Last (x) Movies you are going to Avoid

I know we all love to waste our lives inside the black box but there is only so much you can tolerate. This is a negative thread so please be that.

Youth (Paolo Sorrentino, 2015)
Anomalisa (Charlie Kaufman, 2015) - this looks terrible
Hail, Ceasar! (Coen bros., 2015) - a cast to avoid

I was just thinking this about Anomalisa, like ten minutes ago

I will not allow myself to watch A Bigger Splash. Not that trailers are remotely an indication of how good a film is going to be, but the trailer for this is so pervasively nauseating that it would be a triumph of editing were it somehow to not reflect accurately.

Now that awards season is over, I no longer feel like my avoidance of The Revenant, The Big Short, Mad Max: Fury Road, Room and The Martian is that big of a deal, so I'll just continue quietly avoiding them now.

Youth is the worst Sorrention, and the first he's made in a long time that doesn't at least have that wonderful Sorrentinoesque editing, but it's still fine. Looking forward to A Bigger Splash!

teh danish girl
steve jobs
hateful 8

o yea room also def

Brooklyn

A War! Fuck that propagandistic crap.

Youth was a shade less revolting than The Danish Girl; both movies you can point and laugh at.

will avoid:
Oliver Stone's Snowden thing
X-Men XVIII or whatever
Independence Day 2
Star Trek XXXVIII or whatever
Eastwood/Sully
Magnificent Seven remake
Harry Potter spinoff
Star Wars spinoff

will wait for streaming:
Zootopia
Deadpool, maybe
Finding Another Fish

I thought I was pretty positive & unpicky about films but pretty much everything listed so far I am either avoiding or wish I had avoided

I think the sole exception is Independence Day which I will proooobably see one day even though it looks extremely terrible

Anything Terrence Malick puts out. I have come to accept the fact I find his films shallow and boring, and can no longer be bothered to try.

(I mean, I rarely go to the cinema to catch new films anyway but I don't really see that as actively avoiding films, just... failing to go to the cinema.)

Oh right, now that Oscarbait season is done, Deadpool is thing I give the least shit about.

Might only watch Stone's Snowden thing because of JGL, but still a big maybe.

emil.y, I'm with you on Malick (after Thin Red Line).

what movies have you willingly watched recently that would make you reconsider the actively avoid list by comparison?
(my having watched zoolander2 means I can't really have an actively avoid list anymore)

how is malick "shallow"? of all the ways to go at the guy...

I don't think he's shallow, more like he's got these few things to say and repeats them ad nauseum. I will avoid the new one.

This is supposed to be a solely negative thread, so no defending! Though I guess to me 'shallow' = I appreciate the look of his films but the underlying messages and themes completely fail to resonate with me. I just get nothing deeper than 'oh, I guess that's quite pretty'. You might get something more, but I find myself unmoved.

all of them

Thirding the Malick disdain. Tree of Life felt achingly empty to me. I cannot gel with his very measured, almost clinically literary tone, and don't understand his emotional palette at all. I keep falling for the hype that surrounds him, but I don't think it will happen again.

As usual, you put it much better than I can. I often love "achingly empty" films, but that's normally when the emptiness is intentional. Whereas Malick seems to be desperately trying to impart something, but when I look I find nothing.

Youth is the worst Sorrention, and the first he's made in a long time that doesn't at least have that wonderful Sorrentinoesque editing, but it's still fine. Looking forward to A Bigger Splash!

― Frederik B, Sunday, March 6, 2016 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

The reason for this thread is that a friend & I were going to see it and then got there and it was sold out. We were both dreading it, knowing it was going to be complete and utter shit but liking some of his previous work.

Another friend dragged me to A Bigger Splash! and it was so banal - this barely disguised ad for the Italian tourist industry (even if good things don't happen) so you should avoid it if you can.

The even bigger reason is that 2016 has been terrible for films. Rams by Grímur Hákonarson looks like this quirky Icelandic film I just don't care for. The Revenant is a complete fkn joke.

In parallel the BFI has been running a Godard season and his work from the 70s onwards (never mind the 60s) has been putting everybody to shame.

Dreading the end of this (next week is the last of it). If I am able to I always like going to the cinema.

