UMBRELLAS OF CHERBOURG-it seemed ludicrous to me at age 16. I was not prepared for anything about it. I would probably like it now.
KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE-just didn't get the humor. Not sure if I would now or not.
LETHAL WEAPON-could not take watching Danny Glover's daughter get tortured (although it was mostly threat rather than action).
Of course, with movies on TV, we don't finish even half of them. It took us all we could do a few weeks ago to make it through 21 Jump Street.
What movies have sent you to the exit early?
27 comments:
Patti - I almost walked out on the adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. To this day I don't know why my husband and I sat through it (he wanted to walk out on it too).
Well, we walked out on THE DARK KNIGHT twice, but both were because of unruly patrons. However, when we finally saw the whole thing on video we didn't like it.
Can't remember others at the moment but will try and recall.
Jeff M.
The Omen, when a character was beheaded for no better reason than shock. I was there only because there was nothing else to do in a small rural town in Massachusetts.
I'm not sure I would walk out now, assuming I was there in the first place. I have probably been desensitized in the nearly forty ensuing years.
Some worthy candidates, here...though I liked the 1984 DUNE more than many, the "heartstrings" sequences were, well, felt. I haven't gotten around to KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE yet (KFC calls your slight typo finger-slippin' good), but the artifice of UMBRELLAS (and the not so superb music) and all sorts of things about THE DARK KNIGHT or LETHAL WEAPON, much less 21 JUMP STREET in any form, can scare off any viewer.
The three movies I've walked out on, though mostly due to my companions being even more annoyed/freaked out than I (I tended toward annoyed, they toward freaked), were THE FOOD OF THE GODS, NIGHTFALL with David Birney (a bad sign in itself), and CHILD'S PLAY. I've come close several other times.
I forgot about Food of the Gods. I wanted to see that as a kid. I've walked out of two movies: the Kenneth Branaugh movie that was a Shakespeare play he had turned into a musical: No one in the cast could sing and it was way easy to tell which lines were the additional dialogue written by Branaugh. Also I walked out of Requiem for a Dream. I'd owned the book for a few years after I'd devoured Last Exit to Brooklyn but I just couldn't get into it. The day after I walked out of the movie I sold the still unread book. I was surprised that it was a hit, I thought it was unrelenting and calculating in it's depressing tone.
Natural Born Killers ... didn't last 15 minutes ...
I've only walked out on one movie in my life, a zombie movie I can't even remember the tile, and there was one I got into free(a buddy was dating the manager) that I stayed for the end. It was a piece of crap and I lost time I could never get back.
Oh, yes, I need to add NATURAL BORN KILLERS-although it was on DVD. COULD NOT TAKE IT although I know people who admire it. Haven'e heard of FOOD OF THE GODS. I'd forgotten David Birney. One of the few actors I ever spotted in NY.
I have walked out on plays, but I've never walked out on a movie.
I would have walked out on The English Patient, but my friend kept saying it will be over soon. It wasn't. I did walk out on The Avengers (Sean Connery & Uma Thurman).
Boy, that ENGLISH PATIENT was a big disappointment. I kept waiting for the romance to come and it never did.
I have never walked out on a play, I don't think. No, that's not true. I have walked out on many college plays.
I rarely watch movies in the theatres. So most of the time I am walking out on films I am watching on television. I watch a full movie in bits and pieces over a week to 10 days.
Margot, that's hilarious about Dune. I can see why you were tempted! As a reader of the Dune books, I must say that was a hugely disappointing film!
I was tempted to walk out on Back to the Future 2--so boring! And the first one was so good.
BTF2 was hugely disappointing. They recovered a bit with 3 but they should have left well enough alone.
I hardly go out to any movies. I often start watching them on TV and then turn them off or leave. I do that so often I don't remember them.
I never walk out in theaters, but have occasionally turned them off if it was a DVD rental or something.
The only movie I recall walking out on was E.T., which we didn't like (still don't), but the reason we left was that another person in the theater physically attacked us. Long story. We would have walked on Kubrick's BARRY LYNDON, but Livia had to watch it for a college class she was taking at the time.
We've turned off lots and lots of movies on videotape and DVD.
I thought 21 JUMP STREET was much better than I expected it to be. I liked it quite a bit.
I only remember two, but I'm sure there were many more.
