10 Movies I HATE

I tend to be far more interested in solutions than problems. I’d rather write about or teach what I love than what I hate. I get irritated with critiques that don’t deign to imagine an alternative. I loathe writing the parts of essays that summarize why what everyone else has said is wrong; I want to hurry up and get to the part where I say my own fresh and optimistic ideas. And I generally find something redeeming even in films that I’m suspicious of (see review of Lost in Translation in the Fall issue of Film Quarterly).

But yes, I do walk out of movies sometimes. I get ticked off when I feel like a film is wasting my time and money. I get my knickers in a twist when something is truly offensive — and by ‘offensive’ I don’t mean explicit, immoral, violent, not PC, cruel and inhuman, etc. I love John Waters, who embraces the explicit and the immoral, and offends in a sweetly delicious way. I think that violence and nihilism can wake people up, and can be moving or even funny (Tarantino, or the final show-down in A History of Violence). Margaret Cho is certainly not PC but I love her; she’s funny as hell. And yeah, I thought Der Untergang (the Hitler bunker movie) was probably irresponsible, but not because it portrayed Hitler as ‘human’ or because it made us ‘sympathize with Nazis’ (I think it’s far more irresponsible to portray dictators or perpetrators of genocide as unimaginable inhuman monsters, because real humans did and still do these things). I’m not even above stupid potty humor and the like; hell, sometimes I am below it.

So when I say these films offended me or that I hated them, it’s not because I have made some blanket moral judgment about what is acceptable and what is not. I’ll readily admit that some of the films here are probably ‘good’ in the sense of well-made or succeeding in their intended effect. What I’m interested in, though, is the capacity of a film to evoke a clear and strong negative reaction: a visceral, face-souring, passionately negative reaction. Much ink has been shed trying to answer the question of why people love what they love, why they love the way they love. This is the beginning of an attempt to think through the reverse. Which is equally interesting and particular to individuals, if not more so. There are plenty of advertisements and stuff out there that tell us what we ought to like and desire and even fetishize; there are less guidelines for what to despise. On second thought, we do get plenty of direction from mass culture about what/whom we’re supposed to feel repulsed by (homeless people, queers, the physically disfigured, etc.). But there are also categories of things that have that certain je ne sais quoi, that we are simply repelled by for very primal and often inexplicable reasons. I find this category of things fascinating, in the same way that I find fascinating the things that people are inexplicably terrified by, that I wrote about in my ‘little nightmares’ column in h2so4.

Plus, it’s just plain exhausting trying to say productive, generous, and constructive things all the time. I have to do this all the time in my job, being diplomatic and constructive. Sometimes, don’t you just want to pan and shred and tear shit up and express your loathing without offering a single constructive suggestion for how to piece it all back together? It is a truism of anarchy that every act of destruction is also an act of creation. The philosopher Henri Bergson saw negation as more positive than positing. Trashing can clear the mind and cleanse the soul. But enough justification. Shred away, my lovely bitches…

10. Mercy. HATED it. This movie was SO BAD. Here are the notes I took right after I saw it: “Really bad serial killer film. At first we think it will be like Basic Instinct: the blond icy lesbian did it. But then it turns out to be the cross-dresser (Silence of the Lambs). But no! In an unexpected twist, it was the innocent-looking girl who was raped by her father as a child. Really original, guys.” This litany of usual suspects sounds like a parody but it was not; they were totally serious. It was so bad it made me feel pity and embarrassed for the actors/filmmakers in a way that I often do at bad live theater but rarely at the movies.

9. Pieces of April. I walked out of this puppy, and learned the important lesson that one should NOT go to a film just because it has a Magnetic Fields soundtrack. As about.com puts it, “A rebellious girl with a broken stove wants to make Thanksgiving dinner for her family. Why do we care? If there is anywhere we don't want to be, it's in a station wagon filled with a bickering family.”

8. Whipped. This movie was so awful I don’t even remember why I didn't like it. Probably a combination of boring, badly made and mildly offensive. It's bad in that generic 'bad movie' sort of way that probably doesn't even deserve to be on this list, because the dislike it inspires is so banal. In fact, bad on me for having gone to see it in the first place. Was I drunk? What was I thinking?

7. Closer. These erotic betrayal stories are almost never good, because the dialogue is always stupid and inadequate to the emotions it’s trying to express, and what is supposed to be sexy and passionate and profound ends up just stupid and ridiculous. You just hate these people and wish they would get off the screen. An editor should have taken a scalpel to this POS. Shocker: it turns out Natalie Portman was lying the whole time, deceiving her lovers, and hahaha the joke’s on them? Guess what: you’re going to have to yank that rug out harder from under me, because from where I sit, it ain’t budging.