I know we aren't suppose to defend film, but Rams is delightful... If you all didn't see Of Horses and Men by Benedikt Erlingsson, you need to do that as well, and they're kinda the same film.

dunno if something can be both quirky and viscerally crushing but this is a thread of hatred so on we go. obv i am never watching The Revenant ever

Even though I set-up the thread no one needs to follow all the rules (not that there are any hard-and-fast rules) so yeah defend if you happen to watch and like it. Obviously I'm saying 'no way' on the basis of a trailer or a review of it or what I hear about it. xp

The rams trailer made it look like quirky deadpan comedy but it's like straight tragedy. I liked it, probably in large part because it wasn't the former - as we were leaving my friend said "imagine if that had been a British film" and we both shuddered at the thought of the fucking michael gambon rhys ifans bullshit that would be

youth really was pretty bad -- glacial male-artist sorrow (certainly the end of something or other, one would sort of have to think), that one guy who only plays quivering bureaucrats as a quivering bureaucrat, all dialogue clearly written but not spoken in esl which gave the whole movie such a stilted uncanny feeling i almost liked it. liked the giant marx tattoo i guess.

anomalisa was perfect on its own extremely limited and unpleasant terms.

the coens have been at the top of their career since burn after reading so i am very excited for this obviously slight one.

anyway, deadpool.

The Revenant, The Danish Girl, the Dakota Fanning trans boy movie, most of the foreseeable superhero movies, Zoolander 2

all of them

― mookieproof, Sunday, March 6, 2016 12:49 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm.

I am the Joey Chestnut of avoiding movies

had no idea stone was making a snowden movie; that's unnecessary. idk if there's a scene in oliver stone's whole oeuvre better than the fire alarm sequence in citizenfour unless it's the one where joe pesci's wig comes off.

Rams should be seen just for the awesome images of Iceland :) They have this whole boom of cheap films filmed around the countryside, using the landscape and many amateur actors. All of the films have names like Rams, Sparrows, Volcano, Virgin Mountain, Of Horses and Men. It's a style, kinda.

Yeah, Youth is pretty bad. Sorrentino has only made 'big-male-sorrow' films. His last three films were male-artist-sorrow, but before that it was politician and mafiosi. It's definitely the biggest failing of his filmography, and Youth is really doubling down on it. The guy is still just 45, why are all his films about men growing old and irrelevant? But he is a good picture-maker, and Youth has good pictures.

When Tree of Life came out the local alt-weekly ran two reviews: "I Saw The Tree of Life, and I Loved It" and "I Didn't See The Tree of Life, and I Hated It." I'll always love Badlands and should get around to watching The Thin Red Line but nothing after that has had much appeal.

The only 'my god what rubbish' reaction I've had to a trailer recently was for The BFG, but after the disaster of Tintin I was unlikely to see another Spielberg kids' movie anyway.

The trailer for Hail, Caesar pretty much gives the entire movie away - and does so in a far snappier fashion than the film itself. Ralph Fiennes is the standout turn in H,C but even that wasn't enough to make me see A Bigger Splash, especially after I read a really arsey interview w/ the director in Sight and Sound.

And yes, Youth was unrecoverable in any coherent critical way as a 'good' movie, but it's not an especially interesting bad movie either. The corollary of its male-artist-sorrow is a gross sexism and general disregard for any of the female characters (Rachel Weisz and Jane Fonda probably give the best performances in the film, but they're marginalised and trivialised when set against mouldy Michael Caine and mumbling Harvey Keitel). Also thought This Must Be The Place was a turd, so yeah, it def feels like Sorrentino loses something quite crucial when working with an English Language script.

The Big Fucken Giant. Never saw Tintin but I will do my duty and watch it as part of the big Spielberg project. But I get to stop at Bridge Of Spies, then my commitment ends, so the BFG can G the F O.
Never watched Avatar, Titanic, Independence Day, any Jurassic Park sequels, I watch a hella lit of bad ibdies but I can't be bothered with that shit.
Still Alice, my mother keeps trying to show me and I am "no thank you"

Fast/Furious films, Saw films, TV spinoffs...

The director of A Bigger Splash is Luca Guadagnino who made the quite good I Am Love, so def seeing A Bigger Splash.

I watched Synecdoche New York two days back and decided to give Anomalisa a pass.

guys if you're not hating on days of heaven you're hating malick wrong

its like if you're really going to hate oasis you can't just start hating with 'be here now'. you have to commit to your hate. it's like hating only the late u2: fuck that.

i am love is a garbage movie for garbage people

oh my god rain on a statues face it looks like the statue is crying fuck me did your 5yo cowrite this thing

anomalisa is a great title for a mediocre mid-90s indie record

dlh's thing on youth and esl kinda makes me want to see it, or at least make a movie that uses the same trick to some effect

Non-english speaking people has been doing this for decades.

'Oh look at this stupid director, he isn't even a native English speaker, and he still thinks he can make a global film! lol, what a weirdo.'

