Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
Let’s dedicate tonight’s Medium Cool to the subject of movies we walked out on (in the theater), movies or TV shows that we stopped watching before the end, and books we stopped reading before we got to the end.
Don’t just tell us which book / movie / show you didn’t finish. I’m especially looking forward to hearing the why!
I think the hardest movie I have ever watched was Schindler’s List, but I never thought about walking out. Thank goodness for the music in that film or I never would have made it through!
If you feel like it, we can also talk about really tough books / shows / movies we have made it through, and why.
Announcement:
The first part of Subaru Dianne’s two-part series on Josephine Tay will be in two weeks, on July 30. Then we’ll skip a week and come back to it on Aug 13. I asked SD to share a bit of her plan for us in this series.
Scottish-born Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896-1952) wrote in various genres under several pseudonyms, the best known of which is Josephine Tey. Although Tey published only eight mystery novels, she occupies a prominent spot in the Golden Age pantheon thanks to her 1951 masterpiece The Daughter of Time.
I suggest we discuss Tey and her works in two Medium Cool sessions. On July 30, let’s go over the five books featuring her detective Alan Grant: The Man in the Queue, A Shilling for Candles, To Love and Be Wise, The Daughter of Time, and The Singing Sands.
On August 13, let’s get into Tey’s three stand-alone mysteries: Miss Pym Disposes, The Franchise Affair (Grant appears briefly in this, but he is not the protagonist), and Brat Farrar. These books introduce elements of profound moral/ethical ambiguity.
I love Tey’s writing, and I can’t wait to read your thoughts and comments in a few weeks! ~ SD
Okay, back to our previously scheduled event for tonight, talking about books we closed, shows we turned off, and movies we walked out on.
Snarki, child of Loki
Lo these many years ago, walked out on Jesus Christ, Superstar, in a free campus showing.
Why? because the date had gotten mixed up with a showing of a Monty Python film (NOT Holy Grail).
Kept waiting for the camera to pan over to John Cleese with a “…and now for something completely different”, but gave up after about ten minutes.
I *think* the dates got mixed up. Maybe it was someone’s idea of a joke.
WaterGirl
@Snarki, child of Loki: oops!
WaterGirl
I walked out of the Deer Hunter and Deliverance. Too violent for me.
Suzanne
Million Dollar Baby. What a monstrous fucken bummer.
Auntie Anne
I walked out of Braveheart – way, way too much gore and violence.
dc
Zorba the Greek, couldn’t stand it. It was being shown at the local independent movie house. We walked out after maybe 30 minutes.
Mr. Prosser
We walked out on Straw Dogs with Dustin Hoffman during the rape scene.
Trivia Man
Deadpool – too violent
i tried to read Dune many times over about 25 years before I actually finished it. I kept getting lost in the names and Woo Woo. Since I went straight to the Heinlien section in the used bookstores… Herbert was always in my face. Eventually finished and enjoyed it. Also liked the recent movie.
Scout211
The only movie that I actually walked out on was Moonstruck. I thought that movie was painfully awful with horrid acting. My friend and I both agreed we couldn’t stand it and decided to walk out.
To this day, I don’t understand why people like that movie. But I guess it’s not a bad thing that we all have different likes and dislikes.
Gravenstone
I can think of several movies I should have walked out of, but alas remained to the end much to my disappointment and sometime shame. Instead, I’ll recount a brief tale of a theater that dropped a movie after one day! Small town northern Indiana 1984 and This is Spinal Tap came to the small theater that had only recently opened in the town where I was attending college. Apparently the theater management thought so little of the movie that they pulled it after the opening night. Never did get an explanation, just “oops, it’s gone!”
Phylllis
The Banshees of Inisherin. I love love love Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, and really love them together. Once the finger thing happened, I noped right out of there.
Yutsano
I watched the whole movie, but Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil was horrible to me.
I also couldn’t finish The Royal Tennenbaums. Ten minutes in and all I saw was horrible people being horrible to each other and my brain said nope. Maybe I can appreciate it now but that bad taste still lingers.
Trivia Man
I didn’t walk out of ET but I was close. Biggest movie disappointment of my life. Sci Fi on the big screen! Real sci fi as seen in Amazing! Star Wars was ok, but that’s space opera. I wanted hard sci fi! (Spoiler: not ET)
Alison Rose
I read a lot (99 books so far this year) and I very rarely DNF (did not finish, which the booknerd world has turned into an acronymic verb). I like to give a book a decent chance to get good, and if I’m already halfway or so through, I’ll usually just continue because I’m a stubborn bitch, and also sometimes it’s like rubbernecking at a car wreck…you wanna see how bad this shit is gonna get.
But there are some I’ve had to give up on, and it usually is for one of a few reasons: It’s so incredibly boring that I can feel myself slipping into a coma trying to read it; It’s confusing and convoluted to the point that I cannot understand anything that’s happening (this occurs mostly with fantasy books); It’s offensive or repugnant, often in some way that I was not anticipating based on the synopsis.
Example for reason 1: The Fiery Cross by Diana Gabaldon, book 5 in the Outlander series. I made it through four of this woman’s insanely too long books, but by the time I’d gotten 300 pages into the 1400 PAGE LONG book 5 and LITERALLY NOTHING HAD HAPPENED, I was like, you ma’am can fuck off. It was like after the first book, her editors went “no holds barred, bitch, do whatever you like and we will simply take your first draft and publish it”. At least in the first couple books, while they were very long, there was actual plot to pull you along. The third and fourth books started slowing down a lot, and book 5 was ridiculous. 300 pages of planning for a lunch or something.
Example for reason 2: Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor. I had read her previous trilogy and absolutely loved it, and was excited for this one. And man, it sucked. And a big issue I had with it was that the plot itself was basically built on a plothole and made no fucking sense if you poked at it even slightly. The explanations given for everything were inane and weird, and there were so many obvious questions that didn’t seem to get answered (having read reviews from people who finished it, I know that this continued throughout the book). I just kept asking BUT WHY and there was no why.
Example for reason 3: Cereus Blooms At Night by Shani Mootoo. All I’m gonna say is that if you are going to have an incest storyline, you damn well better handle it properly. And this book…did not. Very much not. Despicably much not.
NeenerNeener
The only movie I ever walked out on was The Blair Witch Project, not because it was scary (because it wasn’t) but the shakey camera work made me queasy.
The first book I ever abandoned was Dahlgren, and the next was Titus Groan. I love fantasy and sci fi but neither one of those books convinced me I wanted to soldier on to their ends.
Alison Rose: I loathed The Fiery Cross. I didn’t give a rat’s patoot about the minutia of a clan gathering in North Carolina. I did finish it though.
Chetan Murthy
I walked out of Vamp (grace jones as vampire): when the pretty-boy protagonist gets jumped by a vampire, I was sure he was gonna get it, and I almost passed-out. Then Alien 3, same thing: the moment when Ripley confronts the alien, and it gets ready to rip her apart, I again almost passed-out, had to leave.
Lyrebird
(moderate content warning)
There was a mafia movie with woo hoo a same-sex romance between a mafioso’s gf and another lady. A friend of mine convinced me to try watching it since it was groundbreaking and supposedly had great camera work. I got through a few scenes, realized it was still going to be fake torture and murder replaying in my nightmares, groundbreaking or no, and I whispered to my friend I’d meet her in the lobby after, and I got the heck out. I don’t want to see if my Google-fu is strong enough to find the movie. Maybe you loved the movie, it’s okay. I still remmember the gottammed smashing someone’s head into a toilet scene. This was maybe 25 years ago.
Best thing: in the same theater they were showing Microcosmos, which I had seen before… it was already to the snails, but it was such a relief. That got me back together.
Martin
Never walked out on a movie I paid for or book. However, I have refused to watch a movie, or a show and I have reasons for that, which effectively if I had accidentally walked into it, I probably would have walked out.
I have also stepped out of some video essays for different reasons.
So, as to the former – horror, needless gore, torture porn – those are usually easy to spot going in. Also toxically masculine shows that I used to be able to watch I now avoid. I probably wouldn’t walk out, but I would definitely describe the experience as a waste of time.
I would also sometimes turn off a streaming movie because it didn’t match my expectations. I like both good and bad sci fi. But if I go into something expecting good sci fi (something I can suspend disbelief) and I get bad (something to cringe on) then I’m out. I might come back to it when I’m looking to cringe on bad sci fi, but that moment was a mismatch of expectation. I think this happens a lot – I want a happy movie and it’s clearly a downer – I’m out and might come back later. Documentaries can be light or heavy and that can be a mismatch to my mood.
As to the latter, I can usually spot pretty early on if this is something being argued in bad faith, and I’m immediately out. I’ll watch good faith essays on things I disagree with, but I won’t watch bad faith essays on things I do agree with. Like, I need to come out of that with something of value.
One of the things we sometimes do in our household is consume media for which we are not the target audience, and that is not always an especially comfortable experience, but then that’s sort of the point – to expand our comfort, so the act of turning it off is to say ‘I’m not ready for this’. I think this habit has caused us to be pretty judicious in why we might turn something off.
Scout211
@Alison Rose: I’m with you in the Outlander series of books. I devoured books 1-3 and 4 was okay but I started skipping whole chapters and OMG, the scene was still happening, chapters later! I stopped even borrowing them from the library after #4.* Does Gabaldon not have an editor!? Ever!?
I don’t have Starz but I have watched a few episodes over the years of the series and the writers on the series have done a really good job of cutting out all the irrelevant crap that Gabaldon writes in the books.
*Correction: Actually I tried to read #5 but returned it to the library after chapter one.
PaulB
I’m generally a fan of comic book movies, assuming I can turn my brain off, but “Batman & Robin” and “Batman Forever” were just too bloody awful to finish.
TV series that started really well but just couldn’t sustain my interest include Ugly Betty, Mr. Robot, and Heroes. Loved the first couple of episodes of each, but then just lost interest and never finished the season.
Edited to add, add Glee to that list.
Mike in NC
@Auntie Anne: Gore and violence are a Mel Gibson specialty.
Ugh, seeing Jon Voight reminded me how much of a Trump humping freak that guy was.
Phylllis
Also, Mrs. America on Hulu. Not the least bit interested in a sympathetic portrayal of Phyllis Schlafly.
Alison Rose
@Scout211: I honestly do not think an editor even glances at her books. It’s absurd.
dm
Narnia, when CS Lewis starts ripping into the friend’s parents for their “modern views”. I apologized to the kids and told them I didn’t want to read any more of that to them because I felt like the author didn’t like people like me. Their mother soldiered on through the rest of the series.
I’d never read the books as a child, so they had no nostalgia value for me.
Subsole
@WaterGirl:
Deer hunter. Born too late to walk out on it, but turned it off on the teevee.
I get what they were going for, but Good Lord that movie c r a w l e d by. Too slow.
BarcaChicago
I didn’t walk out of Titanic but my uncontrollable laughter during the dramatic/tearjerker scenes did put me in danger from many angry audience members…
West of the Rockies
Some will loathe me for this, bit I hated Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I found it tedious and the narrator’s treatment of his son dreadful. I wanted to like it. I felt bludgeoned by boredom.
I walked out of Sin City. It was stylish (definitely) celebration of violence.
smith
I read a lot of mysteries and can tolerate a fair bit when it comes to violence, but I don’t do torture porn. For me that means dwelling at length, in detail and/or repeatedly on the suffering of the victim.