6. Supersize Me. McDonald's is bad for you. Um, we already knew this. But Morgan Spurlock has to prove it, by eating nothing but McDonald's for a month. Gee, I wonder what the consequences will be? This doc combines the worst aspects of a self-righteous PSA and a narcissistic diary film. There is almost no reference to, say, capitalism, or the broader causes of obesity. Blame is basically placed on the fat, caricatured, stupid people who are dumb enough to eat fast food. In this way the film becomes a comedy like Shallow Hal: hey, let’s all laugh at the fat people. Hmm, I wonder if there are other reasons people eat at McDonald’s? Could it be that you can still stuff yourself there for $3, and it’s addictive, and it’s on every fucking street corner, and the vast majority of people are too poor to pay $9 a pound for local organic fair-labor non-GMO produce at Whole Foods?! Jesus, Spurlock, get your targets straight.

5. Chuck & Buck. Wow, this movie had me cringing so hard I was gagging for hours, nay, days afterwards. Buck could turn a gay person straight. He is SO ABJECT you just want to kick his creepy little stalker ass and throw up all over him and then run away screaming. Talk about needing a mouthwash movie. I think I watched five hours of television afterwards and still couldn’t get the foul taste out of my mouth. And that hateful, odious song that goes “oogily oogily oogily fun fun fun…” I’m getting queasy just thinking about it. This movie turned my gut in a way that made Todd Solondz’s Happiness seem like a walk in the Disney. I suppose that means it was good, because it totally succeeded in eliciting my utter contempt and revulsion.

4. Grease 2. This was my original *finger in throat gagging motion* movie. I happened to see it on television when I was a kid and it seriously traumatized me, especially the song “Let’s Do It for Our Country,” which mixes soft-core porn and patriotism in an utterly revolting way. I had nightmares about that scene; I’m lucky it didn’t make me frigid and apolitical for life. Maybe if I saw this movie again as a grown-up, I’d appreciate the campy/satirical aspects a bit more. But it disgusted me so badly as a kid that I was scarred for life. Please, God, make it go away!

3. In the Company of Men. This film was totally offensive! I walked out on sheer principle, the only time I’ve ever done that. And it’s not that I’m such a prude that I would never deign to watch an apt depiction of misogynist jerks ‘n’ assholes every now and then and maybe even find something redeeming in it. But this film majorly brought out the feminist in me. It was just BEYOND. It pissed me off to the same degree that Chuck and Buck grossed me out, which I suppose is again an admission that it succeeded at some level if that’s what it set out to do.

2. Requiem for a Dream. This movie has the unique distinction of having both offended AND physically repulsed me. Offensive: it totally butchers and sells out the middle-aged female character (Ellen Burstyn), and it has the ugly, self-righteous moralizing tone of an anti-drug PSA. Repulsive: I don’t mind being ‘challenged’ by a ‘difficult’ aesthetic every now and again, when it’s well done and with purpose, but I saw nothing redemptive in the artillery-style strobe cuts of overdosing people in the most unforgiving close-ups ever. An unrelenting assault. I had to cover my eyes to prevent going into anaphylactic shock. I KNOW that drugs are bad, and that McDonald’s is bad — you do not need to give me a fucking seizure, kay?

1. The anti-drug PSA film that I saw on 16mm in the 5th grade. I wish I could remember the title of this thing, because it was really sick. This was supposedly an educational film for children, but it contained images just as graphic, if not more so, than any I have ever seen on a shock site. I am not exaggerating. A scene of a 30-pound woman OD-ing and sliding down the stairs like she had no bones in her body and puking bright yellow all over herself and then convulsing and dying. Footage of people putting heroin directly into their infected, puss-filled 5-inch gaping abscesses. Corpse photos. People drowned in their own cocaine-filled mucus, which looked like scoops of ice cream covering their noses and mouths. Yeah, good idea to show that to a 10-year-old. I mean, this was unbelievable, basically a long snuff film masquerading behind a wafer-thin facade of public service. I remember I was sitting next to a boy I had a mild crush on, and he puked all over my shoes. The interesting thing is, this movie did not work. That is, it did not make me not want to do drugs; even at age 10 it was obvious that these were extreme cases. Better they should have leveled with us, just given us some real data about addiction and recovery or lack thereof or the larger effects of the drug trade, we weren’t too dumb to process that and we could have been spared this horrible trauma. Did anyone else have to endure this movie? If so, we should start a support group. Forget the ten bucks I wasted on Pieces of April, I would have paid, oh, probably around $1000 NEVER TO HAVE SEEN THIS FILM.

I want to start one of those networking websites where people say what they dislike instead of listing their favorite things, which are always boring and predictable anyway (Jonathan Safran Foer, anyone?). I dream of a utopian world where people bond over their common HATES rather than their common interests. So long, suckers. Screw you and the horse you rode in on. Yeah!