Serdar, what didn’t you like about The Hustler?
The Cook, the Thief His wife and Lover. I made it up to the child molestation scene and that was the straw. The very name greenaway just gives me the sours to this day.
@Strawdawg-I haven’t seen it for awhile but I thought they did something to a boy but it wasn’t child molestation-cutting off his navel if I remember correctly.
Yeah, you’re probably right Steve, I didn’t see the whole scene, but I saw what was coming. Molestation or torture are pretty much huge turn-offs for me when it’s children involved.
When you say The Hustler, do you mean with Paul Newman and Piper Laurie? ( + Jackie Gleason + George C Scott)
One of my all-time favourite films! An American tragedy of the all-too-human dimension, beautifully photographed, written, performed. Terrific score. Over the years I must have watched it on TV at least 3 times.
I can see people being greatly disturbed by The Cook, The Thief… Still, I found it rivetting. Leaving wasn’t on my mind.
My friend vomited whilst watching Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Choke (Clark Gregg). It’s the worst film I’ve ever seen, and that includes such classics you get on the Chiller Channel like Basilisk and the one about the flesh-eating locusts that can only be killed by people who eat a purely organic diet. I knew it was going to be crap when I heard the conversations going on around me… “hey man, you know like, Chuck’s work is like totally sick, man… people have thrown up at his readings and shit, man… I can handle it man… the guy’s like, the most incisive writer of our generation.. I’ve read all his books… this is gonna rock”
What made Choke walkoutworthy though is the absolute absence of any irony in its total lack of respect for women, and it’s completely self-congratulatory slap your thighs lads here’s some beta male thinking about blowjobs all the time and imagining what that girl’s tits look like to a voiceover about dejection with society because life is a nihilistic meaningless psychologically confusing mess if you’re a white, middle class and American male (poor you, you have my sympathies). And the fact that it was really badly acted and really badly filmed, a sex-comedy pastiche of Fight Club. Ah, Chuck Palahniuk, what happened man? Did you just run out of ideas? Or was it only ever one idea, and you recycled it to the point of soft chewy pulp. Semen and Jesus and foreskins and excessive masturbation… all the really tough, incisive subjects in the world today (if you’re a hormone-driven, milky-lipped 15 year old boy). His website (aka The Cult—- no hint of irony) boasts a new “writer’s workshop”, where “Chuck will read your work, review your work, and best of all, suggest ways to improve your work.” So everybody knock off three pages of double-spaced sentences and put each sentence on a new line, and make sure your text includes bitter soundbites about your undisguised self-loathing and inability to find meaning in anything, and he’ll give you an A+
Anyway, back to the film. It was shit and I walked out. And it felt good, because I was in the middle row right in the center of the theater, and everyone had to stand up to let me out, and I made a roomful of pseudo-men feel bad about indulging themselves in sexist, mindless crap.
Does it count if instead of walking out I was forced to stay because I was with a group of people, and in lieu of storming out I made MST3K-esque comments about the movie? That might be an entirely different thread…but if not, then Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls was a recipient of said commentary.
@Daniel Clancy
You wanted to see a Michael Bay movie?!?!?!?!?
: )
I don’t walk out of films – I don’t want to be that person. There’s something about the act of doing it that I really don’t like. If I’m gonna subject myself to a movie in the first place, I don’t want to give up on it, even if I start to space out or get disgusted or whatever. But I generally try not to see films that I know I’m not gonna like.
The times that I’m really tempted to walk out are when I’m with friends and seeing something I didn’t really want to see in the first place. And I’d rather not just leave them there, so I stay and try to pull a MST3K. It’s probably annoying as hell, but no one should be enjoying “Yes Man” anyway.
I’ve never actually walked out since if I paid for it, Im getting my money’s worth. With that said though, I have come close. Tideland was probably the closest I ever got to simply walking away. I probably stuck through it though simply hoping it would get redeemed for me but it simply never did.
In retrospect, Tideland wasn’t a terribly horrible film. Nothing about it was really jarring in a specific matter. I dont know….its one of those cases where I just have an unexplainable repulsion to it.
I walked out on “The Skeleton Key” but that was because my ride came and I had to leave. I walked out of “Any Given Sunday” because it was a terribly boring film. I wanted to walk out on “The Bourne Ultimatum” but I was with my family and they were enjoying it…. I was just counting ceiling tiles… oh, and most recently I went to see “The Flight of the Red Balloon” and I wanted to leave but I was on a date and we just criticized the movie throughout….
@Tobias Morgan
You are the first person to agree that Choke is a horrifically bad film. The only thing that kept me in the theater was the fact that I had payed my money and no good films we’re playing until after Choke finished. Needless to say I treated myself to a free screening of something else right afterwards and a refill on my boyfriend at the time’s bucket of popcorn. Drowning a bad film out with stale, too buttery popcorn is the way to go.
I normally don’t go see something unless I know I’m going to like it, but a couple have slipped under the radar, as they say, I’ve never walked out on a film, yet. One memorable (maybe it’s only memorable because it was the last time it happened) one I almost walked out on was “A Christmas Tale” (Desplechin), I was so angry. It had no coherence what so ever.