I once got exactly one page into a book before quitting. The book in question was by Helen Durrant, but I’ve completely blocked the title. It opened with a description of someone being maimed. I’ve never been tempted to look at any of her books again.
Subsole
@Lyrebird:
I thiiiiink that movie was Bound.
Was it a 90s movie?? Looking back there were a LOT of gritty mafia movies with a ‘twist’.
Gin & Tonic
I don’t think I ever walked out of a movie, but can easily think of one I should have: the Al Pacino Scarface. As the saying goes, no redeeming social value.
Jackie
@WaterGirl: Never wanted to watch Deer Hunter because violence. Walked out of Deliverance – as a teenager had NO CLUE about what it was about; the song Dueling Banjos was why I thought it would be a fun movie.
CliosFanBoy
“Napoleon Dynamite.” Stupidest move I ever saw, and I sat through both “Supergirl” and “Spaceballs.” I would have walked out on “Meet the Parents,” but we were sitting in a theater with friends. I thought it was dull, superficial, and rather sadistic.
Chetan Murthy
@West of the Rockies: Ha! ZATAOMM! I read the first half, b/c I was in a place where I was trying to understand the scientific method in some sort of philosophical way. I was deep in a valley of darkness where my job (for a decade) consisted entirely in debugging other people’s nightmare software concoctions. So it helped. But when he gets to wherever-it-was that he’s going (about halfway thru the book) it turned into some sort weird philosophy text, and I dropped it.
Elizabelle
Inception. And Blade Runner, seeing it the second time (I guess 20 plus years later). Too much dark dystopia.
Subsole
@BarcaChicago:
Yeah. I laughed uncomfortably loudly when that one passenger pinged off the hull during the sinking.
Rachel Bakes
Saving Private Ryan. Everyone said if you can make it through the first 15 minutes you’re good. The first 15 minutes was closer to 30 and I lasted for 20.
Also walked out on Mission Impossible: 2. I grew up in the original and was not a fan of the first movie (Jim Phelps does not turn traitor. Period.) but friends said that 2 was closer to the actual show. Ghastly.
books: too many to mention.
Hidalgo de Arizona
The only movie I’ve ever walked out of was Napoleon Dynamite – the “watch idiot behave stupidly” genre of comedy has never appealed to me, and I think I only lasted about fifteen minutes before deciding there were better things I could do with the next hour and change of my life.
With books, I don’t think I’ve ever quit a book halfway through, but I did quit the Ring of Fire series of books after I got to the first one that was written by Virginia DeMarce; I have never seen the combination of “excellent scholar; terrible writer” quite as perfectly displayed.
For movies, the hardest thing to get through was definitely the slave ship scene (if you’ve scene the movie, you know the specific one I’m talking about) in Amistad, because of the incredible brutality on display. I don’t think I’ve run into anything similar in books, but the Namibian Genocide episode of Lions Led by Donkeys definitely hit a similar note.
SpaceUnit
@West of the Rockies:
Christ, I was forced to read that book for a college class. Nothing but horseshit from cover to cover. I said as much in class and got the professor pissed off at me.
Rachel Bakes
@West of the Rockies: hates that book in college. Went on forever and had no damn point.
Subsole
The only book I never finished was Atlas Shrugged. I just could not. I didn’t even walk away due to the politics (though I don’t much care for Ayn’s); it was just this unbearable mix of dry and preachy and heavy-handed, anvil-dropping “Take That!”s. Bored me to tears.
Which is odd, because I actually rather enjoyed her short stories. And they were every bit as heavy-handed.
Chetan Murthy
@SpaceUnit: de gustibus and all that. I will say that in 1998, I was typing in chapters of the book to send to my manager and a few others, trying to explain what debugging was about, and why we needed to change things in our organization. I titled the series of emails “Zen and the Art of Websphere Debugging”.
Keithly
“Last year at Marienbad”. Simply unwatchable. It broke my date, who, let the record show, was going for an advanced degree in German literature, and I didn’t object when she suggested that we leave.
Suzanne
I gave up on The Red Badge of Courage in high school. Boring AF. Even my teacher said so.
Another Scott
@West of the Rockies: Quality!!
;-)
Only a few things about ZatAoMM clicked with me – him describing the classrooms at Chicago (I’m sure I was in the same rooms), and him puzzling out why his motorcycle didn’t run at high altitude the way it did in the valley (that was pretty easy for this gear-head).
Lila, the sequel, was a terrible bore to me.
Cheers,
Scott.
UncleEbeneezer
I’ve bailed on SO MANY series but the ones that are most surprising because I really expected to love them are: The Good Place and Schitt’s Creek. Something about the wholesome/earnest style of comedy just isn’t my thing. Feel much the same about Ted Lasso and we are currently on hiatus from it and probably will never go back for Season 3. But we are also very quick to ditch stuff nowadays because there are so many options that there’s no need to finish stuff just to finish it. We’ve ditched several true crime documentaries and many, many K-dramas. We can’t stand when K-dramas use goofy sound effects to punctuate their comedic moments. It’s just too distracting and takes a bit too far on the silly side.
I think I walked out on Frantic because I was a teenage boy and thought it was boring as hell. Went one theater over and watched A Fish Called Wanda instead, which I really enjoyed (despite not being a Monty Python fan).
Anything Monty Python (except AFCW). I’ve tried the big movies a couple times and have bailed on all of them. But I’m also not big on Brit humor, generally. A lot of it just doesn’t hit, for me.
West of the Rockies
@SpaceUnit:
I will confess to hurling As I Lay Dying across the room (by myself at home). The grad school instructor thought it was the finest book ever written. I barely passed that class.
PaulB
I’m a voracious reader, and almost always bought my books (rather than borrowing from friends or the library), so kind of felt obligated to finish them. Like West of the Rockies above, though, a notable exception was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I started it 3 times. Have never finished it.
These days, I’m getting most of my books via Kindle Unlimited, so I’m a lot more relaxed about giving up on a book. The two most common reasons, I think, are because the protagonists are really unpleasant people that I have no sympathy for and don’t want to read about, or because the plot is just too ridiculous, trite and contrived.
oldgold
I have only walked out of one movie. My sister and I went to Cecil B. DeMille’s movie the Ten Commandments in the late 50s. It was long. It had a run time of 3 hours and 40 minutes. Neither of us had ever been to movie with an intermission. So, when theater curtain came down for intermission, we thought it was over and got up and walked home. As a consequence, we missed Commandments 6 through 10.
It explains a lot.
Dorothy A. Winsor
I’ve never walked out on a movie, but I quit lots of books. I give the book 50 pages and then feel free to quit if I’m bored. There are too many other books to read.
Let’s see. what have I quit recently?
Britfield and the Missing Crown–I was invited to hear the writer of this middle-grade book speak and tried to read it ahead of time. I got to the 20% mark and dumped it. The writer was a total huckster. It’s a long story.
The Left-Handed Booksellers of London–Too much time spent explaining the magic. Charming gender fluid character, but that wasn’t enough to save it.
Gideon the Ninth–Bored. I can’t remember why.
I sound cranky. I should stop
ETA: Oh, and you all are absolutely right about Diana Gabaldon.
UncleEbeneezer
@Subsole: That wedding scene went on for like an hour…
Fraud Guy
We were walked out of Stripes after the mud-wresting scene by my father, because he did not think a PG film would include brief, impossible to see nudity.
I have never walked out of a show; the closest I ever came was Last Action Hero, when the meta-meta-meta plot gave me a migraine.
delphinium
TV shows I stopped watching included: The Sopranos-have never been much into mafia stuff and didn’t like the characters; the most interesting part of the series for me was the opening montage/music, and Game of Thrones (stopped midway thru Season 2) due to overabundance of violence and awful characters.
Movies that I watched all the way thru but would not watch again due to some very disturbing scenes were: Requiem for a Dream, Titus (with Anthony Hopkins), and The Machinist (with Christian Bale).
Aunt Kathy
Shortly after college graduation, the book Bonfire of the Vanities was all the rage. Everybody on the subway was reading it. Co-workers were talking about it. I got a few pages in and realized these people were all terrible and I wasn’t going to spend another minute with them. In “On Writing,” Stephen King said it was absolutely fine to drop a book that you don’t like. Life is too short and there are way too many good books out there waiting for you. Sounds good to me.
West of the Rockies
Oh, may I another answer? I truly loved the Frank Herbert Dune series (with declining fervor after the third). When his son and someone else took over, I despised them. Seemed like the writers were getting their sexual yayas with some of that stuff.
I’m pleased I’m not the only one who did not like ZATAOMM. For some, it is a life-changing experience.
UncleEbeneezer
@Phylllis: We gave up on it too. Though we were enjoying it, just not enough to stick with it. Ironically, I actually saw Schlafly speak when I was in college and was dragged by some Young Republican friends I briefly hung out with (back before I stopped wanting anything to do with Republicans, of any age). I knew very little about politics at the time but the practically-spitting vitriol she spewed about the Clintons and the way the
mobcrowd just ate it up made me feel icky. It was actually the first moment that I realized: I may not know what I am, as far as party-affiliation goes, but I’m definitely not with these weirdos. Looking back it was pretty prophetic of MAGA/Q-anon etc., like 2023 vibes even though it was only 1993.delphinium
@Mike in NC: Speaking of Mel Gibson, wish I could have walked out of The Patriot but my friend was into it, so stayed to the end. Utter trite garbage.
BC in Illinois
The only movie I have ever walked out of was Soldier Blue (1970). My brother and I went to see it, knowing that it was going to end with a massacre scene — not unexpected for an anti-war movie. But the first part of the movie was played to be cute, with light-hearted Candace Bergen comedy. This was designed to make the ending even more heart-rending. My brother asked if I wanted to stay for the massacre, I said “no,” and we left.
A movie I SHOULD have walked out of was Tommy (1975). I loved the original music — saw the Who play it, live in Columbia MD, in 1969, just before Woodstock.* But the movie was more in love with Ann Margaret than with the music. A really total, utter disappointment.
*Best concert I have ever seen. When the band played “the chord” just before “See me, Feel me,” 20,000 people breathed in, all together. After they finished “Tommy,” they went on to basically play all of “Live At Leeds.”
UncleEbeneezer
@Fraud Guy: Not impossible to see. I was like 12 years old. We hit the Pause button on the VHS tape to confirm.
FelonyGovt
I’m a voracious reader. I quit Lessons In Chemistry after maybe 50 pages (hard to tell on a Kindle). I lived through awful misogyny, did not feel the need to relive it, and the main character was so flat. And the scene in the professor’s lab- I won’t say more- pretty much finished it for me.
SpaceUnit
I was looking forward to the Cohen brothers remake of True Grit but nearly walked out on it. Nothing about it made sense. They had good actors but gave them nothing to work with. I guess the whole concept was to retell the story with absolutely zero chemistry between Maddie and Rooster and maybe that would somehow be funny. And the pacing was a disaster.
Bupalos
I turned off the Guardians game when Tito left Trevor Stephan in after walking 2 in a row up 3 in the 8th. Mostly because I thought I might hurt myself or damage property.
Good decision, except… as I knew I’d have to… I checked 15 minutes later and confirmed the worst… and still hurt myself and damaged property.
Ken
I will take this opportunity to, um, anti-recommend Laurell K. Hamilton’s “Anita Blake” and (especially) “Merry Gentry” books. The Blake books are a supernatural mystery/detective series, and the first couple weren’t bad, but the sex scenes kept getting more intrusive and detailed, and I eventually gave up.
