Sin-Emetic: Signs I'm Going to Hate this Film
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In December 2015 I wrote a post about Christmas which ended up descending into an itemised list of reasons why I hate the film Love Actually. This ended up being one of the most popular posts I'd ever written at the time, I imagine for the same reasons that I enjoy reading scathing one-star reviews on Goodreads – people are generally funnier when they are being mean than when they are being nice. Sad, but true.
I could probably write a Bachelor's thesis on Love Actually and why I hate it so much, but a) it's not Christmastime and b) most of my acquaintances who like it don't want me to watch it with them as they perceive my witty observations and valid criticisms as 'ruining the film', thus it thankfully isn't often inflicted upon me. Contrary to what some people may believe, I don't actually enjoy destroying other people's fun, so I decided to publish a list of things I hate in films so that anyone who wishes to watch a film with me can choose something that I'm not going to bitch about the whole way through. If your film of choice ticks any of the following boxes, please don't show it to me.
WARNING: Spoilers for the following films below: The Fault in Our Stars, City of Angels, The Notebook, Say Anything, and Titanic (although if you still care about spoilers in that last one then I suggest you just sit down and watch it already; it's been nineteen years).
It's a love story in which one of the leads dies
This doesn't apply to all films in which a romantic lead kicks the bucket, but the bad ones are just so bad that it warrants first place on my pet peeve list. The Fault in Our Stars, Titanic, and City of Angels are three films that spring to mind when I think of character deaths so obviously written to draw tears from viewers that one suspects that legal restrictions were the only thing stopping the director having pepper spray released into the audience at each screening. These deaths don't deepen the viewer's understanding of the film or bring a new layer of symbolism to the narrative. They're there because the film's creators wanted to get an emotional reaction out of the audience and they thought that killing off a lead would be the quickest, easiest way to do that.
I have cried at many films. I cried at The Green Mile. I cried at The Lion King. I cry just thinking about Untouchable. I even cried at the most recent Star Wars instalment (although that was partly because I saw it the day after the office Christmas party and I was catastrophically hungover). I did not cry at The Fault in Our Stars. If anything, its desperation to move me to tears only served to irritate me so much that I wished both leads would just hurry up and die already so that the film would end and I could go home. The closest I came to crying was when I remembered the price that I had paid for the privilege of pissing away two hours of my life watching the cloying, saccharine waste of film.
I'm not sure when film and TV executives decided that the ukulele was going to be the go-to instrument to make a character appeal to the Youth of Today, but it needs to stop. I hate ukuleles now, which is quite an impressive feat considering how small, quiet, and relatively inoffensive they are. I think my objection to them stems from their being used as a lazy way of showing that a character is 'quirky', a word that, over the past five years or so, has come to mean 'not actually original or interesting in any way but has a fringe and maybe wears a hat occasionally'. The only film I can remember seeing featuring a ukulele-player who I didn't want to strangle is Some Like It Hot, so the only way to get away with including one is to also devote at least half of your film's screen time to Jack Lemmon.
Obviously I enjoy clever films, or at least claim to on my Facebook page so that people think I'm cultured and intelligent. The distinction here is between films that are clever and films that try to be so. Clever films – or, indeed, clever pieces of art – usually focus on telling a story, and happen to do so in a thought-provoking and interesting way. Films that try to be clever spend most of the narrative trying to surprise the audience and show off just how smart they are rather than actually saying anything worth listening to, and as a result end up feeling convoluted, confusing, and annoying. The worst offender that I can think of off the top of my head for this is the smug and tedious Now You See Me, a poorly plotted heist that fancied itself as a slick thriller, and which I did not enjoy in the slightest. This was partly because I really wanted to watch Dodgeball and was outvoted, but only partly.
There's a big romantic gesture that is actually really annoying and/or creepy when you think about it for even half a second
I'm a big fan of romance when it's genuinely heartwarming and shows care and a meaningful connection between two characters. However, I've seen far too many 'romantic' films in which one or both of the lead characters behaves in a way that would be obnoxious and unsettling if they weren't played by an attractive actor and their actions not set to a swelling, sentimental soundtrack. I know I might make some enemies by speaking ill of The Notebook, but let's be realistic here: if you saw a young man threaten to commit suicide to get a woman to go out with him you'd probably advise her to take legal action to stop him coming near her ever again. Even if they're not creepy, a lot of the time these gestures are still, at the very least, pretty inconvenient and annoying. Sure, I enjoy a bit of Peter Gabriel (although I'd rather listen to 'Sledgehammer' than 'In Your Eyes', personally), but if someone woke me up by blasting it outside my bedroom window first thing in the morning I would tell them to climb up Solsbury Hill and never come back down again.
Mark Wahlberg is in it
I'm a big fan of romance when it's genuinely heartwarming and shows care and a meaningful connection between two characters. However, I've seen far too many 'romantic' films in which one or both of the lead characters behaves in a way that would be obnoxious and unsettling if they weren't played by an attractive actor and their actions not set to a swelling, sentimental soundtrack. I know I might make some enemies by speaking ill of The Notebook, but let's be realistic here: if you saw a young man threaten to commit suicide to get a woman to go out with him you'd probably advise her to take legal action to stop him coming near her ever again. Even if they're not creepy, a lot of the time these gestures are still, at the very least, pretty inconvenient and annoying. Sure, I enjoy a bit of Peter Gabriel (although I'd rather listen to 'Sledgehammer' than 'In Your Eyes', personally), but if someone woke me up by blasting it outside my bedroom window first thing in the morning I would tell them to climb up Solsbury Hill and never come back down again.
Mark Wahlberg is in it
Anyone blessed with even the tiniest shred of taste knows that Marky Mark hasn't produced anything worthwhile since he left the Funky Bunch.
Image credit: Joel Abroad
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