Anaesthesia

Image by Francis Dodd

TVC nominates the following pretentious and overblown Celluloid soporifics as the most narcoleptic films of all time:

Absolutely Anything (2015) You’d have to go a long way to find a comedy without a single laugh but here we are!

A Bridge Too Far (1977) The Arnhem campaign in Holland is re-staged as the 80 Years’ War.  The ridiculous length serves to allow the countless star cameos, all of which add up to a big fat zero.

Brooklyn (2015) Jesus, Mary and Joseph!  What Eejit finagled this?  Two hours of ennui, to be sure, to be sure!!

Dances With Wolves (1990) Quick, Tom!!  Shoot that Indian!  (we have to admit the cinematography, by Dean Semmler ASC, is superb).

The English Patient (1996) The dreariest, most ridiculous, box-ticking war/bore/romance pseudo-slop we have ever seen.

It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) It looks like they dragged a big flashy cast of comics out of Vegas during a casino strike.  In over two and a half-hours, you’d struggle to find 2 minutes of laughs in it.  This ‘comedy’ is the bastard father and mother of a later overblown-and-similarly-unwanted ‘comedy’, 1941. L suggests The Great Race is a part of this dysfunctional family…P is not sure about that, as he still gets a laugh when Peter Falk suggests offering the Russians some beads.

Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1973) TVC accepts that art must dare and hence will fail oftimes.  But the price of that freedom is exposure to public opinion.  And when you make a two hour film about talking seagulls, talking rot, we will walk out and take our hot chips with us.

Knight of Cups (2015) It’s in the cards.  Ace of spades.

Lantana (2001) Sydney is not Beijing.  Yet its size is such that we can’t buy the immense coincidences of disparate characters who keep bumping into one another in this chichi soapie.  Barbara Hershey is not a bad actress, and has appeared in some decent films (The Stunt Man, Hannah and Her Sisters) but she somehow always manages to annoy.

Melancholia (2011) The one that had us hankering for the end of the world.  The use of music from Tristan und Isolde is particularly risible. (nb. L is not with P on this one – she’s a fan.]

Titanic (1997) Like sitting on an ice floe for three and something hours.

The Tree of Life (2011) Even the Lord only took 6 days to build the world…

 LOCAL ANAESTHETIC

We add a supplementary list, on a provisional and predictive basis, for films we have not watched to the end, for fear of liquefaction of our internal organs…

The Hours (2002) – Read Mrs Dalloway instead.

The Last Station (2009) Like reading one of Count Tolstoy’s bitter and twisted essays, but translated into Bantu.

Foyle’s War (TV) With M*A*S*H, the only examples of war series that seem longer than the war in question.

Open All Hours (TV) Surely the nastiest, bleakest, un-funniest comedy ever.  Sorry, no, that’s Still Open All Hours – at least the original had Ronnie Barker.

[Note: this little list is a tribute to 3 hilariously wise books produced by the brothers Medved: The Fifty Worst Movies of all Time (and how they got that way) (1978) by Harry Medved with Randy Dreyfuss, and The Golden Turkey Awards (1980) and Son of Golden Turkey Awards (1986) by Harry and Michael Medved.  However, we usually adopt the position of a weary critic who submitted a worst list to the first-mentioned title, Charles Champlin of the LA Times, who said “I don’t see the worst films except by accident. Life is too short, and I can take suffering or leave it alone.”]