In the Gentry books, Hamilton cut out any pretense and just made the viewpoint character a faerie princess who has to have sex, frequently and with as many people as possible, to fuel her magical powers.
citizen dave
I tend to finish stuff, although in my older age I break off from streaming series easily. We walked out of the Adam Sandler movie Uncut Gems in the theater. It was too much; very unsettling.
When I was 13 or 14, I recall quitting the reading of the book The Towering Inferno, because it was boring. Not sure what made me want to read it. I had read Jaws, so maybe figured TTI was of similar quality?
Ihop
Didn’t walk out on, felt I could stick on through; but the angriest I have ever felt upon leaving a theater was after watching Kevin Costner’s Robin hood.
Still have no desire to hear a defense of that.
BeautifulPlumage
Movie I walked out of: Slacker – boring and pointless
Books: tried several times when young, but could never get past a few pages of Gone With the Wind or any Gore Vidal book
citizen dave
Funniest directed walkout was watching Blue Velvet on the IU Bloomington campus. Pre-movie announcement: If you stay past the Dennis Hopper huffing scene, we won’t refund your ticket price
narya
I walked out of Pink Flamingos, a million years ago. I have not seen many of the ones listed above–I cannot watch gore/violence, no matter how “fake,” so I choose my movies carefully. Three books: A Confederacy of Dunces (I will never understand why people looooove that book), Zen and the Art . . . (I tried to read it before grad school at Chicago and hated it; after spending time at that institution I understood why I hated it), and Bonfire of the Vanities (I’d liked some of Wolfe’s stuff, but that one had no likable character within a hundred miles).
WaterGirl
@West of the Rockies: You may answer many more times. :-)
Lyrebird
@Subsole:
Sounds about right. And yes I think 2023-25 or so=something in the 1990s yes? :-)
Chetan Murthy
Book: The Closing of the American Mind (Allan Bloom). I read the Introduction, and it was filled with so many howlers, I couldn’t continue. And hell, I had *bought* the book. What a waste of $$.
delphinium
@Yutsano:
Right there with you on that one.
citizen dave
@SpaceUnit: I’m a really big Coen brothers fan and corroborate this. Great description of their True Grit. Not sure what made them do it, but it is a really flat movie.
Martin
I don’t consider leaving a series between seasons as leaving, since you enter it not knowing what kind of commitment you’re making there. After a season you’re allowed to rebalance your recreational time checkbook. Same for after a book. Sometimes you’ve gotten what you want out of it, and are in need of something different.
zhena gogolia
@WaterGirl: I made it all the way through Deliverance, although I wasn’t happy. I watched The Deer Hunter on TV, loved it, although I probably wouldn’t if I saw it again. I’m just a big George Dzundza fan. I made it all the way through Pink Flamingos.
I walked out of The Draughtsman’s Contract after 15 minutes. A woman was throwing up. It didn’t seem it was going to get better.
I walked out of Last House on the Left. Nuff said.
Books? There was a book called The Mind-Body Problem, by Rebecca Goldstein, which I read to the end, but then actually tore it in half and took it out to the garbage can.
Kristine
Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, the follow-up to Gideon the Ninth.
I loved Gideon and was looking forward to Harrow. Maybe it was the wrong time for that book. I’m good with getting dropped in the midst of things and waiting for the plot to eventually dawn, but I didn’t like Harrow and things stayed too murky for too long.
Still, inclined to give it another chance some other time.
Also, insanely envious of those covers. Such good covers.
bluefoot
@Alison Rose:
DNF has been a long-standing acronym in auto racing, so I did a slight double take hearing it applied to books. Funny how incongruous it seemed to me.
I’ve never walked out of movie theater, I don’t think, but I have stopped quite a few movies while streaming/on tv. I tried the second Hobbit movie a couple of times but gave up each time. I’m always happy to turn off movies that are too violent or gory. For a while post-9/11 it seemed like torture scenes were more or less required in a lot of movie and television. Definitely not my thing.
As I’ve aged, I’ve become a lot more willing to stop reading books. It used to be a point of pride that I finished all the books I started, but at some point I decided that life is too short. Everyone tells me I need to give the ASOIF books another try, but I bounced hard off of them.
Suzanne
I had to leave the theater and go into the bathroom and vomit during Breaking the Waves by Lars von Trier. I went back in and finished it, though. Couldn’t tell you why. His movies are excruciating.
narya
@Kristine: Hmm. This series was on my list to check out. Why didn’t you like it
ETA (so I don’t clog up the comments): I also did NOT like Blue Velvet, but stuck it out. I was with/around people who thought it was fabulous; I no longer even remember it.
zhena gogolia
@BC in Illinois: Oh, God, I sat all the way through Tommy, for my sins.
Loved her in Bye Bye Birdie, though.
Splitting Image
I don’t quit books very often, but I seem to recall picking up a James Michener book at a school sale back in high school. I think it was The Fires of Spring. I got about a quarter of the way through and put it down. I also recall bailing on The Valley of the Dolls. I watched the movie instead, which makes less sense but is shorter.
I can’t remember the last time I bailed on a movie. I don’t go to the theatre very often, so if I quit watching on a DVD, I can go back later and finish it. I’ve done that a few times. Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra actually benefits by watching it in two parts. It’s too long to watch in one go, but if you treat it like an 80s miniseries it’s a fun watch.
Oh yeah, I think I quit on Gone With the Wind, too. I read the first chapter and skimmed most of the rest. It was interesting to discover that the book explicitly says that Rhett Butler is a Klansman, which the movie quietly elides, but I looked at the size of the spine and realized I would never get through the entire thing.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kristine: It’s true that sometimes you’re just not in the mood for a book, but if you come back to it later, it works.
Jay
Anything by Scott Orson Card, after Ender’s Game.
Guy just went bug nuts.
Phylllis
There are a couple of classic movies I’ll probably not rewatch, if that counts. Lawrence of Arabia is one. The last time we watched it I found myself thinking ‘Yes, yes, the desert is wide and takes a long time to cross. Do get on with it.’. Vertigo irritated me as well the last time I watched it. Long scenes of Jimmy Stewart peering through his windshield with a puzzled look on his face. Hey Hitch, maybe the audience would like to see what he’s seeing.
Conversely, Bridge on the River Kwai, not a wasted scene or bit of dialogue.
Chetan Murthy
@Dorothy A. Winsor: In high school I stopped The Scarlet Letter in the Customs House chapter (basically, the introduction): thought it was dead-dull. In my late 20s, I read the entire thing in one fevered night of reading: thought it was a ripping yarn.
laura
Dave Eggers- a writer who I want to enjoy, but every time I try, all I can think of is time I can’t get back.
WaterGirl
@zhena gogolia:
Wow. Go you! I read a mystery by Bill Clinton’s favorite mystery writer and it was so sexist that I tore it up and walked it out to the trash bin.
MomSense
Evita 1979. Amazing cast. I knew all the songs before I went. I didn’t leave but I was crushed. Absolutely hated the staging. Ruined the whole experience. The stage had these giant turntables and the cast and scenes kept spinning and changing while the characters stood in the middle. I was bitterly disappointed. I still say that was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen and I wanted to love it.
If anyone was in NY at the time, you remember the commercial for that show ran all the time. I memorized the whole commercial and used to do it as a skit for my parents friends.
Cameron
@narya: I had a big problem with A Confederacy of Dunces; I don’t think I’ve ever read any other book in which an author expended so much effort in admiring his own cleverness.
WaterGirl
I’m noticing a theme here with gratuitous violence.
narya
@WaterGirl: Some of Kurt Vonnegut has become that way for me; he had some issues with women. I loved Vonnegut, but some of the later re-reads made me cringe.
Marc
I have a dog-eared paperback copy of Gravity’s Rainbow that I’ve owned for at least 45 years and is still sitting on my bed stand with a bunch of other books I’ve never gotten around to reading. It’s accompanied me on multiple transcontinental (the bookmark is a TWA boarding pass) and transoceanic (even Pan Am) flights and I’ve never managed to finish it. I usually get 400 or 500 pages in, then some character that probably appeared in one paragraph a few hundred pages earlier suddenly pops up and I’ll have no idea what the significance of that was (taking notes so I can figure out what is going on is a step too far for me). The last time I got as far as the appearance of the Schwarzkommandos. All I could do was shake my head and wonder WTF am I reading?
The only movie I’ve ever walked out on was The Rapture which my then girlfriend and I had thought was some sort of art house cult/conspiracy movie, but then we realized the movie was about the actual GD Christian RAPTURE.
oldster
Count me in among those who did not like ZATAOMM. Or maybe I should say: I found it interesting the first time, but shallow and gimmicky the second time. If you have never been exposed to any of those thoughts, then it can seem deep. Then once you encounter them elsewhere, you realize how derivative Pirsig was.
I have a very low tolerance for violence in movies. Like, I’m okay for the first two-thirds of “The Sound of Music,” but towards the end it gets too intense for me, what with the nuns disemboweling staff cars and stuff.
Accordingly, I am baffled that people watch and enjoy movies that feature violence and cruelty. Or horror, for that matter. Have these people suffered no genuine violence in their own lives, have they been tortured by no real-life sadists, that they feel the need to see it on the screen?
zhena gogolia
@West of the Rockies: Oh, God. Ask me and Omnes about that one. Horrible.
Chetan Murthy
@MomSense: Ha! I had the same experience with the Broadway version of Chess! I’d had the music since when it came out (1984?) and am a biiiiig ABBA fan to boot. So when I saw Chess on Broadway I was … .underwhelmed. I didn’t walk out, but I thought it was terrible and didn’t at all hew to the message of the original music.
laura
@Phylllis: Ooh- the last time I saw Lawerence of Arabia was at the North Point Theatre in San Francisco and was built for panavision. Not only was it presented in glorious fashion on the biggest of screens, but I went with my big brother and it was in walking distance of Cesar’s at Bay & Powell; the greatest unionized Italian restaurant in all of North Beach. After that movie showing with a proper intermission, I don’t need to see it again, and the North Point and Cesar’s are long gone, so there’s that. But, oh, what a time it was.
zhena gogolia
@Phylllis: Have never made it through Lawrence of Arabia, but VERTIGO???? I’ve seen it probably 20 times, always with breathless delight.
Kristine
A Discovery of Witches, the book. Ingenuous heroines bug me. Gave up after Diana wept atop the castle while Matthew was in London doing all the serious investigation that I wanted to see. Also, “Will’s Playes” was too cute by half.
That said, I enjoyed the series–I’ve only seen S1 but will watch the rest soon. Bringing in other plotlines at the beginning made the story more interesting and moved things along much faster.
Chetan Murthy
@laura: Yeah, gotta say, I *love* Lawrence of Arabia. I’ll watch it just to bathe in the cinematography, just sort of ignoring the story and all, b/c I know it so well.
Brachiator
I will give almost any movie a chance. BTW, it used to be that if you walked out within 15 minutes, you would get a refund or a free ticket for a future movie.
I remember seeing some parents take their kids out of Batman Returns, the movie with the Penguin and Catwoman. Some kids were visibly distressed at scenes implying the murder of children. Kids took this personally.
I also remember a woman, maybe on a date, angrily walk out of the Cronenberg film Dead Ringers, followed by her sheepish looking boyfriend or spouse. Not a good date movie, but a provocative film.