'Meanwhile, isn't Eddie Redmayne amazing as a Dane, let's give him all the oscars!'

i think there was more to dlh's claim than that tbh

Anything with "today's comedy superstars" US version - people I generally find unfunny (Louis CK, Tina Fey, The Amy's Schumer and Poehler) ---everything I've seen them in up to now a resounding dud so no thanks.
Anything by Lanthimos
"Anomalisa" was a real chore.

Also - no more Baumbach. Or Ben Stiller ( he just seems fed up in everything).

Well I mean that wasn’t why I flew to New York. But I’d do it again even tho both flight and screening were longer than the Irishman, ready player one, and all Tarantino

Jojo Rabbit

I support your choice.

i enjoyed it but it took a while for me to build up some measure of trust in what it was doing/going for, and i can easily imagine it failing that test for different viewers

It's got some good people in it, but from the trailer KNIVES OUT looks totally insufferable.

looks like rian johnson is going back to incompetently imitating detective writers

The Megyn Kelly biopic Bombshell. I suppose it seemed like a good idea to idiots in 2017.

1917
vaguely jingoistic sam mendes helmed ww1 epic hellscape with heavy FPS visual identity=pass

hard pass also on Midway

1917 is getting the kind of rave reviews that have betrayed me w/every Sam Mendes film i've seen

i kind of secretly hate every film and television show and play he's ever done

Otm. Incredible to me that he has done Skyfall and basically nothing else worth seeing.

Skyfall is "impressive" but i think where he falls flat is he makes these very beautiful images which are cinematically inert, even in his two big budget action movies. Skyfall looks amazing but seems worse over time, and Spectre didn't even have the beautiful look.

i gotta say i got suddenly more interested in Midway when i realized it was a Roland Emmerich destruction schlockfest and not another oscar-bait mournful war film. not enough to actually go see it, mind you.

Richard Jewell

Trying to think: has there been a mainstream film with a rote '(first name) + (last name)' title that wasn't cinematic bullshit?

barry lyndon and... toni erdmann

Truck Turner

Jackie Brown

daniel blake (i am,)

Irma Vep. Simon H liked Martin Eden. Andrej Rublev.

Charley Varrick
Ed Wood
Donnie Brasco
Elmer Gantry
Air Bud

Marie Antoinette, Effi Briest, Brewster McCloud, Cluny Brown...

Action Jackson

Brewster McCloud
Norma Rae
Hudson Hawk

oh wait B.McC was posted

just saw marie antoinette the other night, it ruled

and I hear good things about John Wick

Ha, I knew I was setting myself up with that post. Although I should've clarified that I meant biographical films using that title format. Under the new, tightened restrictions, I'd say the only exceptions mentioned that prove the rule are Ed Wood and Air Bud.

Erin Brockovitch?

Marie Antoinette doesn’t fit firstname + lastname formula y’all

Definitely one that sucked was Steve Jobs

Probably doesn’t need to be stated, but: Cats

I totally forgot Cats was even happening until I saw some fancy new edition of the Eliot book today. And then I remembered and I died. I died, guys. I died.

Most of the movies represented during the pre-Star Wars trailer suite looked like steamy refuse but the only one that stood out enough to really get my goat was the one that, sight unseen, I would've found the least objectionable.

Why. The fuck. Is the dog in the new Call of the Wild 100% bad CGI. What could possibly justify not using an actual dog in a live action movie about a dog. Did Harrison Ford only agree to star if they were willing to hang a green screen hung in his living room so he never had to leave his easy chair?

EXCLUSIVE: James @mang0ld to direct Timothee Chalamet in Searchlight’s #GoingElectric about Bob Dylan’s move from folk to rock musichttps://t.co/OZnkvp1dVs

— Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) January 6, 2020

Lol good nominee

ugggggh Fuckkkk that!

Chalamet is a terrible actor

coming around on it purely for the fact that no on will be more annoyed at its existence than robert himself

I thought I read he was executive producing it?

jesus, missed that

some fuckwit has made a movie about the military wives choir

We needed calendar girls for gammonettes

I would watch a Short Cuts style movie about the wall of gammon lads tbh

I once sent a very offensive and treasonable comment to military wives choir on twitter in response to their xmas single when i was pissed. GCHQ probably have a file on me.

ugh, Peter Cattaneo

as well as all that other parochial garbage he also did the fucking A Word. I nearly assaulted my television with a lump hammer over that shit!

jesus what a wasteman

ffs Sharon Horgan youre better than this

She was also in that awful Game Night movie, which she was also better than.