Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

[Pietro Paolo Virdis]

I had heard a lot of good things about Rushmore . Looking it up on IMDb the cover says "MAGNIFICENT! The best and most beautiful movie of 1998"
It's almost always at the top on best comedies of all times lists.

The main character is so annoying already five minutes into the film you wish for someone to break his neck. There's something about characters in movies set in a school who do fuck all when it comes to study yet hardly ever venture anywhere else than the bloody school, which annoy me. This prick takes the prize. There is nothing likeable about him, nothing intriguing, nothing interesting. He's just a bloody leech who doesn't even act wild, smokes pot, drinks beer or tries to get laid. He just wanders about like a fucking cretin acting smart when he's about to get expelled.

29:52 was when I paused wondering what the bloody point was to continue this massive waste of time. It felt almost great to click the white x above a red background in the top corner.

If I'm to give a short review of this film it will read...
...IT CAN FUCK OFF!

[Pietro Paolo Virdis]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

I turned off Withnail and I yesterday. Couldn't stand any of the characters.

[Gerontophile]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

I hate 'Withnail and I'. It is shit of the highest order. And I have watched it 3 times. Forcibly. (sic) Massive pile of poo.

[Ginger Yellow]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

You people are crazy.

[Wyatt Earp]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

Yeah, insanity.

[ian.64]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

Tried to watch Withnail and I some years back but lost interest half-an-hour in. Not to say I disliked it, I just think I may not have been in the right mood for it at the time. Perhaps at some later stage I'll give it a go and perhaps re-discover it and find out what the fuss is all about.

Now, if you want a movie that virtually challenges you to turn it off and watch something else, then Resident Evil: Retribution is the one that takes a shitstained glove, wallops you around the face with it and orders you to stand in a field and be shot at. I know, I know, it's shooting-fish-in-a-barrel time, but I have to let go my feelings on this film. And I'm letting go:

Now.

The difficulty of a film like this is that to find any enjoyment in it, you must have had to place stock in the characters and concept of the previous films in the series. This is impossible, as there's microwave meals I've eaten that I've empathised with more rather than any of the characters in this series, which I admit, I've watched, simply because there are nights when I've got the beers out and expected to be entertained by the kind of crap which might - might - have moments that reach the pissed/fun remit I've crudely set myself.

The first film in the series, Resident Evil: Underground Punchy Zombie Time, was in fact, slightly fun, and contained a number of passable moments before it all went a bit naff. Then you had the rest of the films where we followed Alice, kickie madam du jour, on her journey to find out what the evil Umbrella Corporation was doing and give those naughty men a jolly good whack in the charlies.

This was a bit trying, because as the films went on, her adventures varied from 'okay, I guess' to 'arse-biscuits', and it was the arse-biscuits factor that mainly overwhelmed, because the torrent of explosions, martial-art gubbins, disposable characters so thinly realised they could've worn big plastic tits walked through the Vatican and gone unnoticed, and scripts that needed a vet to put them to sleep, virtually ensured that any incentive to follow Milla Jovovich on her wallop crusade disappeared like a mouse trapped in a fat bloke's arse-crack.

And so we reach Resident Evil: Retribution, a film that had me grasping for the remote, holding it up to the telly and screaming 'I'm warning you! I'm warning you! I want to like you, but by god, if you don't improve, there's a documentary on rural farming techniques on BBC4! I'll go there and never come back, I swear!'. I kept on. I watched in full, and, my god, it was just rank. Like plunging your face into a swimming pool full of tepid piss. A marathon of sleek production, undercut by a thundering river of child-like ineptitude. Go on. Give your five-year-old son or daughter a sheaf of paper and ask him/her to write an action thriller over a weekend and, I bet you, they'll shame Paul WS Anderson.

Let me tell you about the script. They take lines that even Steven Seagal wouldn't have wiped his Canada-sized arse with and they put them in here. Lines of such dull, superficial simplicity that were they sentient they'd kill themselves in realisation that they'd offer nothing to the world and life had nothing in return. No originality. No. None. If there was an original idea in there, it got seized by the Cliche Liberation Front, taken behind a shed and had its testicles cracked between two house bricks.

Message to would-be screenwriters: don't you dare - don't you fucking ever dare - invent yet another gang of tactical-unit hard men whom we're invited to mourn as we find out they're just human and they end up getting shot. There are squirrels wrestling with hamburger boxes in the local park with whom I would empathise rather than some muscled, cigar-smoking twat who tosses off - emphasis on 'toss' - a smart one-liner (usually as smart as a sheep that's been force-fed two pints of Glenfiddich before having its head ran over by a milk-float) before buying the farm in bullet-ridden glory. Predator did that a million times better, and its eternal curse is that, forever onwards, shite like RE:R will copy it. And leave out the funny bits.