“All That Jazz”, at the moment of his heart attack: what a lot of egotistical tommy-rot. And, “Barry Lyndon”, snore.
Walked out on Zodiac by Fincher because it was opening day and the dang print had a scratch in it. Intolerable and inexcusable, especially for a masterpiece like Zodiac.
Across the Universe. And never had I had received so much crap from people who I thought liked good movies until I told them how much I hated this movie. Having Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” video expanded into a two and a half hour feature would be a better version of this crap.
I recall walking out on a good movie because the theater stank really badly.
Barry Lyndon. BARRY LYNDON? Have you no sanity man?
Only film I’ve ever walked out on was A Prairie Home Companion. Knowing the subject was a behind the scenes look at the radio show of the same name I went in with lowered expectations and still was awestruck at how terrible the film was and how it continued getting worse.
Thea, what made your friend vomit during Fear and Loathing? Sympathetic DT’s?
I have never walked out of a movie. I mean, I’ve felt like it, but I always stay until the end, for some reason giving the film the benefit of the doubt, and to get my money’s worth. I try not to go to movies unless I have a good feeling I’ll like them. The closest I’ve come in recent memory was Mirrors (dragged there by a friend) and the Santa Clause 3, but I couldn’t leave because I was with my grandma, and I wasn’t just going to abandon her, haha.
I like Meryl Streep which is why I decided to see Mamma Mia! with my mom but I may have walked out if I knew I could catch a better movie in another room and get my money’s worth.
I don’t like to walk out on movies because I’ve had too many experiences where I’m watching a film, thinking I hate it about halfway through, but then end up loving the film by the end, when the whole arc of the movie is revealed. It’s kind of that “aha!” moment.
Those are the best kind of films in my opinion – they make you uncomfortable in some sort of way, but then the challenge pays off in a big way – the movie as an experience, rather than just entertainment.
Then again, I don’t usually see a movie in theaters unless I think its really worth seeing on the big screen. Too expensive otherwise!
I don’t like to walk out on movies either- no one wants to be that person. But for one exception – ‘Independence Day’ (I know, alot of people will disagree…) I thought it was the most mindless, effects-laden piece of crap- what a waste of an overblown post-production budget. (How many hungry people would it have fed…) Expecting a somewhat intelligent morality-tale (something like ‘The Day the Earth Stood Still’) and instead got a painfully bad, ‘farcical’, fear/paranoia-invoking slap in the face….
Millenium (1989) is the only film I’ve ever walked out of. A time travel movie that keep circling back on itself to the same badly done scene.
i FELL ASLEEP during ‘james and the giant peach’ i was too tired to walk out and the theater was warm. yeah. im not that guy that walks out on movies.
i live in a relatively conservative area in northeastern america. i watched fully 1/3 of the theater that were watching ‘watchmen’ walk out progressively during the film. and, do ya’ know WHAT? people werent leaving because of boring confusing violent movie making (by the way, i liked the movie). they were leaving progressively EXACTLY as a new scene started where billy crudup’s character dr. manhattan appeared. why?
because his semi-engorged glowing blue…….PENIS was showing.
i shit you not. i live in a puritanical nightmare of a place. i heard someone as they got up from behind me say: ‘they didnt list MALE nudity as a reason for the R rating!’ i laughed and looked the whipped shadow of a man that shuffled after the penis-phobic cretin of a woman in the eye and snuggled closer to my flesh-colored-penis loving girlfriend in our rocking loveseat with the armrest raised.
~dje
I walked out on the end of Wanted, but it doesn’t really feel like I cut that movie short. I pretty much got the point and new exactly how the next five minutes ’til credits were going to go, it was the end of a double feature day, and my roommate and I were tired and in no mood to look the people who were actually enjoying that movie in the face.
By the way, I know the post I’m responding to is two months old, but the Fountain was brilliant. Anybody notice how all three stories are told with the same camera angles?
—PolarisDiB
I know it has its fans, but a friend and I both walked out of “There’s Something About Mary”. I can put up with sophomoric humor. I can leave my brain at the door as long as the laughs are genuine and no one gets hurt. But the nastiness here was painful. The film makes fun of developmentally disabled (read: mentally retarded) people and gets “laughs” from a scrotum caught in a zipper (in closeup) and disgusting rashes and skin lesions and saggy old-lady breasts (in closeup) and (infamously) ejaculate being used as hair gel…
I also walked out of “The Gods Must Be Crazy”, but I was in a bad mood.
Chuck Moran
I’ve been a film fanatic since age 10 or so – and I’ve seen God knows how many movies by now. But to this day, I’ve only walked out of THREE films. Two of them were Robert Altman films – “Quintet” and “Buffalo Bill and the Indians” – both for the same reason, and that is that both movies were paralyizingly dull (a REAL insult when you consider I sat through both versions of “Heaven’s Gate”). The third was “Interiors” by Woody Allen – but that was mainly cause the movie was going to be a very very obvious downer, and I just wasn’t in the mood for a downer (I watched it later – it was quite good).