I walked out of my first movie ever last night. I hated to do it, because it was a "World Premiere" and the director spoke before the airing. It was locally produced.
I'll describe the movie now, fuzzing up some details because it's not my intent to embarrass the director, who seemed nice.
It opened with a an aerial shot of a rivulet of water. Very pretty.
Two minutes later, I was thinking, "Uh, time to move on from this shot."
Then the sound started. It was people doing a chant in monotone notes.
Based on my estimate afterwards, we got 12 minutes of running water and monotonic chants. 12 minutes. Stare at some running water for 12 minutes while ringing your doorbell continuously and you'll see the challenge.
Then the scene switched to an aerial shot of some frozen body of water. One minute, two minutes, .... then the sounds came on, and they were random wildlife sounds. And when I say random, we're talking random. There were dogs barking, for example. Dogs barking while we looked down at the frozen water.
That went on for another 12 minutes or so and nothing on the screen ever moved.
Then we went to the third scene. This one had a boat on a lake, and I thought, "Okay, we're going to start hearing some narration now."
Nope. It was 12+ minutes of the boat sitting on the water, very slowly drifting slightly to the right, which was the most exciting scene of the night to that point.
The sound started for this scene, and it was someone saying sentences. I couldn't tell what was being said, because the director recorded five or six different voices saying the same sentences, and then she offset each voice by half a second. The result was cacophonic noise that was rhythmic enough to be really annoying, and you couldn't understand the words. That went on for almost ten minutes and I finally put my fingers in my ears because it was so annoying. Then she started strobing in bright pictures, still images that flashed so fast that you couldn't tell what the image was. Fast-flashing movie scenes really bother me, so now I had to either cover my eyes or my ears and I needed to cover both. I finally leaned over to my wife and said, "I can't take this any more. I'll wait outside." She decided to go with me and we left.
When we walked out, I looked at my watch and we'd been there for 48 minutes, minus ten minutes for the intro speech. They were still showing the boat on the lake when we left.
I'm fine with avant-garde stuff. It's not always my thing, but I can tolerate it. But this? This was painful. It was essentally 48 minutes of looking at three photos surrounded with nonsensical sounds. I can't figure out how that director put that together and decided that it was ready for the public. I felt like a meanie for walking out when the creator was in the audience, but life is too short for that, man. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Bowser:
I walked out of Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy back in the day. Just an awful, horrible movie. Fire Me Boy! and I used to get into arguments over that movie, lol.
Beatty so loved the character of Dick Tracy that he went to so pretty wild ends to ensure he maintained the rights to the character.
I had such low expectations going in that I actually kind of liked it. Not enough to ever watch it again or buy it, but it was okay.
The only movie I ever walked out on was the Brad Pitt Jesse James movie. The wife and I went to see it with another couple and we all hated it. It was tedious and dull, and I've never seen Pitt play a more uninteresting character. Maybe it got better. Don't know, don't care. I'll stick with Long Riders when it comes to movies about the James Gang.
Two movies that I wanted to walk out on but didn't were Moonstruck and the Clooney Batman movie. In both cases I was with someone else who had driven to the theater and many miles away from home (saw the Batman movie in Staten Island), so I was kind of stuck. Ironically, I was with the same person when I saw both of them. [Reply]
My main problem with the LOTR movies was that the third one should have ended with the "you bow to no one" scene. Instead, it droned on for another pointless half an hour while I HAD TO PEE REALLY REALLY BAD.
Rainman, what did the director say in their intro? Any conceptual hoo-hah that might've given you some insight in how to receive this?
Sounds more like a film art installation than a "movie", I've been to art museums where you walk into a dark room and something like this is playing on the wall.
Only movie I walked out on was THE MASTER. Waste of two good actors in a terribly boring film. also, one other film around 2001 was called the Dinner or something about a dysfunctional family gathering after one family member died. It was dark and depressing, can't remember the name. [Reply]
It was hurting my head just reading the op this morning, did you get the sense other audience members around you were about to die rolling their eyes as well?
Either way, you clearly made the right call... yeeesh [Reply]
The one and only movie I've ever walked out of was The Royal Tenenbaums
The trailers somehow made it look brilliantly witty, but good grief that thing was suuuch a crushing bore... Andersons worst movie by far, probably didn't even make it halfway through [Reply]
