It's always annoying when you reach a point in the movie where you just cannot bear to carry on. I've sat through plenty of bad films, but there are some times when you only need to watch for a short while before you know you aren't going to appreciate anything about the experience. Here are a few recent examples. Naturally there's no rating because I can't really judge the whole length of these films but, needless to say, I don't recommend any of them.
Stage Fright (2014)
I'm a big fan of horror comedies. Not such a fan of musicals, though I'm not averse, but it wasn't the music which made me give up on Stage Fright...
Admittedly I was feeling a bit of an outsider to the setting of a summer camp. We don't really have that sort of culture in the UK. Sure I went on scout camps and there are groups that do activity weeks which may involve camping. But this is a little different. But I was still ready for the film to pull me into the setting. (After all, it's the Friday 13th setting essentially, right?)
Then one singer pipes in with an incredibly homophobic line about how he's gay "but not in that way". Okay fine, the song'll move on and I can pretend this didn't happen, right?
Wrong.
Immediately this guy is backed up by a whole group of female backing singers all repeating that same horrible line: "He's gay, he's gay, but not in that way."
And then another person steps in to sing "I'm gay, I'm gay, I'm actually gay..." At this point I'm relieved that he is responding to all this nonsense. With the movie having made a big deal about homosexuality, this gay character can finally put that into its proper context....
And then the actually-gay character with the stereotypical effeminate voice sings his next line:
"... I don't get hard when I see T and A."
*click*
I don't know what happens next and frankly I don't care.
The Falling (2014)
I know Mark Kermode loves this film, but by the time I switched this off, one of two female protagonists had already had two sex scenes and yet still had no clear personality. And no, reciting poetry isn't a personality.
Nobody in the film really talks like a human being. The scenes unfold slowly, presumably expecting us to be wowed by the scenery. I was bored.
Perhaps if there had been more compelling dialogue and character building in between the two sex scenes I might have kept going. But there was simply nothing going on here.
The Book of Life (2014)
I watched this film to about the half way point. Despite some cool ideas on presentation the story is generic and boring. The animation isn't really terribly interesting either.
While the film tries to portray the main female character as a strong character it mainly does so by misogynistically characterising every single other girl where she lives as shallow, fickle and uninterested in reading.
The plot concerns two boys competing over this one girl. While the script writers have clearly seen Aladdin and get their heroine to argue "I am not a prize to be won", the whole story here seems to be specifically about "winning the girl" (with very little ambiguity about who ought to win).
One thing I found particularly weird was why, in a film supposedly about Mexican culture with a guitar toting hero, they would keep including cheesy pop songs? I'm a real sucker for Spanish guitar, but there's very little of that sort of music here. I finally gave up on the film when they started playing a particularly cheesy song which wore out its welcome when it was played endlessly on the radio in the 90s: "If you like my body and you think I'm sexy."
Good grief!
The reviews I saw said this was a bit mediocre. On the contrary, it's dire.