Not Always Watchable — Classic Movies That Bore Me to Death
Ten movies I can’t watch over and over again. And why
In a piece a few months ago, I wrote about movies that are always watchable. Movies I can watch time and time again and never get bored. They include such gems as Sightseers, The Terminator and Castaway.
You’ve probably got your own favourites. But how about the ones that you put on and instantly regret? Curse yourself for not having gone to bed or read a book.
As I’ve written about before, movies are hard to make. With a novel, there’s the author, the editor and perhaps some readers. If you have the talent, you can write a good novel. It may not sell or make money, but one man or woman can produce something great.
This isn’t the same with film. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. You need a good script — most scripts are lousy. You need the money — even harder to get. You need good actors and a director who can work together — tricky. Then you need a good crew, good locations, and even good weather.
It’s no surprise then that really good movies are few and far between. It’s much easier to make a bad movie than a good one.
Then there are those in between, the good, the bad and the ugly. Movies that are not intrinsically bad, but are not movies I’d watch over and over again.
Below are ten of my favourite non-rewatchable movies. Pinch of salt required.
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Yep. I may as well kick off with Tarantino’s big cheese, the movie that had the critics bending over backwards to say something even more superlative than the last critic. If that were possible.
I’ve written about this movie before and got hammered for it. What! People said. It’s a classic. The movie that reinvented cinema.
I saw it in Nottingham (UK) when I was a student, and everyone went mad for it. Every kitchen, living room and bedroom had posters of Pulp Fiction plastered over every surface as though they had run out of wallpaper.
“Have you seen Pulp Fiction, Phil?” my friends kept saying.
Being a fickle 19-year-old wanting to fit in, I said, “Yeah, it was great.”
But deep down, I knew I was lying. I found it boring. Disjointed. The dialogue was chafing. The plot non-existent. The acting bombastic. And it finished as though nothing had happened. Which it hadn’t.
It wasn’t the worst movie I’d seen that year — Stargate took that award. But when you consider the movies released in 1994: Forrest Gump, The Shawshank Redemption, Speed, True Lies, Interview with the Vampire, Dumb and Dumber, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pulp Fiction wasn’t the best.
“Come on, Phil! So you don’t like risky, experimental cinema; you like big-budget action movies and soapy rom-coms.”
Not really.
The year before, I saw Trois Couleurs: Bleu with Juliette Binoche, as well as Derek Jarman’s Blue — that’s challenging. One of my favourites is Brazil, Terry Gilliam’s dystopian classic. 2001: A Space Odyssey is a masterpiece. Doctor Strangelove is a delight simply to watch Peter Sellers. Inception is dream cinema at its finest. I could go on.
I’ve seen Pulp Fiction twice since my university days, and the feeling remains — it’s a bit boring. Sorry.
Breathless (À bout de souffle) (1960)
Until I wrote this, I had only ever seen Jean-Luc Godard’s Nouvelle Vague classic, Breathless, once before on a French exchange with a family in Arras in 1986. I didn’t understand a word of it and as I was 14, thought it was boring apart from the sex and the fact everyone smoked.
If you’ve never seen it, Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a wannabe criminal trying to look like Humphrey Bogart on the run in Paris after killing a cop in Marseille. There, he falls in love with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg), an American student selling newspapers on the Champs Élysées.
Michel pleads with her to run away to Italy with him, but she isn’t sure. They then spend the rest of the movie thinking about it, while the police move in.
I watched it again a few months ago and realised that it’s one of those movies film students love and everyone else politely pretends to like. Jean-Luc Godard’s trademark style of jump cuts, mumbled dialogue, and lost camera shots works well. For about 30 minutes. Then it loses its impact and feels like a love story between long cigarette breaks.
I can’t say I don’t like it. I do.
But that’s mainly because I’m more enthralled watching late 1950s Paris (the movie was shot entirely on location in 1959) than concentrating on the actual dialogue. Having been to Paris many times, it was nice to see it in another era, and not full of a million tourists wandering around with their phones in their hands.
Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)
I’m going to get crucified for this.
So let’s start by saying that growing up in the 1980s in the UK, I watched all the reruns on TV and later the films on VHS. I love Monty Python.
What’s the problem with Life of Brian, then?