THE GOLDEN CHILD - mostly because of the audience's unruly behavior
NATURAL BORN KILLERS - I think I probably left at the same moment Charlie did. Right when the "I Love Lucy" parody started. I didn't find anything in what I saw funny, but the audience was laughing uproariously and it disturbed me more than the movie. I had to get out of there.
Really interesting to read that people will sit still in a movie theater and endure an awful movie when the smart thing to do is to leave. But leaving while live performers are on a stage is much easier? Odd. I've walked out on plays but I've always waited until intermission.
We've walked out of a number of plays too - at intermission and sometimes on highly touted Olivier Award winners in London that we just didn't get or couldn't stand.
A couple of times we barely made it to intermission it was that bad. One was called Fame about Marilyn Monroe and her German psychiatrist played by Bibi Besch with a horrible German accent. This stinker closed after opening night. I think it was about 1974 but I'm on the road and can't check my records. Five minutes before the break I was reduced to holding my hand over my mouth so as not to burst out laughing.
I did hate one show so much in London that I walked out halfway through Act I. It was either that or start yelling at the actors. (Hayley Mills was one of them as I remember.) I waited outside for Jackie through the rest of the show .
Jeff M.
One movie: Viva la Morte (Long Live Death), a movie from the early 1970s set during the Spanish Civil War. A grotesque mishmash of nightmarishly hideous violence coupled with perverted Catholic sensibilities. I don't even know if I got the title correct--perhaps Todd or someone else will know. Anyway, when they buried a guy up to his neck and had horses gallop over his head, I knew I'd seen enough.
We almost walked out on The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. I don't know why we stayed--it never got any better.
I walked out on one play: an Equity-waiver production of a musical called Very Good Eddie. I'm not sure if it was from the 1920s or just a twenties pastiche, but it was dreadful and I left at intermission.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066530/
Viva la muerte ("Long live death") indeed...apparently, some fascists actually enjoyed chanting thus. It doesn't sound like a cheery filmgoing experience, no, though I might be more sympathetic to its aims (though I've not yet gotten around to seeing the less explicitly anarchist EL TOPO, which might be similar in several ways, nor the similarly anti-fascist non-cheering SALO).
Dan Luft--you're lucky if you missed THE FOOD OF THE GODS in theaters. I found it remarkably inept, and my companions, also eleven year old boys, were unsettled by the big square-cube-defying wasp in the early going. We decamped to (for me) a second viewing of THE BAD NEWS BEARS. Tatum O'Neal. I think I might've overlooked her 10-month seniority over me as easily then as I would now.
Though I liked BRIDGET LOVES BERNIE at the time, Patti, Birney has struck me as the oiliest sort of smug one-note actor since...he helped make the first season of ST. ELSEWHERE pretty ungreat, for example.
I've never walked out of a play (as opposed to away from theater in the park sorts of things joined in progress), but the one Wolf Trap concert I walked out of, as Donna was feeling poorly and there was Nothing interesting going on onstage, was the Miles Davis band following an excellent and mostly unappreciated set by the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1988. Woman two or three people away from us, after MJQ finished: "They're not modern!" Madam, you may have my share of the aimless noodling which followed them.
And THE AVENGERS with Thurman and Feinnes was indeed worth walking away from, Naomi.
I'd forgotten he was in St. Elsewhere.
I'm trying to remember - I know I walked out on movies when I was younger. Now I rarely go to the theater anymore so at home, I just use the remote. I tolerated the Nicole Kidman version of MOULIN ROUGE for about ten minutes. Simply could not believe my eyes or my ears.
Years ago I wanted to walk out of PRETTY WOMAN but I was with someone who was enjoying it. I did walk out of QUEST FOR FIRE once upon a time.
Recently I remember turning off THE ADVENTURES OF TIN TIN about halfway through. I kept thinking it had to get better. What a disappointment.
Also J. EDGAR which I really thought I'd like.
But that's not the same as getting up and walking out.
I think I must have seen ten minutes of hundreds of movies in the past few years. :)
I've walked out of exactly three movies at the cinema, two by choice and the third reluctantly.
The first was the notorious anime Legend of the Overfiend, which I went into unsuspecting; I just couldn't sit through any more gratutitous rape scenes.
The second (on the same night!) was Liquid Sky, which was grating on my nerves.
The third - actually the first, as it was a couple of years before the others - was Wild At Heart, on my second viewing; I had recommended it to a group of my friends, and when they left en masse halfway through I felt compelled to go with them to find out why. Philistines.
I would have walked out of The Bodyguard but I was with three other people who liked it
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