We always hear about people wanting their two hours or hour-and-a-half or some other span of time that was spent as a total waste of that part of their lives, back. I must admit that I have left after paying full ticket price only once that I can recall, but have endured some showings that make me wish I had left early.
If a bad movie, or even one I’m not really caught up in within the first few minutes, comes on TV, I’ll switch to another channel or shut off the TV.
But, failing those shortcuts to the “right answer” what movie or movies have you endured that wound up being absolute waste of your time. No redeeming value whatsoever.
You don’t have to go to the IMDb Bottom 100 movies unless you just can’t think of any, but I suspect if you’ve seen over 100 movies, that at least one of them falls in this category.
Strange as it may seem, I never see a film as a waste of my time. Even if it’s a turkey, it has value to me for the following reasons:
I’m not exactly a busy person. A couple of hours watching a crap film is a couple of hours not spent sitting in front of the computer wasting my life refreshing Slashdot and the SDMB.
Bad films have comedy value.
A film I’ve sat through is a film I now know about, and therefore serves as useful for conversation. I’m a bit of a pack rat in that I want to accumulate a large library of ‘seen’ movies.
A bad film helps hone my analytical and critical skills, useful for other movies. It also helps me appreciate films that are good.
I’ve never walked out of a film, and I don’t ever plan to.
However, as far as films I’ve seen at the cinema are concerned, I dozed off a little during The Matrix Reloaded and Van Helsing. Yeah, they were pretty bad. I find that there’s a sort of loop-back point on the graph of film quality. Once a film passes this point, its worth actually increases because of the comedy value I mentioned above. Back at University, we watched many awful slasher flicks, that while technically and ‘cinematically’ worse than the couple of blockbusters given above, were more enjoyable experiences overall. It’s the same reason why the IMDB bottom 100 are probably more enjoyable to watch than many in the 4-5/10 range.
I remember being bored senseless by The Man with Two Brains with Steve Martin. I wasn’t a fan of his at the time, and the movie seemed interminable and pointless.
My wife dragged me to see Far from Heaven and I would have just as soon used the time spent to clean the filters on our AC system.
Of the ones mentioned thus far, this one gets my vote. It’s pretty much supplied me with all the curiosity I ever had for M. Night Shyamalan’s version of “entertainment.”
There’s a big difference, to me at least, between a bad movie and an offensively bad movie.
I just posted about how much I disliked Napoleon Dynamite, but that seems to have been an honest effort that just didn’t click with me.
And then there are borderline cases, like The Illusionist: an intelligent movie that goes off the rails at the end with a hero’s cunning plan that would require the entire universe conspiring to make come true.
What I hate are the movies that are so deliberately smug as to push their stupidity down my throat and dare me to like it anyway.
Two reasons why I will never again let friends talk me into seeing movies that I just know will be worthless:
[ul]
[li]Jingle All the Way[/li][li]Analyze This[/li][/ul]
Using the time sorting my sock drawer would have been less wasted. At least I’d have sorted socks.
I like most movies mentioned so far. I wonder what that says about me.
Anyway, my vote is for Signs. Most really, really bad movies have some kind of comedic value or are at least cult-y bad so they can serve as a conversation piece or what-the-fuck-ever, but Signs was a complete waste of time from credits to credits.