It’s the least funny of all their work. I mean, it’s good and clever, but every time I watch it, I can’t help thinking it’s not The Holy Grail or The Meaning of Life, the other two Monty Python movies (And Now For Something Completely Different, isn’t a movie, more a greatest hits selection of sketches.)
For me, classic Python is the absurd, grotesque and unsettling. And while Life of Brian has these, it’s more a satire than the absurd comedy I love.
Python fans may think I’m mad, but the last time I watched it, I was bored. It dragged, even though it’s only 94 minutes long.
The gags seemed weak and predictable, and the acting was not as good as I remembered. Something wasn’t working. When I watched it as a teenager, I thought it was wonderful.
Maybe it hasn’t aged well. Perhaps it’s become worn and not particularly relevant in the multicultural, multi-technological world we now live in. Or perhaps Python just isn’t funny these days.
I guess in some quarters that’s blasphemy. Stone me!
The Irishman (2019)
I’m a Scorsese fan. Who isn’t? My stepmother isn’t, granted, but she doesn’t like anything that isn’t on BBC ONE between seven and nine in the evening.
Casino is my favourite partly because I can’t believe how many Marlboro cigarettes Robert De Niro smoked during the making of it. Did he have oxygen on standby?
You would think I would like The Irishman. It’s got De Niro as the lead, plus Joe Pesci and Al Pacino. The only film to feature all three. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. I wouldn’t call it boring. You can’t call a Scorsese film boring. But it wasn’t his best.
The film spans 50 years of Frank Sheeran’s life (De Niro), and as the actors were all in their late seventies when it was made, Scorsese used anti-ageing technology.
There was probably no way around it; using younger actors would have reduced the movie’s star quality. But for me, this ruined it and made the movie seem really odd. Almost spooky.
Furthermore, the 3.5-hour run time was absurdly long, and it didn’t have that Scorsese energy. Yes, it was a bit boring, and for a Scorsese film, you don’t expect that. In stark contrast to his Killers of The Flower Moon released in 2023, which had the same runtime but was superb.
I rest my case.
The Shining (1980)
When I was at college, just like Pulp Fiction, everyone had at least one, possibly two The Shining posters on their walls with the slogan “Here’s Johnny!”
Most had never read the book. “Oh, there’s a book,” they said. “What, one of those books written after the movie to cash in?”
Duh!
The Shining was based on Stephen King’s 1977 novel of the same name. King hated the movie and didn’t hold back on his criticism of Kubrick.
“Cold,” he said. “No sense of emotional investment. Just a man losing his mind in a big, empty hotel.”
He hated the fact that Sam Torrance, portrayed by Jack Nicholson, was unhinged from the start. “Where’s the drama in that?”
King thought Kubrick had missed the point and changed basic things that shifted the motive of the movie from forgiveness and redemption to one of total horror.
I agree. It’s OK the first time around, but on further viewing, it’s draining. And the ending is weak. Especially the photo scene, where Sam Torrance is seen in a photo in 1921, years before the events in the movie.
This made no sense, even though film buffs think it adds mystery to the movie. It doesn’t. Even King said, “It’s mystery for mystery’s sake”, and thought Kubrick added it just to be clever.
The movie is visually stunning and scary. But it loses its way about halfway through, and never recovers until Sam freezes in a maze like he’s some reincarnation of Henry the Eighth lost in his maze at Hampton Court.
Dunkirk (2017)
If ever there was a movie that promised so much and gave nothing back, it’s this one. I’m English, so I’ve heard people bang on about Dunkirk since I was born.
I’m not patriotic, and to be honest, I wonder how long we can go on dredging up the Second World War. Hopefully, not much longer.
It’s not that Dunkirk was bad. The visual aspect was stunning and real. But it felt like I was watching a lengthy documentary, the story of which I had been told about a hundred times before.
Despite all the great cinematography depicting an iconic war story, it wasn’t that interesting. And considering this was from the director of Inception, (Christopher Nolan), it felt like he had directed it in his sleep. And put everyone there in the process.
Lord of the Rings Trilogy (2001–2003)
I really like the three movies, but you can’t deny they go on a bit. Especially if you’ve watched the extended version that lasts for about a thousand years. By the time you’ve finished watching this, it feels like you’ve outlived Middle Earth and gone to the End of the Earth.
