After last week’s post on my five favourite films we now have to tackle the other side of the spectrum. Here are five movies with their own section in the Geneva Convention and guaranteed to be on a loop in my own personal hell. Not that I believe in hell, though I did live in Coventry for three years.
No pictures this time. I don’t want flashbacks.
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Special effects movies have a bad reputation for valuing spectacle over story, but drag out a story of man’s trip to Jupiter so that happens in real time, add a few blokes in monkey suits, and apparently you have a classic. To say this was tedious was to do a disservice to the possibilities of tedium. The boy and I didn’t as much watch this film as form a mutual suicide watch.
Inception (2010)
Inception is a film of idea. Unfortunately, this was an idea postulated by the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi over two thousand years ago, so we’re not exactly talking current, here. It’s what a Media Studies student would consider clever. Yes, you can’t distinguish dreams and reality a lot of the time, we get it. Do you really have to go on for two and half hours about it? Could you not use that time to, oh, I don’t know, give some of the characters personality, not change your rules halfway through, or come up with a more original threat than men with guns?
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (2001)
Watching this film is like witnessing a drunken teenage party while sober. A waste of the crayons the script was obviously written in. I was cringing so hard at what I saw I couldn’t defecate for a week. The half of the cast that wasn’t indulging themselves was only doing this because they were too old for porn. This film features Eliza Dushku in her underwear. I never want to see this film again. That’s how bad it is.
Batman and Robin (1997)
Another cringeworthy film that acts as an effective diarrhoea treatment. As leaden as one of Arnie’s dumbbells, delivered with all the acting prowess of a BBC 3 comedy. It goes for camp in the same manner as a wet weekend in a tent on a Welsh hillside does. My wife claims to like this film, but I don’t recalling her rushing to borrow the DVD off the Boy.
Thunderbirds (2004)
I wasn’t cringing during this film, but only because it’s impossible to cringe and vomit at the same time. The beloved 60s adventure series is butchered into a saccharine children’s story of mind-numbing awfulness. Someone, somewhere, likes this film. They’re setting up their own cult as we speak.
