Five Movies I Didn't Finish

Faithful readers, I have a hard time walking away from a movie before it's over. I tend to watch films until the bitter end, even if it makes me miserable. I mean, I have watched both The Day of the Dolphin AND The Dolphin: Story of a Dreamer in their entirety! And neither one of those movies should have been created, let alone watched. Nevertheless, there's always a part of me that needs to know how the story ends, no matter how dumb the movie may be. Also, when I'm watching a bad movie (like Lady in the Water), I just keep hoping that it will have some redeeming moment at the end (which Lady in the Water doesn't have), and it's that hope that drives me to the finish (and makes me finish movies like Lady in the Water).

However, out of the 4,815,162,342 films I've seen in my lifetime, there are a handful of movies I didn't finish. These aren't my worst hated movies -- after all, it's not really fair to pass final judgement on half-watched movies -- but here are some of the films that I found to be so bland or intolerable, that I stopped watching them and don't care to ever finish them.

High School High

I remember watching this one with my family at my sister's basement apartment when I was a teenager. We had no idea what we were in for, but soon discovered this movie is nothing more than one tasteless joke after another. I truly believe that the "inspirational teacher" genre needs to be mocked and mocked often, but this movie crossed the line too many times, and it wasn't humorous enough to justify us keeping it on. Jon Lovitz is a funny man, but this movie would not be useful evidence of the aforementioned statement in a court of law. And since I watched this movie back in the 90s, I didn't even have the internet resources to look up the ending and satisfy my curiosity. Maybe I'll do that now. Hold on one sec. . .
 . . .Yup. I'm glad we turned it off. That was stupid. I've said it before and I'll say it again, the worst movies in the world are comedies.

The Aviator
I feel somewhat ashamed of not finishing this one because it's a Best Picture nominee and it stars Kate Beckinsale. I hope that the lovely and talented Ms. Beckinsale can forgive me. However, after watching the first four and a half hours of The Aviator, I was bored and sleepy and decided to turn off the movie and do something more productive. My plan was to go back and finish this movie later, especially because of the potential of another Kate Beckinsale scene, but I never got around to it. There always seemed to be something more interesting to do than watch Leo DiCaprio brood at the camera. Personally, I preferred it when Howard Hughes was portrayed by John Locke in The Rocketeer.

Dreamgirls
Now, some of you out there may disagree with this one, but I found Dreamgirls to be utterly boring. So boring, in fact, that I didn't even remember watching it until I found it in my Netflix viewing history. To be fair, I'm not the target demographic for this movie -- I'm not black, I'm not a woman and I'm not entertained by two-hour music videos. This movie seemed to be nothing more than a showcase for the vocal chords of Beyoncé and Jennifér. Eddie Murphy boldly stepped out from behind Donkey's shadow and gave a dramatic, live-action performance. But who wants to see Eddie Murphy do serious drama? If I want to see Eddie Murphy not be funny, I'll watch . . .anything he did after 1988. I don't remember what, exactly, drew me away from the TV when watching this movie, but I do remember being relieved that I didn't have to finish it.

Post Grad
My wife chose to rent Post Grad. I agreed to watch it because it starred Michael Keaton, who is fun to watch, and Alexis Bledel, who is nice to look at. I fell asleep during this movie. I made it through about two-thirds of Post Grad before the lack of laughter dragged my eyelids down. This movie tried to be original, but it followed the predictable path of the rom-com to the point where I knew exactly where it was going -- which is why my brain no longer felt compelled to watch it. When I woke up the next morning, I asked my wife how the movie ended. She told me, and then apologized for wasting a Netflix shipment on it. I forgave her, and I also forgave Vicky Jenson, the director of Post Grad. After all, she was a storyboard artist for He-Man, (The Not Real) Ghostbusters AND Jem. My childhood thanks you, Ms. Jenson, but please just stick to drawing.

Once

I will now explain to you the plot of Once: a street performer meets a girl and they sing together. Then they talk for a bit. Then they go somewhere and sing together. Then ***spoiler alert*** they go somewhere else and sing together. That's about as far as we got before my wife told me she was too ill to continue watching it, so we turned it off and went to bed. I sent it back to Netflix the next day without finishing it, but I did look up the ending on Wikipedia. ***spoiler alert*** They wander around and sing some more. Much like Dreamgirls, this movie bored me because it felt like I was watching the movie's soundtrack. This was just a vehicle to get people interested in the music of Glen Hansard, and to help people pronounce the name of Markéta Irglová (Won-HEET-Won-Dur). It's such a boring story that they don't even bother to name the main characters! Hansard plays "Guy" and Irglová plays "Girl." Other character names in this film include, and I'm not making this up, Guy's Dad, Girl's Mother, Bassist, Lead Guitarist, Man Watching TV and, of course, Heroin Addict. I do like the song Falling Slowly, but as far as the movie goes you could say Once. . .was enough.


So there you have it. There are five movies I didn't finish. There's nothing drawing me back to them, either, so unless any of you have some strong feelings toward any of these films and/or have a powerful rebuttal, I'll probably never finish them. . .except maybe for the one with Kate Beckinsale in it.

What about you, faithful readers? What movies have you stopped watching mid-way through and never finished? And do you think you'll ever go back and finish them?