- 1. Have you ever walked out of a movie?
2. How long did you give it before you left?
3. Did you ask for, or get, your money back?
4. Did you ever see that film at a later date and stuck around for the whole thing?
5. How about a rented movie? Did you ever give up on one of those and send them back to the store before you finished it?
I came close to running out on two films:
- -A couple weeks ago during BOOGEYMAN. Fucking despised that movie. It had a great first scene (though way too reminiscent of the start of DARKNESS FALLS), but afterwards, every scare was a result of the soundtrack blaring in, or some weird imagery being spliced in accompanied by loud sound effects. Piss off!!! It was incredibly frustrating. I sat there the whole time gritting my teeth and couldn't wait for it to be over. I've never been so angry while watching a movie (well, for reasons quite like that). I was with a friend so I couldn't really leave, though.
-In early '01 when I saw that Charlize Theron/Keanu Reeves flick SWEET NOVEMBER. Quite possibly the first movie I saw in a theatre that I hated! Was actively hating it while I watched it, and that doesn't happen much at all. Recently, I tend to think of funny things to say in the reviews I hope to write about the movies I see, but I'm not trying to hate them, I'm just trying to remember them better. But SWEET NOVEMBER was so awful that I was scowling like an 80-year-old listening to rap music. Manipulative piece of shit. The stupid audience was falling for it, too, which just got me angrier. They were all crying and laughing at the dumb jokes and I just wanted to throttle them all.
Anyway, it's a bit of a problem for me, because I've really racked up the late fees over the years. I always seem to grab a half dozen films at a time, am allowed to keep them for a week, but get turned off by the task at hand and don't start watching them until a few days before they're due back, and then of course I need to watch them twice and so I end up trying to watch 12 movies in three days. That's with Blockbuster, though. In the summer, I signed up to Zip.ca, which is the Canadian version of Netflix (you rent DVDs online and they mail them to you). I pay a flat fee every month and can rent as many or as few films as I want, and can keep them as long as I want. So guess how often I send a movie back as soon as I've watched it? Yeah, I tend to keep them around for months on end with the intention of fully digesting them more than once, but I just end up not watching them at all and paying like $30 CDN a month for the service. Eep! I hardly think I should start ditching movies if I don't like them after twenty minutes, but this is hardly working for me either.
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