Oh, it still has zombies, by the way. Remember the hordes of the walking dead that turned up in the previous films? Well, here they are again, only they reach summits of horror matched only by watching your pet goldfish staring at that plastic castle as it tries to mind meld with it, or whatever goldfish do. In fact, let's have a Resident Evil movie where Alice finds that the Umbrella Corporation is owned and managed by Swimmy the Goldfish, thus revealing a unique twist and a strange kind of emotional undertow where all that carnage and destruction was all because the little golden twerp needed a bigger tank and better goldfish food. Zombies have outlived their scary usefulness. They could open supermarkets and you wouldn't be impressed. They're just wank now.

Oh, forgot. The ending opens the door to another fucking sequel. Yes. Sorry about that.

Next one that comes along, just empty a box of drawing pins on the kitchen floor, turn your back and fall, arse-first, on them. It'll be more entertaining, I assure you.

[Lucia Lanigan]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

Yeah, that's weird.

I fast-forwarded through a lot of Downfall.

[Pietro Paolo Virdis]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

hahaha, excellent, ian

[jason voorhees]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

Message to would-be screenwriters: don't you dare - don't you fucking ever dare - invent yet another gang of tactical-unit hard men whom we're invited to mourn as we find out they're just human and they end up getting shot. There are squirrels wrestling with hamburger boxes in the local park with whom I would empathise rather than some muscled, cigar-smoking twat who tosses off - emphasis on 'toss' - a smart one-liner (usually as smart as a sheep that's been force-fed two pints of Glenfiddich before having its head ran over by a milk-float) before buying the farm in bullet-ridden glory. Predator did that a million times better, and its eternal curse is that, forever onwards, shite like RE:R will copy it. And leave out the funny bits.

Framed on my wall.

[Ginger Yellow]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

Though we would have missed out on The Raid if they'd followed that advice.

[beak]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

Lucia Lanigan wrote: I fast-forwarded through a lot of Downfall.

* * * * * SPOILER ALERT * * * * *

The Nazis lose the war.

* * * * SPOILER ALERT ENDS * * * *

[Gangster Octopus]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

[UKIP]But the Germans won the peace[/UKIP]

[Sexual Chocolate]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

Back in those halcyon days of lurking I wanted to post here.

I've never been able to get through Withnail and I. I'd like to ignorantly suggest that you have to be white and middle-class to get through the entire thing. Managed about half and can't recall laughing once. When I want to university people without accents would quote from this endlessly. Might be why I got on better with the locals.

As for Rushmore... the part where Bill Murray rejects the kid on the basketball court while speaking to Schwartzman on his mobile

is nothing short of brilliant. How can you not love this film? Nothing else that Anderson will ever do will reach the heights of this film. And he's made some decent ones since.

Where is PPV these days, anyway? I liked his posts, threads, generally. Not that he needs my approval, I'm just curious.

[Gangster Octopus]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

Incidental Contact wrote: Where is PPV these days, anyway?

Ganja, like gerontophile, is something of a binge and purge poster.

[Slightly Brown]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

I'm with Incidental C: Rushmore is all shades of wonderful. I can see why Anderson's shtick would be annoying - and even I found it so in The Life Aquatic - but it works perfectly here. Murray is a scene-stealing machine in most things, but this is fantastic.

[Sexual Chocolate]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

That scene's perfect, even down to The Kinks track. There are so many fantastic moments in Rushmore, I really struggle to see how people don't enjoy it.

[E10 Rifle]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

You know what, I wouldn't care if not a single person who isn't white and middle-class had ever appreciated Withnail. It's still a wonderful film, on loads of levels.

[Sexual Chocolate]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

Don't mind me, E10; I'm a bit of a dick but so's everyone every now and again. I wanted to like it. When I'm next laid off and have a bit of time to watch it, I'll give it another shot.

[Slightly Brown]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

I've turned pretty much every pornographic picture off before its, erm, climax. I've tried to watch conclusions - a job-well-done professional hat-tip to the actors/protagonists - but I can't stagger over the finishing line. I got close with one that was based on Enter the Dragon [reader supplies own pun] but I couldn't make the end, let alone the denouement. Boards do hit back.

[Slightly Brown]

Judge me by films I've turned off halfway through

When I say "watch", I mean found in a hedge.