moments, but–for some reason–had these moments every so often where it just became jaw-droppingly retarded.
Usually I’ll push through a movie, though often I’ll start fiddling with something or other and my attention will wander. One exception was Speed Racer. I only made it about 20 min before the dullness finished me. Wasn’t even good as background noise.
The internet has shortened my movie-watching time. It’s too easy to check Wiki or IMdB to see what happens. The movie has to be something special to keep me in my chair for two hours.
Today’s example was Kind Lady on TCM. I liked the setting – late 19th century New York City – because it fits with the book I’m reading now – Time and Again by Jack Finney – but I knew the guy was a slimeball and it ticked me off that Ethel Barrymore was so easily taken in. So I watched about 20 minutes and went to Wiki.