I love Star Trek, but bailed on the series Enterprise. I didn’t really care for the characters, and the whole thing just seemed dull and un-involving.
Back in the day, a friend and I went to see the 1975 Pasolini film Salo at an art house cinema.
Salo is an intense political horror movie loosely based on a work by de Sade and perhaps inspired by a true crime incident in Northern Italy involving the abduction and torture of a group of young people.
The movie is well made and builds to some very graphic scenes. But it is difficult to watch. It doesn’t just depict violence. It depicts intense suffering.
Some people in the theater had heard that the film had been banned in some countries and I guess wanted to see if they could bear to watch it. At various points in the movie, people got up and walked out. At the end, my friend and I and a couple of other folk, were the only people in the theater.
Suzanne
@WaterGirl: When we packed our stuff up in AZ, SuzMom found an old, crumbling copy of Atlas Shrugged amongst her books. Tiny print, paper browned with age. We shredded it and used it for packing material for the dishes.
Chief Oshkosh
@Phylllis: Yep. That was an awful, awful movie. I cannot believe it was even considered for awards, much less snagged some.
JR
@Aunt Kathy: Bonfire is a great choice. I loved the book despite my misgivings about Wolfe, so I went one step further than you. That step was the movie, which was just irredeemable garbage. Fortunately it was a (Netflix) DVD so no major loss there.
oldster
On a different topic — that photo of Jon Voight at the top really shows how Angelina Jolie can be his daughter.
Wapiti
I couldn’t finish The Commitments movie, I read and loved the book, but the section of the movie where they’re auditioning band members was painful and laborious. I think they were going for funny.
Likewise, couldn’t finish The Boys television series, because I read and enjoyed the graphic novel and the characters didn’t match. Hughie wasn’t Hughie. Butcher wasn’t Butcher.
VFX Lurker
One comic that I may leave permanently unfinished is Dave Sim’s Cerebus. I read about thirty to forty issues of the critically-acclaimed 300-issue series in the mid-90’s, but I stopped shortly after his comic started sharing his views on women.
Phylllis
@zhena gogolia: I wonder if some of my impatience was due to work stress. I’ve noticed just in the past couple of weeks since I retired that I’m able to focus and read for longer and longer periods of time.
SpaceUnit
@citizen dave:
I though Jeff Bridges made a great Rooster Cogburn. The girl was good too. They just didn’t have a script.
frosty
Walked out: The Conqueror Worm with Vincent Price, circa 1963. Scared the hell out of me and I was done.
Stopped reading: Something in the last couple of months but I’m damned if I can remember what it was. Left a big impression!
Stuck with: Schitt’s Creek. The first part of the first season: All these characters are awful!* But once you stick with it, they slowly become less unredeemable and turn human, and the process was fun to watch.
* Except Stevie. I loved Stevie.
bluefoot
The flipside of media that I don’t like so didn’t finish, there are also some excellent books that I couldn’t finish (or took me a really long time) because they were so lacerating or intense or hit too close to home at the time. “Blindness” by Saramago is one of the most memorable for me. I loved it but had to put it down.
Television can be like that too, where I have to take it in small doses or stop entirely no matter how much I like it. “Chernobyl” and “The Wire” were two I definitely needed to watch slowly. I had to stop “Jessica Jones” because the depiction of an abusive relationship and the PTSD after it was way too close for me.
zhena gogolia
@Phylllis: I saw it on TV when I was a teenager and was fascinated by it. But then I saw it in a theater when they did the remaster, and I fell totally in love! I’ll watch it on TCM whenever it’s on (although I don’t have TCM any more, so I guess I’ll have to find it streaming somewhere). If you can see it in a theater, do!
zhena gogolia
@frosty: I made it through The Conqueror Worm!
ETA: Wasn’t that about Alito’s favorite witch hunter?
ETA: I guess it was another witch hunter named Matthew, Hopkins, not Hale.
Subsole
@delphinium:
I absolutely loved Titus.
Series-wise, and kind of on a note with GoT, I had a hard time w/Sons of Anarchy. I mean, the utter lack of redeeming characters was just a bit too much. That said, it was actually pretty bold and one of the things I respect about it: good people don’t normally end up in biker gangs. And if they do, they don’t stay there long.
So, yeah. I respect the gangster show being full of actual, true to type lowlife gangsters. But after a point, I just couldn’t make it. (As a coworker once said, “This is the first show I’ve watched where I’d be okay with every character getting their throat slit.”)
Kristine
@narya: I enjoyed the first one–liked Gideon the character and while the universe was bloody complicated I rode along in the passenger seat and enjoyed the ride.
The second one…Harrow was one of the people who made things rough for Gideon, so, strike one. But I can find characters compelling even if I don’t like them, so I could’ve looked past that if the first chapters hadn’t struck me as being stuck in the mud. All that said, I will probably give it another try. The universe is bloody fascinating and original.
Miss Bianca
@Trivia Man: I hated ET! I didn’t walk out on it, but thought it was so manipulative, it actually made me angry that I was crying!
I thought my friend Harry summed it up beautifully: “Relentlessly heartwarming.”
Movie I couldn’t finish? Most recently, it would be Mad Max. Had never seen it, kept hearing great things about the series (especially Fury Road), and figured I should start at the beginning.
Dear God, what a waste of celluloid. Can’t even imagine wanting to see any of the others now.
Mike in Oly
Independence Day. I was with a large group of friends and they were my ride so didn’t get to walk, out but boy did I want to. One of the worst movies I have ever been forced to sit thru. The plot was transparent, the writing cliche and predictable – and the acting was phoned in. It was totally insufferable. I never understood how it was a blockbuster. More recently I was really disappointed to see Guardians Of The Galaxy 3 featured animal abuse (yes, CGI, but still) and I just could not manage to see it. The only Marvel movie to date I had to skip, and I am a huge fan. But I knew I would never get those images out of my brain and jeebus there’s enough horror in there from 57 years on this planet already. I don’t need more.
As for books, I tried several times to read Dune and The Lord Of The Rings and could never get more than a chapter in before being so bored I just couldn’t any longer.
West of the Rockies
@zhena gogolia:
Do tell!
narya
@Kristine: Thanks!
Kristine
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Yup. Lois Bujold’s Memory was the first Miles Vorkosigan book I read. Bounced off it FIVE times. Sixth time through, I devoured it, then worked my way through the rest of the series.
Grumpy Old Railroader
I honestly cannot begin to count the number books that I have set aside to read later and never finished. Since I have not gone to a theater in many years I can say that when I did go to movies I stayed. (We usually left the drive-in movie sometime after the kids fell asleep). But like the books I never finished, there is a whole bunch of movies that I have started to stream but stopped midway and looked for another.
For the last year my kick has been wading through international movies. I got into South Asian for a while then European then Latin American and now am wading through several excellent Korean series on Netflix and Prime Video. I have many false starts with these also but finding a pearl amongst the chaff is well worth it. Last night I watch “Carmen” on Amazon. It is set in a village on the island of Malta. Carmen is middle aged and is her brother’s housekeeper in the rectory where her brother is the priest at the local church. He dies suddenly and she is evicted with only a suitcase, no relatives, no income and nowhere to go. Great movie
Miss Bianca
@Alison Rose: I loved the first four Outlander books, then found each subsequent one more of a slog, and finally, the last one (something with Bees in the title, like Tell the Bees I’m Gone?) – yeah, I got 100 + pages into it and finally was like, “Plot? Plot? Diana, have you forgotten what a ‘plot’ is?” – and checked out. I think there were still 800 pages to go.
dm
@Kristine: I reread Gideon before tackling Harrow, and I think it helped, though I ended up reading Harrow a second time right after the first because, oh, boy, is she an unreliable narrator — so unreliable she can’t even trust herself for 90% of the book.
But, I love nested puzzles.
Alecto, the third book, I’m afraid will take three readings before I’ll feel that i’ve grasped it all.
I don’t suppose it counts, but every few years I get thirty pages into Finnegans Wake before finding something else more pressing.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Kristine: I love that series.
PaulWartenberg
Season One of Heroes was soooooo good… and then Season Two happened and all of a sudden I didn’t believe there were ever any other seasons except the first one. You can’t tell me otherwise. THERE’S ONLY ONE SEASON OF HEROES, OKAY! THAT’S IT! (cries)
Amir Khalid
I bought a single-volume edition of The Chronicles of Narnia and then abandoned The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe early on out of reader fatigue, which surprised me because I’d liked the movie. (I never read the later books or went to see the later movies, either.) I did see the entirety of The Hobbit movie trilogy, out of duty I guess — even though Peter Jackson had padded the hell out of the material, and the result was about 2½ movies too long and 20db too loud.
I discovered about one page in that I was intellectually totally unprepared to make sense of Heidegger’s massive Sein und Zeit, so I gave up on that. This was a disappointing because I had finished, and liked, a work of similar length by Karl Popper.
TV shows? If I’m not thrilled by the first episode I see, the show doesn’t go on my must-see list, that’s all. I can’t recall a show that fell off the list.
LiminalOwl
@Yutsano: I couldn’t walk out on The Royal Tenenbaums for some reason, but I certainly wanted to. For the same reason.
@Trivia Man: Never have seen ET, agree on Star Wars. For hard SF, I recommend Arrival.
@BarcaChicago: omg me too!
I very very badly wanted to walk out of Leaving Las Vegas, or maybe Ileft but came back. It was a class assignment with no excuse or alternative option. Ugh. Not just the romanticizing of death-by-alcoholism, but novody had warned me about the graphic rape scene. I cried afterwards.
Elizabelle
Something jackals will enjoy: The American Film Institute has a daily “Get the Picture.” Guess the movie from one image; you’ll get five choices. Some are harder than others.
http://www.afi.com
Maxim
Movie I walked out on: Cape Fear, the Scorsese one. Ick.
Movie I wish I’d never seen: Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. (I did not know what it was about, because I am very spoiler-averse, and the trailers only showed DiCaprio and Pitt, with no hint of the rest of the story.) On a related note, I am sick of films, regardless of genre, that tell whatever sort of story just so they can build up to some scene of horrifying violence as the climax.
Books: I used to always finish books; I’m a lot less forgiving these days. So, lots.
TV shows: most of the time, I stop watching a show because I drift away from it rather than consciously deciding to stop. I did quit, though, with Good Girls. I got three seasons in, and then one episode they crossed a line and I was done.
dm
@zhena gogolia: heh, it will probably add nothing to your appreciation of the book to learn that Rebecca Goldstein is now married to Stephen Pinker.
RobertDSC-iPhone 8
A video game: The Last Of Us part II. I will never finish because I don’t care about the characters.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
The only reason I didn’t walk out of An Officer and a Gentleman was that the airplane was at 30,000 feet over the Atlantic. This was in the days when you didn’t get to choose a movie, the airline chose it for you, and projected it onto the bulkhead at the front of the cabin for everyone. They played it three times going eastbound, and then again three times going westbound, and I never found anything enjoyable about the story or any of the characters.
Martin
@Miss Bianca: Oh, yeah, Mad Max is rough. No, you skip that one.
Road Warrior is where you start. You get the necessary elements of Mad Max in the opening monologue – about 15 seconds. It’s much lighter and more focused on the strange cars and the action pieces and all that. It moves from being more plausibly dystopian to being less plausibly dystopian, and that makes it an easier watch. Mad Max 2 is similar. Fury Road is as well.
