Movies and TV I just walked out of a movie for the first time ever. - Page 4

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.
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Originally Posted by Easy 6:
Thin Red Line was such a total mess, philosophical meanderings about nothing... the perfect Sean Penn vehicle

Thin Red Line was terrible, absolutely terrible. And I think it was made worse because it came out at about the same time as some really good war movie, maybe Private Ryan? Or Forrest Gump, to the extent that it had war scenes? Regardless, my wife and I had recently enjoyed some war movie and went to Thin Red Line with high expectations, and it was a slog to sit through it.

Even so, I was never tempted to walk out. In contrast to the one I walked out of, at least something was happening on the screen. People were walking and talking and stuff.

At home, I tend to be pretty impatient these days with on-demand movies. If they don't keep me engaged, I'll give up on them pretty quickly. I also get distracted easily at home, which makes the movie's job harder. So that's a different animal.

At the theater, I've never given up until this week. But I can think of a few movies where I was impatiently waiting for it to end so I could go do something interesting. Off the top of my head, I can think of ...

Some Almodovar movie that I don't recall the title of - He was supposedly a big deal so we went to one of his movies. First off, it was in Spanish with subtitles, which doesn't help. But that wasn't the main problem. I don't know if Spanish people are just dumb, but it was a really stupid plot with overacting that seemed more appropriate for a children's TV show than an adult movie. It was kind of embarrassing at parts when the actors were mugging for the camera.
Kill Bill - I didn't care for any of the characters. It was boring and bloody and the plot was nearly non-existent. I like almost all of Tarantino's stuff, but this one was a major swing and miss.
War of the Roses - If I wanted two nonstop hours of people arguing, I'd visit my parents. Plus, it was an early date with my future wife, and the subject matter wasn't conducive to dating.
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover - I saw this decades ago and remember nothing about it other than being bored out of my skull.
One of the later Star Wars movies. The first three movies were legendary. I think (not sure) that I watched the fourth and was unimpressed, and then the fifth one was excruciating to the point that I never watched another one. It could have been the fourth movie, but I think it was the fifth. I just remember a scene with Natalie Portman (or was it Keira Knightley?) and some dude talking about politics that seemed to last hours.
Pretty much any Woody Allen movie made after about 1985. That guy jumped the shark bad.

I'm sure there are others, but these pop out in my mind as near-walkouts.

Every one of them was 500 times better than what I saw last week, though.
[Reply]

Originally Posted by Rain Man:
Thin Red Line was terrible, absolutely terrible. And I think it was made worse because it came out at about the same time as some really good war movie, maybe Private Ryan? Or Forrest Gump, to the extent that it had war scenes? Regardless, my wife and I had recently enjoyed some war movie and went to Thin Red Line with high expectations, and it was a slog to sit through it.

Even so, I was never tempted to walk out. In contrast to the one I walked out of, at least something was happening on the screen. People were walking and talking and stuff.

Its YOUR fault you didn't get it, now slink away out the side door you lowbrow loser!
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