For my money, there’s too much empty dialogue and close-ups of Elijah Wood. The same goes for quite a lot of the other characters. There seems to be a lot of thinking and procrastinating. A lot of discussion and chatting. If you took all of this out, you could probably slice the entire runtime of the trilogy in half.
If I ever end up in prison and ask if I want to watch a movie (can you do that in prison?), I would ask for the super extended cut of The Lord of the Rings.
Either that or Sátántangó, a seven-and-a-half-hour, Hungarian epic. Seen it?
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
I live an hour away from the Normandy beaches in France. I’ve never been. I don’t have to. The first 30 minutes of Spielberg’s movie are regarded as one of the most realistic depictions of war ever made.
Gone were the classic images of soldiers being shot with no blood. Here, bodies and limbs are blown off, and you feel the true terrors of war as though you are there.
Which is perhaps why the rest of the movie feels languid. The intense adrenaline rush of the first half an hour is so frightful, it’s like eating a stodgy starter and then having no appetite for the rest of the meal.
I may be coming across as over critical — it’s a good movie. But it definitely drags between the opening scene and the final bridge scene at the end of the movie (which is stunning).
A middle section, in which they are searching for Private Ryan that amounts to an hour and a half. Almost an entire movie in its own right — Searching for Private Ryan.
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
I can’t remember this movie, but I’ve watched it twice. I know this because my wife told me we watched it in the cinema together. Then years later on DVD.
She said we were both disappointed. We were both Charlie Kaufman and Philip Seymour Hoffman fans and were looking forward to it. I remember Hoffman being excellent as normal, but the rest is a blur. Which is strange, as I can remember all the Police Academy movies I saw at school.
My wife said I don’t remember it because the first time, I was drunk. The second time, I was sober (sort of). But I still don’t remember it.
Luckily, she reminded me. “It was bloody boring”. She said it was like they had all the ingredients for a great movie in place — great scriptwriter and director, production designer, actors — but then weren’t sure how to proceed.
It was like when you’re a teenager and your parents have gone away and you have the house to yourself, but you don’t know what to do. Apart from getting drunk on your parents’ Crème de Menthe.
That, she told me, was what Synecdoche, New York felt like: getting drunk on Crème de Menthe.
Toy Story (1995)
Can you hate a kid’s movie? It’s probably one of the no-nos of reviewing cinema. Not that I’m a reviewer, I just talk about them. But it would be like criticising The Snowman, the animated classic based on Raymond Briggs’ illustrated novel of the same name.
That’s very good. I’ve seen it every year as it’s always on at Christmas in the UK. It’s nostalgic, joyous, poignant, and sad. But most importantly, there are no words.
Yep, for 26 minutes, there is no dialogue, no speaking. Just music with, of course, the famous, only ever choirboy-hit: Walking in the Air.
Cartoons when I was growing up were always short, a maximum of 30 minutes. When I got older, I started watching stuff with humans rather than pencil sketches. They were called big-boy movies.
I remember when Who Framed Roger Rabbit came out in 1988. A mix of live action and animation. It was crap. I was 14 at the time and found it childish.
I’ve never been a fan of animated movies, and that includes Toy Story. They don’t work for me. Maybe there’s something missing in my head. Too clean, too pristine, too distinct. The lines are too precise.
I like movies to be hazy and fuzzy, like they were made on a cine camera in 1950. I suppose a bit like Breathless. In fact, if you made an animated version of Toy Story in the style of Breathless, and condensed it to thirty minutes, it might work.
I’m probably being a bit picky. I have been writing this piece for what seems like days now. And I’m sure Toy Story is good.
The problem is, I saw it too many times babysitting my nephew. Now, when I see an image of Buzz Lightyear, I want to smash things. Which I guess isn’t in the spirit of a children’s movie.
I’ll stop now.
If you got through this, you might like its predecessor, Always Watchable — Movies That Never Fail, which you can read here.
This was originally published on Fanfare and nearly sent
into an apoplectic fit. But he’s OK now. (Which is good as he’s the best movie reviewer since Barry Norman left Film ‘98 in 1998)For more Everything, click here.
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Strikes me how rarely I want to re-watch anything from recent years. The thought of reloading Oppenheimer or Barbie is borderline nauseous even though they were must-see hits in 2023.
King's criticism of Kubrick is inane. I suggest rewatching The Shining as a comedy about writer's block. Hilarious when not scary.