It’s not for everyone of course, but Mad Max is not a popcorn film and Road Warrior and the ones after are.
WaterGirl
@narya: I loved Vonnegut; he had a big influence on me. Maybe I shouldn’t re-read them!
PaulWartenberg
@Scout211:
With regards to the Outlander series becoming too long. I see it as a problem with a ton of authors whose works become a series, where more “author tract” creep sneaks in, and more stuff that would have gotten edited out stayed in to bore the readership.
Tom Clancy comes to mind: his early works were relatively good but then he started getting into the politics of the Ryanverse and started twisting reality into his own fantasy, and half of his stuff became unwieldly with subplots galore and no editorial control.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@WaterGirl: Came here to say I stopped reading Deliverance, and for the same reason. Just too violent.
Nelle
A number of years ago, I gave up watching Criminal Minds. The camera was lingering too long on women’s tortured bodies. I liked the ensemble acting, but no, just no.
Miss Bianca
@SpaceUnit: I’m with you on that one! Loved the original movie version of True Grit, (it’s probably the only John Wayne movie I ever actually *want* to rewatch) and I thought it was actually much closer in spirit to the book than the Coen Brothers version, which was just a wet, creepy mess as far as I was concerned.
Actually, now that I think about it, the only Coen Brothers movie I really, truly dig is O Brother Where Art Thou? Most of the rest I’ve seen have been too creepy for my tastes, including up to if not quite including The Big Lebowski.
PaulWartenberg
@Martin:
the only reason to watch the first Mad Max is to watch the beginning: the police chase of the NIGHT RIDER! A memetic glorious introduction to the beginning of the end of civilization.
A FUELED INJECTED SUICIDE MACHINE! When we look to the night sky, we think of him!!!
Tokyokie
After I read Jim Thompson’s A Hell of a Woman, which ends with its extremely unreliable first-person narrator going schizophrenic, as evidenced by alternating lines regular- and italic-case type, and offers two different, but equally horrifying endings, I couldn’t pick up another of his books for several years. And I’m the sort who enjoys romans noirs.
(I apologize for sort of giving away the ending, but come on, nobody picks up a Jim Thompson novel expecting it to wrap up happily ever after.)
narya
@WaterGirl: A huge challenge for me currently is Player Piano–some of the themes are extremely relevant to where we are now (technology taking over our lives, what’s left for humans to do), but the portrayal of women in it made me uneasy even when I read it as a teenager. I didn’t have enough language about misogyny to know why, but it made me squirm. I’ll probably give it a shot, though, because there are some fascinating bits
ETA: and then there’s the short story with rape . . . as a “necessary” thing. Um, no.
MomSense
@Chetan Murthy:
It’s the worst because the build up to go to a Broadway show is so intense especially when you love the music.
Laura
@Ken: I kept up with the Anita Blake series for quite a few books as I absolutely was intrigued with the supernatural world she created and the politics in that world. I quit when I realized that I was skipping the tedious sex scenes and they comprised almost the whole book. I read that all the complaints from readers about the sex scenes led the author to write the next book in the series as almost all sex scenes, no plot.
Miss Bianca
@Ihop:
Oh, but that one is *so* bad, it’s actually funny.
Gin & Tonic
@Amir Khalid:
I think everyone is.
Josie
I quit watching Breaking Bad after a few episodes because I developed a strong dislike for the main character. I actually wasn’t drawn to any of the people, but the main guy really pushed my buttons. My son keeps telling me what a fine piece of work the series was, but I just could not watch it.
Martin
@RobertDSC-iPhone 8: Hard to compare video games here. There’s a whole other set of reasons to put one down, and they’re big investments – at least on the order of a book, and where a book is time, a video game is time and effort. If you’re not good at particular kinds of game mechanics, they can be really hard to complete and become not fun really fast.
The genre of ‘not fun’ video games is just barely getting going (give Pathologic a run, for instance). Different expectations than other kinds of media.
Laura
@Scout211: I feel the same way about Moonstruck – can’t understand why so many people love it.
Falling Diphthong
The Midnight Sky about 10 minutes in, as I realized that the Earth-like moon to which some of humanity might escape wasn’t orbiting a gas giant in another solar system. It was orbiting Jupiter. Earth size, cozy Earth temperatures due to volcanism, Earth levels of sunlight (don’t know why on this one), breathable Earth atmosphere, complex biosphere. We just never noticed it up ’til now! Man, good thing there’s a whole Goldilocks planet right close by for when this one gets messed up.
I enjoy Clooney, but I just couldn’t do it.
In my climate crisis fiction I’ve been a lot more drawn to the theme “So we sent the billionaires off to try and establish a biosphere from scratch on a ball of dirt, and then the rest of us settled down to group action to seriously addressing the biosphere issues here.”
frosty
@Marc: I read Gravity’s Rainbow five times in the 70s. I found more paranoia, conspiracies, (and great puns) every time. Picked it up about 10-15 years ago and couldn’t even get started.
dm
@Marc:
There’s a scene like that in V, too, and there’s even more weird shit in South Africa in Mason Dixon. God forbid Punching ever tackle the Musk or Thiel sagas. Papa Musk sounds like a Pynchon perv.
oldster
Moonstruck was bad, yes. But isn’t that because everything with Nicholas Cage is bad?
Take about your nepo babies.
MomSense
Moonstruck was awful. I snapped right out of the theater. Game of Thrones, from what I could see (production was so dark) was terrible. I don’t like torture porn. Hated Mad Men. I am not fascinated by that time period and I hated all the characters. I watched the first season of 24 but that was it.
Jinchi
Same here, although it’s easier to walk out when the theater is your own living room. I found the whole story unwatchable and it seemed like it was just getting worse over time.
Plus I hate the whole trope of people in Ireland being perpertually miserable.
Marc
I have a first edition copy of Player Piano that was purchased by my Mom. She was a computer at the time and loved that book.
oatler
@Miss Bianca:
Costner’s accent was pointedly referenced in “Men In Tights”.
Matt McIrvin
Dune and Dhalgren are both books I abandoned too– in the case of Dhalgren I kind of feel bad about it because I like Delany and the book was doing a lot of artistically interesting things, it was just a really tough read. Dune, I have no desire to go back to.
Managed to read a lot of Pynchon but I think I dropped Against the Day halfway through.
Ruckus
One of my jobs in the navy on board ship was movies. I have no idea why but our work group cared for and ran the 16mm movies and projectors that we’d set up on the mess deck and show. Once had to exchange movies with the “film library” on an aircraft carrier while in the Mediterranean. Small open boat across the bay, up 5 decks just ahead of the aft gang plank, walk all the way forward on the hanger deck to the forward end of the ship, about 1000 feet, down 5 decks to the film locker, 2 of us carrying 4 movies each, exchange the movies for 8 other crappy movies, reverse our trip and then listen to the complaints over 8 days of the crappy movies we’d gotten because there were NEVER good movies.
Damn navy almost ruined movies for me. That and humans…..
Falling Diphthong
@Josie: The showrunners of Breaking Bad are clear that the main character is not someone to be admired. Though some fans ignore this. I need to like someone in the show more than I liked anyone in BB.
I absolutely loved Better Call Saul, the prequel, which is just a bit lighter and gentler, with several characters I rooted for. Not having watched BB was actually a plus, as I could be delighted when seeming side characters blossomed into main characters.
Hoppie
Dhalgren, the only 700 page book I read 600 pages of. I liked most of Chip’s work (“Time Considered…” is brilliant) but that was… tedious. What was the point?
zhena gogolia
@West of the Rockies: It was one of the required books for our first-year seminar that was pretty much the only required course. God, I hated it. (I have liked some other Faulkner books that i read, but haven’t read any lately.)
LiminalOwl
@Elizabelle: Ooh, thank you. That was fun!
dm
@Falling Diphthong:
I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say you’ve just described Emergency Skin by NK Jemisin. A little bit of The half-built garden by Ruthanna Emrys, as well.
Off-topic because these are both great
John Cole
The ONLY movie I have ever walked out of was the Pink Panther with Steve Martin. Tammy and I went to see a matinee on a rainy day in 2006 and it was so bad I looked at her about 15 minutes in and said “life is too short for this” and we left.
Maxim
@Chief Oshkosh: I watched the whole thing, but was completely baffled that people were raving about it.
@Wapiti: I liked season 1 of The Boys, but then the pandemic came and it was all too dark for me.
@Mike in Oly: I managed to get through The Hobbit, but the LOTR books bored me. I liked the Dune books, though; I got through the first four, I think.
zhena gogolia
@dm: Oh, that makes all kinds of sense.
narya
@Marc: That’s the thing! The themes are really interesting, and clearly based on Vonnegut’s work at GE (I think?), and there are takedowns of “management” culture that are fabulous! But women are all secondary creatures, grasping to stay attached to an alpha male. As another example, multiple people had recommended Ender’s Game, but very early on some dude says females just aren’t able to do X, and I noped out. I read the whole thing, but never got past that attitude and saw no good reason to try any subsequent books.
Tony Jay
Last night I started watching John Wick 4 having very much enjoyed the previous films in the series. I’d enjoyed the slow and steady escalation of Wick’s conflict with the world he thought he’d left behind, the gradual unfolding of what that world actually looked like and the inevitable journey through the saga to what Part 4 had to be. And yeah, the fight scenes.
Half an hour into Part 4 I turned it off. Apparently someone had the bright idea of remaking an extended version of any generic martial arts ‘thriller’ from the late ‘80s while dispensing with characterisation, plot or story, then got Keanu to wander half conscious through it.
Nah.
Mike in NC
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: A ridiculous movie. Apparently Richard Gere was hot stuff way back then. A few sailors on my ship seriously asked if that was what Officer Candidate School was really like. That cracked me up.
zhena gogolia
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: Not even the theme song?
Josie
@Falling Diphthong:
That’s interesting. I never tried watching Better Call Saul because I was so turned off by Breaking Bad. I might give it a shot at some point.
zhena gogolia
@Miss Bianca: Try Hail, Caesar!
Matt McIrvin
@Miss Bianca: Mad Max is really in a different genre than all of its sequels–it’s a nasty 70s revenge thriller in the vein of Death Wish or Dirty Harry, but with dystopia and car chases.
Starting with The Road Warrior (aka Mad Max 2), they become stylized post-apocalyptic Westerns, more or less. Still super violent but it’s all more fantastical.
munira
I quit watching Rings of Power after the first episode. I love Tolkien and couldn’t stand what they did to Galadriel’s character.
zhena gogolia
@MomSense: This is what’s happened to me almost every time I’ve gone to the Metropolitan Opera.
I love the music from Evita, so I’ll probably never go see it.
delphinium
@Subsole: I thought the acting was great and enjoyed how it was filmed, was just really bothered by some of the scenes in it.
Brachiator
@Ihop:
I recall the director of the film saying that he was going to be historically accurate. For a myth? Challenge accepted. I lost count of the inaccuracies and anachronisms. There was a scene where someone tacks a wanted poster for Robin Hood on a tree. I figured that there may have been a handful of people who could read during the time period in which this version was set.
The acting was bad, too. But I stayed until the end.
Miss Bianca
@Tokyokie: Jim Thompson is a tough read, if I’m remembering correctly – I found a collection of pulp detective novels in the Northwestern University Law Library collection, of all places (I worked there for a time), and one of them was a story of his told from the POV of a corrupt small-town sheriff that just got more and more disturbing. I finished it but I felt kind of dirty afterwards.
