Films That Personally Offend You (1 Viewer)

[WillG]

I'm wondering if anyone is personally offended by certain films. Not in the sense that it touches a nerve or puts you off politically. I'm talking about being personally offended that certain film were greenlighted in the first place. Seems that there are probably so many innovative scripts by talented writers out there that studios won't touch because they choose to make seemingly crappy films instead, and it just makes you angry.

I saw a trailer for a film today called, I believe it was "Shall We Dance" I'll summarize the trailer for those who have not seen it. Richard Gere is living a drab life, he seems to have a standard suburban life with a wife, played by Susan Sarandon, maybe a couple of kids and a dog. He has a daily commute to work in the city, but it seems to be that he feels his life is dull. One night he is driving through the city and is captivated by the sight of Jennifer Lopez looking out the window of the building she is in. He goes to see what it is all about, and it turns out she is a dance instructor running a dance studio. So now he is being intorduced to the world of the dance, but keeping it from his wife because he is embarrassed. She finds out, he comes clean, and they dance together, or something like that.

Now I know that this film has not been released yet and there is no way I could have seen it already and it sounds like I'm casting aspersions. But this trailer looked so damn stupid. And anything with J.Lo is a gamble. Miramax has made this film instead of something that may have been so much more innovative.

Of course, this is coming from a guy that insisted that "The Passion of the Christ" would make no more than 50 Million theatrically. So who knows.

But does anyone else have films that were made or is going to be made that they feel the same about.

 

[ThomasC]

"Shall We Dance?" is a remake of the 1996 Japanese version, which was a great film. I had very low expectations of the remake when I first heard about it, but after I saw the trailer, my anticipation level skyrocketed. I thought the trailer was done just fine. In fact, it was pretty similar to Miramax's trailer for the original, voiceovers and all.

Hollywood Homicide is probably the only film that has offended me in the way you described. After I saw it, I thought, "What was the point of making this other than for everyone involved in the film to get a paycheck?"

 

[WillG]

Well I suppose that I did not realize that "Shall we Dance" is a remake of a Foreign film. But it seems like those can be a gamble as well,

 

[Patrick Sun]

Any film starring Tom Greene.

 

[WillG]

I did enjoy "Road Trip" and although Tom Green wasn't the lead, he was marketed as having a big part in the film, and his part was slighly funny. I guess it was at the time he was hot with him MTV show. "Freddy Got Fingered" was suppodedly God awful, so I suppose that "Stealing Harvard" could fall into this category.

 

[Scott Leopold]

Pearl Harbor. I've had the DVD for quite some time (got it free via a mixup with Columbia House the first time I joined their DVD club), and finally watched it a few weeks ago. The only cliche they left out was having the butler do it. The whole time, it felt like they were stabbing ice picks in my brain. It's possibly the worst assault to my intelligence I've ever endured. If nothing else, though, it made me understand why so many people bash Ben Affleck's acting ability. He deserves to have his SAG membership revoked for that offense. It almost made me wish the Japanese had won.

 

[David Williams]

I know exactly how you feel, only the film was the wretched Titanic. The story was so pedestrian, so clichéd, had it been set on, say, Disney's Big Red Boat, no one would be paying any attention. The only thing Billy Zane's villian was missing was a big greased up moustache so he could twirl it. The less said about Leonardo DiCaprio the better. Only Kate Winslet, Victor Garber and possibly Kathy Bates come off with any respect. Everyone else was playing to the back row (Poor Frances Fisher!!). It offends me that a film so bad could be the highest-grossing film of all time *and* won the Best Picture Oscar (and if I start talking about Cameron's acceptance speech we'll be here for a while...). Ick!

 

[Travis_S]

2 words: White Chicks

 

[Ricardo C]

No films offend me. Some leave me shaking my head at the filmmaker (Larry Clark, I'm looking at you), others leave me shaking my head at the audience that makes such films profitable (Scary Movie fans, I'm looking at you), while others accomplish both (hi there, Joel Schumacher and Akiva Goldsman!). But taking offense to the point of being angry? Naw. I have a lovely film collection made up of hundreds of films I DO enjoy, so there's always a way to avoid the crap out there.