The Chester Himes story, on the other hand, was sheer awesomeness. Black detectives in Harlem! What was not to love!
zhena gogolia
@Jinchi: Stay away from Martin McDonagh!
Wow, I loved every minute of Moonstruck.
BeautifulPlumage
@zhena gogolia: I was underage but begged Mom to see Tommy so she came with me. I found it weird & fascinating but definitely tried to melt into the seat when the Acid Queen came on.
Mai Naem mobileI
We walked out on Outbreak. Keep in mind this is pre-smart phone. We went to see Muriels Wedding but it was sold out and the only other movie that looked interesting was Outbreak( good cast -Dustin Hoffman,Kevin Spacey,Rene Russo.) Watched maybe 15 mins till the airplane scene and could see where the movie was going. Too intense.
Rachel Bakes
@Chetan Murthy: Chess was all the rage with my HS theater friends so I bought the Broadway soundtrack-not realizing the huge plot differences between European and Broadway. I still prefer some of the Broadway music but the storyline is incomprehensible. When we saw it performed my husband said we should listen to the European version and watch Searching for Bobby Fisher to have a better evening.
Falling Diphthong
Castle. In Season 2 Lainie pointed out that while they seemed into each other, they really would have had a date by now if they actually were. And I was like “Yes! Do not ask me to invest in the romance if these people cannot bother to ask each other on a date.”
In order to explain why they couldn’t date, Beckett had to become this terribly damaged supermodel who should not have been carrying a gun. It was very annoying. I eventually bowed out but sometimes read recaps, which is how I know that Beckett walked out on Castle after their marriage so The Bad People would think that she didn’t care about him, and then he got kidnapped by a totally random psychopath who was like “I need an NYC cop and someone they love… okay, this lady and her husband.” She couldn’t even fool a random psychopath off the street.
Miss Bianca
@Falling Diphthong: I finished Castle because, yum, Nathan Fillion, but yeah…it just got less and less fun and more and more ridiculous, and it was definitely a slog towards the end there.
WaterGirl
@Nelle: I have Tivo, so I was able to fast forward through any details when a woman was held in captivity, or if anything got to creepy, etc. I didn’t need to know the details in order to enjoy the show.
I really did like the characters and I liked seeing the process of figuring it out. Win-win for me
I think that Criminal Minds is on again, but maybe on a streaming service i don’t get?
Maxim
@Falling Diphthong: I have to have at least one character to root for, which is why I couldn’t watch Succession.
different-church-lady
So… Moulin Rouge: the 20th Century Fox logo segment at the very beginning has a silhouette of a conductor at the bottom the screen (MST3K style) and he spazzes around as he conducts the march, and I’m thinking, “This film hasn’t even actually begun yet and I’m already too annoyed to watch it.”
Craig
@laura: the North Point. What a fantastic theater.
raven
The Co-Ed was a movie theater in Campustown at the University of Illinois Champaign Urbana. We used smoke a bomber as we walked up for a flick. When we went to see American Werewolf in London and they whipped out the straight razor we got up and skeedaddled! Later people said we should have hung because it was a comedy but we jammed!
dm
@Hoppie: I liked Dhalgren, and recently re-read it. Can’t tell you what the point was, though (beyond Delany’s coming of age and break up with poet Marilyn Hacker (bits of his memoir, Heavenly Breakfast, reminded me a great deal of Dhalgren).
I think it was Avram Davidson described the book as being about “New York during a garbage strike”.
Amir Khalid
Another acclaimed book I have never been able to finish is Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion. Too long, too dense, too dull. Just couldn’t compare to One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: Best Castle episode ever was the 70s one. So fun!
Maxim
@Matt McIrvin: I think Fury Road is, while stylistically very much in line with its predecessors, quite a departure from them in other ways. I wouldn’t mind rewatching it, whereas I have no desire to do so with any of the others.
raven
@Amir Khalid: The movie version might be a good alternative. Paul Newman, Henry Fonda, Lee Remick and Richard Jaeckel in one of the most harrowing scenes ever filmed.
delphinium
@zhena gogolia:
I thought The Man Who Wasn’t There was good too-also liked the black and white cinematography.
EriktheRed
For me it was the book “Blaze” by Stephen King writing as Richard Bachman. It wasn’t a bad story, but I didn’t like where I saw it heading. A little baby was starting to get sick in an environment where he was only going to get sicker and that kind of thing bothers me.
Benw
I’ve bailed on a bunch of series and books out of boredom or lack of interest. The only book I think I ever put down in rage was The Corrections. Just shitty, shitty people being shitty, Franzen, you HACK!
zhena gogolia
@different-church-lady: OTOH, if it had been Tom Servo, I’m there for it!
delphinium
Also, I can’t stand Robert Downey Jr, so pretty much anything with him in it (except Home for the Holidays) is a no for me.
zhena gogolia
I’m finally binging Mad Men after having studiously ignored it when it was hot. I devoured the first season. I’m still hooked, but getting tired of Don sleeping around so much.
Ruckus
@PaulB:
I believe I read a few pages of Zen and the Art.
I believe that I stopped before I got out of first gear.
When I stopped riding a while back I had amassed over 500,000 miles on motorcycles over 50+ yrs of ridding. I’ve ridden in 3 countries, rode all around New Zealand on a 3 week tour, rode on the island of Mallorca, Spain and mostly in the US, which I’ve crossed twice.
Cliosfanboy
A few more.
I hated Seinfield. All the main characters were jerks. Ugh.
Quit The Number of the Beast halfway through and never read another Heinlein book. Ugh.
Hated Everything, Everywhere, All at Once or whatever it was called. I find multiverse stories interesting but this one was just stupid. Hotdogs fingers???? Really???
Could never finish Moby Dick, or Frankenstein, or Dracula.
Never have seen Vertigo. I just don’t like Jimmy Stewart for some reason. He grates on me somehow.
Scuffletuffle
Seven, because of the over the top misogynistic violence and The Cook, The Thei, His Wife and her Lover, same, in spite of Helen Mirren being in it.
raven
The Gabenpentin I have been taking has really helped me sleep but I just don’t want to read much anymore. I have a big stack of books I don’t think I’ll ever get to.
Suzanne
A few years ago, I decided that I would never watch another movie or TV show in which a dog or cat dies. Nope. Protecting my peace.
Honestly, it is somewhat moot, since I get to watch movies and TV so rarely. But I’m done with it as a plot device. I get upset and I can’t focus on anything else in the plot.
Craig
Didn’t walk out, and actually loved Dancer in the Dark, but I never need to go through that again.
Math Guy
Love to read science fiction, but as the years left to me grow fewer, I am getting pickier about what I read. Still, I want to try new (to me) authors so I recently picked up “To Sleep In A Sea Of Stars” by Christopher Paolini. Really disappointed; it started out with an interesting premise, but (IMHO) devolved into nonsense. I hate to not finish anything I start, but I started skimming through the last quarter of the book.
Also disappointed with “Observer” by Nancy Kress and Robert Lanza; great idea, lousy execution.
Inventor
The movie “Cat People” back in the ’80s was so promising with Natasha Kinski and David Bowie music and Natasha Kinski. It sucked so hard.
As others, I could not get through “Atlas Shrugged”. It was so very poorly written, just amazing how bad. “Who is John Gault?” He’s a two dimensional character in a third rate novel.
Marc
@narya:
I agree and will suggest this was true of just about every other science fiction book written (by men) before the late 70s. And, being black, we also cringed every time a black character appeared (like, say, in a Heinlein book). But my Mom and I loved science fiction, so I believe we’d ignore certain things as we read and focus on the techie stuff.
Yeah, Card doesn’t have the excuse of existing in a not so enlightened era for any of his screwed up ideas, I just skipped the rest of his books altogether after reading Ender’s Game.
Tony G
@narya: I thought “A Confederacy of Dunces” was hilarious, and my sons liked it too when they were teenagers. My wife, however, literally fell asleep after reading about ten pages of it, and handed it back to me. To each their own!
zhena gogolia
@Tony G: I loved it when I read it, but I must say I have never wanted to reread it.
Other MJS
Some years back I was watching Armageddon while donating platelets. I simply left when I was finished because it was so ridiculous that I didn’t care how it ended.
StringOnAStick
@Suzanne: There’s a website a dog lover friend told me about: http://www.DoesTheDogDie.com. That way you know before you are tempted to watch, and it covers all animals not just dogs. It tracks all sorts of categories you might prefer to avoid, like rape, torture, etc.
Joseph Patrick Lurker
@zhena gogolia:
Quit while you’re ahead. It gets worse with each successive season. It would have been fine if it had ended after season 4. The series finale was absolute garbage.
Ken
@EriktheRed: You remind me: I have twice started Matt Ruff’s Lovecraft Country and twice had to stop when the racists start harassing the black family, secure in the knowledge that the law will do absolutely nothing. I seem to have a much greater tolerance for tentacled horrors than for the two-legged kind.
I really should force myself to continue, it’s supposed to be excellent.
Martin Schafer
The only theatrical movie I’ve walked out on was the Harry Hausen Jason and the Argonauts, when I was 8 years old. When giant statue stood up I was terrified and went to the lobby.
Princess
Red Dawn.
I don’t think I need to explain why to this group.
Uncle Cosmo
Some years back, browsing at The Book Thing**, I stumbled upon a pristine trade-paper copy of Game of Thrones, i.e., the first volume. I concluded that this was a sign from doG and since the price was right (zero, zip, nada, niente, free) I hauled it home–
And dumped it back into the donation window 3 weeks later. It dawned on me, after I’d made it to page 320 or so, that (as Frank Perdue might have put it) I did not give a frying flock about one single solitary character in the book. Not one.
Never had the slightest interest in trying again. Or watching it on TV.
** NB Then open every Saturday and Sunday instead of one crappy day a month, as now…grrr…
NotMax
FYI re: some of the above, recommend a long read profile of Samuel Delaney in The New Yorker which was published earlier this month.
Can remember only two walk-outs in a movie theater. Of very different sorts of films.
Ghostbusters and Taxi zum Klo.
Two movies I gave up on maybe 15 or 20 minutes in and pointedly switched off (or deliberately ignored in the case of a plane with communal screens) in extreme disappointment/ennui while on board a flight: Everything Everywhere All at Once and After Earth.
Not a walk-out but a near equivalent was falling asleep in disinterest through the middle third of The Phantom Menace. Gave up on the Star Wars franchise after that and never looked back.
Books? Didn’t not finish them but it was a protracted slog to eventually force myself to complete reading Jude the Obscure and also Nana. Not yet finished after years of pick it up, put it down reading because it is so densely packed with information I can best consume it only in small bites is Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World.
Tokyokie
I started reading Ennio Morricone’s memoir because I love his music. Maybe it was the translation, but it struck me that Il Maestro was a lot better composer than writer. And I quickly gave up on A Confederacy of Dunces for the reasons others have cited.
I haven’t walked out on many movies, but the first was Love Story. The movie could have fit into an hourlong time slot had all the scenes of Ryan O’Neal walking alone as the movie’s insipid theme tinkled on the soundtrack had been cut. I might have walked out of The Harrad Experiment; I remember wanting to do so because it was so dreadful, and I don’t remember how it ended, but then I also could have dozed off for the last 20 minutes. The movie that I walked out on that I best remember was Smokey and the Bandit Part 3, which didn’t feature Burt Reynolds. Early on, there’s a scene in which KKK types harass a couple of Black guys who’d been told to act like they were in an Amos & Andy episode. I’m surprised the filmmakers didn’t try to play a lynching for laughs. Only three of us were in the theater, and I found myself cursing aloud the racist asshole who thought all this was gut-bustingly funny. Because I was supposed to be reviewing it for publication, I felt obliged to sit through the whole thing, but playing openly racist stereotypes for laughs in 1983 told me enough about it, and if I’d stayed, I would have come to blows with the racist asshole (and probably would have gotten my ass kicked). I think I was gone before the Jackie Gleason character even appeared. The weekly’s reviewers would give movies star ratings, with the bad ones getting a little bomb sig. But for that piece of crap, I got the art department to make a sig of a mushroom cloud, which I don’t think ever ran again. It was that bad.
David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch
How ’bout movies that were such a train wreck you couldn’t turn it off.
For example, John Wayne in The Green Berets was so God awful I couldn’t turn the channel.
Ascap_scab
I can think of three TV series that I quit before the end. Oddly, I’m not a big Sci-Fi fan, but all three share that genre.
The first was ‘Heroes‘. The premise was that ordinary people from around the world found they had unusual abilities and a search was on to find who had them and how they got them, culminating in an effort to “save the world”.
Season two was disjointed and fell apart because it happened during the last writers strike. NBC fired the show runners over cost and creative differences. I found it tedious to follow the pointless storylines and gave up before it died of natural causes two seasons later.
Next was ‘Falling Skies‘. An alien invasion destroys the Earth to scavenge resources using the remaining human population as slaves to do the work.
Turns out the humans are resilient and fight back only to find out there are still other aliens the first aliens are at war with.
I stuck with it until season four when the lead characters found a spare alien space ship and flew (without any training) to the moon to destroy the first aliens base. That was my breaking point.
It did go on to a fifth season where humanity wins back the planet. I no longer cared.
Finally came ‘The Walking Dead‘. I was late to the series. I waited until three seasons were in the bank when AMC ran a first season marathon.
I’m not really a zombie guy, but this seemed interesting, so I binged the first three seasons. The producers had to keep finding new, creative and ever more gory ways of dispatching zombies.
I stuck with it until season six or seven when they introduce Negan and the show turns from humans killing zombies to humans killing humans.
That stepped over my lines. I never went back and never watched any of the spinoffs.
Matt McIrvin
@Maxim: Fury Road is overtly feminist, where the earlier ones are… not.
Miss Bianca
@zhena gogolia: Count me in with the “WTF is this shit” crowd when it came to Confederacy of Dunces. I couldn’t finish it back in the days when I *never* bailed on a book, no matter how bad!
OK, I take that back. About the same time I tried to read that one, I figured I had to find out what Stephen King was all about and so I started Christine (Or was it Christina? The one about the evil car, anyway) and thought it was such hooey I couldn’t finish that one either.
Pretty much ruined me for ever trying a Stephen King book again, although I must say I read On Writing and found it pithy and enjoyable.
Matt McIrvin
@dm: I tried to read C. S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet/Perelandra/That Hideous Strength) many years ago.
Out of the Silent Planet, I actually found kind of charming–I am in no way Christian but Lewis’s science-fictional Christian allegory made for interestingly odd worldbuilding.
Perelandra was harder to take, though–it seemed like Lewis realized that non-Christians could enjoy the previous book without actually converting and becoming Christian and this was contrary to his mission, so the tone became much more hectoring, as if the book were trying to shame me into taking its theology seriously as a real thing. I got all the way through, but it was a hard pill to take.
And then That Hideous Strength is one of those books where if I even try reading one or two pages I want to throw it across the room. From a modern perspective, some bits of it probably actually work as satires on the kind of intellectual futurological wankery that people like Eliezer Yudkowsky or Elon Musk do. But the hectoring is just over the top and it’s profoundly anti-woman too.
Ken
Your plot synopsis reminds me, unfortunately, of the Battlefield Earth movie. I’d read reviews, many reviews, about how bad it was, so when it was on some cable channel one day, I thought I’d see if it made it to “so bad it’s fun” territory. Nope. I turned it off after less than half an hour.
Tokyokie
@Miss Bianca: The plot you describe sounds like The Killer Inside Me, which is one of my favorites. It’s twice been made into movies, one with Stacy Keach in the lead role and directed by Burt Kennedy, which is awful, and then with Casey Affleck in the lead, directed by Michael Winterbottom, which is an improvement, but rather misses the point. The device that Thompson uses, that a serial killer can literally get away with murder if everybody in town knows that he’s an idiot (when most assuredly isn’t), is brilliant. He uses a similar device in Pop. 1280, which is more comedic in tone (to the extent Thompson can be ironically amusing). That novel is set in early-20th century Mississippi, and Bertrand Tavernier made it into Coup de torchon (Clean Slate), changing the setting to rural French colonial Africa, which somehow works. It and Stephen Frears’ The Grifters, are the best translations of Thompson books into movies. But I think A Hell of a Woman and Savage Night are too grim for moviemakers to touch.
Oh and another aspect of Thompson’s writing that I find compelling is he chose not to set his roman noirs in L.A. or San Francisco or Chicago or NYC. Instead, the locales are identifiable as New Paltz, N.Y. (Savage Night), Columbia, Mo., and Fort Worth (A Hell of a Woman), and Midland-Odessa, Texas (The Killer Inside Me). The moral rot isn’t just an urban thing, it’s an American thing.
And I’ve long been meaning to get into the works of Chester Himes, as he sounds like an author I would love.
hitchhiker
Clockwork Orange. The scene with the old couple got me right up out of my seat and out the door.
Can’t understand the fascination with Mad Men — watched a few episodes and it just felt like soap opera. I really tried.
Same with SO MANY books; I have zero compunction about abandoning a book. If I’m curious about the plot, I just skip to the end and read the last few pages to find out what happened. There are books I expect to like and just can’t get interested in (Tolkien!); I give them another try every few years, just to see if I’ve matured enough.
I think with ZATAOMM, you might have had to be there in 1975 — a strange time. Idealism out of fashion, Reagan just around the corner. It probably doesn’t hold up, but in that moment it felt important in the way books only can when you’re young.
Quiltingfool
@zhena gogolia: My favorite line from Moonstruck (uttered by the awesome Olympia Dukakis), “Don’t shit where you eat.”
Lyrebird
@Matt McIrvin: I loved Out of a Silent Planet as a kid, and as a teen I worked through the whole trilogy. I don’t know, Perelandra is a mess, but many middle books are a mess. I felt that the third book at least made more sense. But I never re-read either of those two once I’d made it throughh. Have you ever read the interview of Philip Pullman about misogyny in the Narnia books by the way? Actually talking about the Pevinses, not just the obvious issues with the evil witch gal. It was eye opening for me. Made me think of how much I just took for granted, feeling excluded from the fictional worlds I loved to read about was kinda normal.
I think Lewis was more hidebound adn parochial than actively trying to stop others from enojying his work, but ymmv of course! And I did reread the talking horse book in the Narnia series, I can’t remember the name right now, many times.
zhena gogolia
@Martin Schafer: Did you make it to the skeletons?
Quiltingfool
@Ken: You should finish Lovecraft Country. The black family members (and their friends) have to put up with so much shit from white folks, but they prevail.
El Muneco
@VFX Lurker: Cerebus The Aardvark, albeit for different reasons, is similar to Last Temptation of Christ in being among the finest examples of its subgenre for approximately half the running time, then going completely off the rails and becoming something completely different for the second half.
Tokyokie
@David 🌈 ☘The Establishment☘🌈 Koch: I saw The Green Berets when it first came out, and although I was only 14, I realized that it was a piece of crap, consisting of two separate stories that had little to do with each other but had to be included to provide a sufficient running time. And that was without noticing the sun setting in the east at the movie’s end.
El Muneco
@Kristine: I will always stan for Bujold, I’m all in on everything she wrote except for the “Sharing Knife” series which just missed me. There might be a worse entry place to the Vorkosigan books than _Memory_ but I’m having a hard time thinking of one right now.
JML
I’m really stubborn, so I have trouble walking out of movies (especially if I paid for it) and used to grimly finish books even if I was hating it. I’m trying to do better.
Tried reading Brad Meltzer’s The Millionaires (it was recommended to me)…and I’m dropping it after less than 100 pages. Not liking the characters, there’s too much shouting, and I’m disliking the book enormously.
The movie I wished I’d walked out on the most was probably Toys, a movie that I really despised. Love Robin Williams, but that movie was crap.
Seen a lot of people mentioning Heroes here: that show got messed up badly by the writer’s strike (so blame the rich corporate scumbags that forced the writers out), and then ran into the problem where they fell in love with an actor/character that had little purpose after the first season and instead of killing them off/writing them out, they let them eat the show. Too bad, started out great.
Tehanu
I did finish The World According to Garp, for two reasons: I always finished any book I started, and I kept thinking that I would just turn over one more page and I would finally “get” it — I would finally understand why it was such a huge bestseller that everybody loved. When I turned over the last page, and I did NOT get it, I was so disgusted and annoyed that I ditched my lifelong habit of always finishing books. Life’s too short to put up with crap no matter how popular it is. I only wish I had walked out of Forrest Gump, too. At least I had the common sense to turn off Braveheart (on cable) after 20 minutes.
Trivia Man
@El Muneco: my entry to miles vor Kosigan was Cryoburn. Very disorienting but luckily it was an audiobook. The narrator is spectacular and I’m glad I stuck with it. It was also interesting because when I started from the beginning… some plot twists weren’t exactly twists. But that didn’t bother me at all.
NotMax
Turned my back on Peaky Blinders early on after the scene involving a tongue.
Kristine
@El Muneco: Yeah, I know. But I had to stick with it. I met Bujold at the Glasgow 1995 Worldcon and got to hold the Hugo she won for Memory. When I kept bouncing off it, I figured I had to be missing something.
Subsole
@PaulWartenberg:
“But you aren’t doing it for him, Bubba. You’re doing it for me.”
Subsole
@Josie:
Yeah. That series rankled with me until I realized the main character is not, in fact, sympathetic. He’s an insecure, selfish, arrogant fuckup.
I think it is very unfortunate that a lot of folks took him as some kind of badass, because on rewatch he seems almost like a subversion or deconstruction of the stereotype.
Subsole
@Martin:
Ooooh. Here’s a rich seam to mine!
What are some games you dropped, and why?
NotMax
Nearly gave up on Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge but after the frenzied (10 minute?) mess that opens the movie it settles down and becomes quite watchable.
Ken_L
Turned Saving Private Ryan off after 15 minutes of nothing but soldiers being blown up. Stopped reading the Game of Thrones series halfway through the fourth book, when it became obvious it was nothing but a book version of a soap opera which was never going to reach any kind of conclusion that tied the whole narrative together. It now appears the series will never have a final volume of any kind.
Subsole
@Falling Diphthong:
I’d read that, actually.
sralloway
There were films I wish I could have walked out of in 1973, but I was the projectionist in the booth.
Subsole
@EriktheRed:
I love King’s Bachman phase. But yes, very grim stuff. You have to ge in a particular frame of mind to read it.