Yes, I'm a snob. Piss off

 

[LanieParker]

I don't get offended. Like Ricardo said, some films leave me baffled and shaking my head, but never offended. I do wonder why certain films get made at all, but then you know there is always an audience for those types of movies somwhere.

 

[Scott Weinberg]

Ringmaster

 

[Terry St]

The two trailers I've seen recently that made me shake my head the most were "White Chicks", which did manage to get a chuckle or two out of me against my will, and "Soul Plane", which just flabberghasted me. I have no idea how that turkey got greenlit. Both of these will probably climb to number 1 for a weekend or two just to piss me off.

As for movies I've seen... Few movies really piss me off. There are lots I consider to be crap and plenty which I will happily turn off, but very few actually piss me off. "Waking Life" was one of those. Other people seemed to like it, but I absolutely loathe that flick. A friend of mine once took a nursing class to pick up chicks. (Yeah, he was that sort of guy.) One class was on lucent dreaming. He gave me the cole's notes version of that class in about five minutes and it contained more about lucent dreaming than the entire 99 minutes of Waking life did. If you missed it, Waking Life is about Lucent Dreaming, people spouting pretentious monologues, and nothing else. Pretty much all the "deep philosophical monologues" (TM) in the film were inadequate rehashes of stuff I went through, and went through better, way back when I was a dumbass pimply 15-year old tossing dough at pizza-hut on Saturday mornings. The haphazard "random scribblings-traced-over-live-action" animation style they used screamed sloth to me rather than artsy, which is what most other people got apparently. The pretentious knobs who made that film were so obsessed with looking artsy then actually put cello quartets in random places just so they could get a few more strokes of self-masturbatory film-making off. "Waking Life" is all pretentious surface without an inch of depth behind it. The funny thing is I normally like pretentious art flicks. It's just "Waking Life" in particular that rubbed me the wrong way. I can't really explain it any better.

 

[Eric Peterson]

Only about 90% of new films offend me in this manner.

 

[SteveGon]

Armageddon and i am sam for the reasons Scott used for Pearl Harbor (which I've managed to avoid).

 

[Garrett Lundy]

House of the Dead is the only film to-date that manages to make me physically ill it was so bad. The Blair Witch Project made me angry when I saw it in the theater.

 

[LanieParker]

The Blair Witch Project seems to bring out the angries in people! I remember seeing it opening day and every single person in the theater just sat there after and fumed. The guy in front of me turned to his girl and said " We paid $8 for that?".

 

[DonRoeber]

I liked Blair Witch Project My wife gets violently angry when she thinks about Adaptation. It'll be awhile before she can see another Jonez/Kauffman production.

 

[Bill Williams]

Add to the list anything and everything Kevin Smith has produced.

 

[Chuck Mayer]

Please. These are all JV picks.

Batman and Robin is offensive in every way imaginable. It insults the actors, the medium, the craftmanship of filmmaking, the source material, and the audience equally. It leaves no stone unturned in it's effort to suck.

Take care,
Chuck

 

[Jason Seaver]

Offended is a strong word for what I feel about certain movies' existence; most of the time I can at least accept the somewhat cynical explanation that they think there's an audience for it, or see that something might have sounded good as a pitch and then went horribly wrong afterward. At least the uninteresting movies have the explanation of being similar to something people have liked before.

I did see one at a festival yesterday whose existence utterly confused me. It's called Moonlight, comes from the UK and Luxembourg, and like most Euro-movies, has about twenty production/finance companies listed in the credits. It boggles my mind that this many people thought there was an audience for this movie; it features a girl who must be twelve or thirteen finding baggies of cocaine in a drug mule's excrement, later using it, and having sex with the guy. Even if it were a particularly good movie (which it's not), I can't imagine how all these institutions thought this could ever be any kind of commercial success.

Another similar one is Edges of the Lord. It also deals with kids, featuring Haley Joel Osment as a Warsaw Jew hiding out with Catholic farmers during WWII. If you dig through one of the alterna-threads, you'll find my review. It's one of the most competently produced and well-directed bad ideas I've ever seen.