That said, I would pay Lottery money to see a true-to-book film of The Running Man*.
*We will never, EVER see a true-to-book film of The Running Man. A little too honest, and also the ending.
Subsole
@delphinium:
I loved Home for the Holidays!!
Such a wonderful, funny, heartbreaking, heartwarming movie.
Did not see the twist coming, either.
Lethe
Noped out of many already mentioned.
True story, a book series caused me to climb out a window on a date. Had paged through a Gor series book at the used book store, thinking it might be a John Carter of Mars type. I needed brain bleach after that short exposure. A couple years later I’m at a date’s house for dinner and drinks. On the way to the loo I glanced in his open bedroom. Waterbed with bookcase headboard (yeah, I’m old), knife/fake sword collection on the wall, and the headboard had the entire Gor series. I went down the hall and right out the bathroom window. Thank the deities I always drove my own car.
Subsole
@Lethe:
Yikes.
Yeah. Gor is…well…it’s a lot.
Absent liberal deployment of pepper-spray, you made the right choice leaving.
Narya
@Tehanu: I hated Garp sooooo much. I read one more of his at someone’s recommendation (Owen Meany), hated THAT and never read another of his books.
dm
Rotating tag!
blackmtn
Swept Away, the 1974 version. Didn’t walk out but wished I had…
Donatellonerd
i walked out of Purple Rain when he dropped his girlfriend in the garbage can. i just couldn’t.
sempronia
The Departed by Scorsese. I’d enjoyed Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong movie it was based on, and my movie group wanted to watch The Departed to compare the two. I stopped watching about fifteen minutes in. Can’t even remember if there was physical violence, but the movie made me feel like I was being beaten.
I tried the first book of the Gormenghast series since so many people said it was an epic of the same stature as LOTR, etc. Couldn’t get more than thirty pages in without getting depressed and losing interest.
Maxim
Dead thread, commenting anyway …
My first Stephen King book was Salem’s Lot when I was, oh, probably about 13. I read the whole thing, but I absolutely despised him for making me care about characters and then doing terrible things to them. I didn’t read another King book for decades, and when I finally did it was 11/22/63. Which was good, but not horror.
Re Christine: is that the one he didn’t remember writing because he was out of his head on drugs and booze? Possibly.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@zhena gogolia: The theme song was piped through those hollow-tube-type pneumatic headsets. If the source material were Vladimir Horowitz, the headphones would make it sound like he was playing a toy piano. The movie theme song also suffered in a similar way.
Tony Jay
@Maxim:
‘Salem’s Lot is genuinely a terrifying read, mainly because King not only makes you care about (some of) the characters, he invites you into their authentically human world of petty grievances and secret sins that could (as I believe he originally pitched it) have been the setting of a long running daytime TV soap opera – then he adds vampires.
Which is why (mild spoilers) I think the last Castle Rock series that brought the protagonist of Misery to ‘Salem’s Lot was such a mishit. You don’t do ‘Salem’s Lot without vampires. You particularly don’t dangle a big hole filled with coffins outside of ‘Salem’s Lot in front of us without vampires. Lizzy Caplan was great in it, but what a waste of ‘Salem’s Lot.
Jesse
Stopped watching Succession, the HBO series, after 2-3 episodes. Couldn’t stand trying to warm up to any of those characters.
Bobby Thomson
Jefferson in Paris
It takes a lot of gall to try to white savior the story of a literal rapist. It takes sheer incompetence to make that about the fifth biggest problem with the movie.
Bobby Thomson
@Tony Jay: Wait, wut? Salem’s Lot without vampires is like Jaws without the ocean.
Doug
Bailed on The Historian earlier this year because some of the bits that were supposed to be eerie and scary were reading far too much like farce to me. Same problem with Schiller’s Don Karlos a couple of years ago. https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2018/12/24/don-karlos-by-friedrich-schiller/
Seeing many mentions in this thread of the Eight Deadly Words: I don’t care what happens to those people. Place the emphasis where you will. I don’t care what happens to those people. I don’t care what happens to those people. I don’t care what happens to those people. I don’t care what happens to those people.
The title for my review of David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I Will Never Do Again was going to be “A Supposedly Good Author I Will Never Read Again” but then I realized with a title like that I didn’t need the review.
I should have walked out of Pulp Fiction. One or two halfway funny bits and a moderately clever ending did too little to redeem that movie’s contempt for its audience. Hated it. Hay. Ted.
I really enjoyed the glee of Gideon the Ninth, but alas, there was so little of that to be found in Harrow the Ninth. A kindly friend told me how far to skip to find the glee again, and I read from there to the end of the book. That was enough for me.
A Desolation Called Peace got the Eight Deadly Words because the universe bent too obviously around the two main characters, because a space station with roughly the population of La Vergne, Tennessee is not going to do the things (have a diplomatic corps, produce a technology that a major empire can’t) the author has it do, and because the imperial commander touted as more clever and effective than all the others can think of nothing better to do in the first 300 pages than sit and wait for the two main characters to arrive. Of course, A Desolation Called Peace also got the 2022 Hugo for best novel, so what do I know?
Agree with 231, above, that much of the first half of Cerebus is brilliant, and also that it’s best to pretend that it ends somewhere around the middle of its projected 300 issues. Much like Indiana and the Temple of Doom is a brilliant short movie that ends with an airplane’s takeoff, and in which the eponymous Temple never appears.
Also agree with the benefits of persevering in Lovecraft Country. The footsoldiers of white supremacy are scary and more awful than the various cosmic horribles that also appear, but the book is superb.
HeartlandLiberal
Pavarotti, yes, the opera singer, made a romance movie, ‘Yes, Giorgio,’ that was so bad we quit 20 minutes in. The acting, direction, script, were just AWFUL.
Tony Jay
@Bobby Thomson:
Exactly. I get that the writers were trying to play with expectations and dig deep into the backstory King gives The Lot, but yeah, it did come across as a bit “Danny Torrance arrives in Derry but at no point bumps into a scary clown”.
Again, Caplan was excellent and the actual supernatural threat was creepy and had echoes of the original takeover of the town from the novel, but it wasn’t what you’d expect from the ‘Salem’s Lot instalment of a Kingverse series.
Falling Diphthong
@Maxim: Bailed on Succession for the same reason: it was artfully executed, but I didn’t care what happened to any of these people.
Matt McIrvin
Some of my favorite artistic works are the ones that a lot of people nope out of (definitely some in this list), and I can see perfectly well why, because they’re trying something extreme that makes them off-putting or just difficult.
But many others in this category, including many listed here, I bounced off of too. You can never tell what will work for a given person.
CliosFanBoy
I won a signed copy of “The Historian ” at a Popular Culture Association silent auction a few years back. I loved the first 2/3ds of it, but it seemed just to peter out. `By the end, it was just “meh.”
Matt McIrvin
@Lyrebird: I loved the Narnia series as a kid, except that I bounced off of the final book, The Last Battle–I think the allegorical baggage was really getting to me at that point.
Lewis wrote a short story, “The Shoddy Lands”, that I found in a collection of old stories from, I think, Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine and that is one of the most misogynist things I’ve ever read in my life. The protagonist is mysteriously briefly granted the ability to inhabit another person’s interior mental landscape, and the person he drops into happens to be… oh no… a young woman who cares about fashion and makeup! It gets pretty terrible.
Dave from the Rustbelt
I quit Apple TV’s horrible adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy half-way through the third episode. I kept wondering if the screenwriters had even read any of the books.
Matt McIrvin
@Bruce K in ATH-GR: I remember seeing Runaway Train on an airplane in that era, and finding Jon Voight’s scenery-chewing so so-bad-it’s-good hilarious that I couldn’t stop laughing. I was probably annoying people but there was a guy several rows up who was having the same reaction. Only found out much later that many people consider that movie some kind of artistic masterpiece. The airline edit may have been badly chopped up, who knows.
Tony Jay
@Dave from the Rustbelt:
To be fair to the writers, they looked at the story of Foundation as written and decided that while the concept was great, the books themselves were pretty thin and very much ‘of their time’. So they basically reimagined the story for a modern audience, putting their own spin on the creation of the Foundation while retaining the general theme.
It took me a few episodes to get into the swing of it, but once I decided that this was the story of “the bits of Foundation that aren’t strictly in the books, but should have been” I enjoyed it a lot. The Cleons, for example, are a great sci-fi update of the original never-seen Emperor, and it’s great to see more of the Empire and what it actually consisted of, since Azimov himself gave no more thought to it than “Late Byzantium, In Space!”.
TruthOfAngels
@Subsole: Would pay even more for a film adaptation for another Bachman, The Long Walk.
God knows Battle Royale and The Hunger Games have done a pretty thorough job of ripping it off.
zhena gogolia
@Matt McIrvin: The director (Konchalovsky) made some classic Russian films. Asia Kliachina is the best.
SadOldGuy
Back in grad school in the 1990s, I purchased the Cerebus the Pope tradebooks looking for something different than superheroes. The backgrounds were cool and the story seemed like it was going somewhere and then it turned into what TV Tropes calls “Shoot the Shaggy Dog” and I noped out of reading any more.
Miss Bianca
So, WaterGirl, dead thread and all, but reading through this Medium Cool, I had a thought: Have we done one yet on “Books/Movies/TV we loved back in the day and then revisited and hated” or its opposite, “Books/Movies/TV we hated back in the day and revisited and now love”?
Some of the comments – particularly on CS Lewis and Narnia, for example – reminded me of Jo Walton’s classic essay on The Suck Fairy, which is worth a read all on its own.
This was a great thread, btw!
VOR
@Fraud Guy: Stripes was rated R, not PG. I had good memories of it so I tried showing it to my (then) 12 year old son. We got 5-10 minutes in and I realized it was an R and stopped.
I stopped watching “Emily the Criminal” starring Aubrey Plaza. I adore her, the movie is well done, but I couldn’t take the cringe. You see her character making bad decision after bad decision and you just know this will end badly.
Paul in KY
I sure wanted to walk out of the Michael Jordan Space Jam movie. There with my little nephews. God was it bad…
Paul in KY
@CliosFanBoy: Napoleon Dynamite was so so bad.
Paul in KY
@laura: Lawrence of Arabia is best watched with a real nice buzz.
Paul in KY
@Miss Bianca: 1st True Grit is damned good movie, IMO.
BillD
Australia, Chicago, Succession, Breaking Bad.
Paul in KY
@Matt McIrvin: I just could not make it thru Dhalgren. Still not sure what the hell it was about…
Paul in KY
@munira: I suffered thru the whole thing. Sort ended up hate-watching it. Just WTFing all the time about various characters they either butchered or whothefuckisthis?!?!?!
Paul in KY
@Inventor: Who gives a fuck who John Galt is? I made it thru about 300 and then just trashed it and hit myself in the head for wasting precious seconds of life on it.
Paul in KY
@Marc: I think “Cat’s Cradle” is a very hard book to get through (at least for me).
Paul in KY
@Uncle Cosmo: Not even the dire wolves? Not even them…
Paul in KY
@Tokyokie: As a kid, I liked it. Worked on all the cool booby traps.
Paul in KY
@Tehanu: There are some damned funny scenes in that book…
Kayla Rudbek
Game of Thrones was a DNF for me, as well as Gormenghas.
jame
Deadwood. Ugh.
Stopped reading Lord of the Rings in the second book. Nothing but battles. Then I found Bored of the Rings, and felt justified.