Blake Schwendiman's Blog and Blook

This week I spent most of my free time getting my house ready to be listed. We're going to be moving locally soon and so I've spent too much time painting and cleaning and no time watching movies. I am far overdue to finally list my least favorite movies of all time.

Now, there are many reasons a movie can be hated. Obviously a bad movie is just a bad movie, but an ordinary bad movie probably won't end up on this list. For example, Solaris is a really bad movie. As far as I'm concerned, there was nothing about the movie that made it worth watching. However, it doesn't make my list of worst movies because it was just a generically bad movie. To make the list, it had to be remarkably bad or have completely missed the mark for my expectations. I'll provide as much detail as possible as to why these movies are on the worst of the worst list:

• Unbreakable
  After seeing The Sixth Sense (which I enjoyed very much), I mistakenly thought that M. Night Shyamalan was going to continue to roll out great movies. Wow. Was I wrong about that.

  Unbreakable was a horrible disappointment. This movie never did anything. There was so much opportunity and so little delivery. Obviously I'm a big action movie fan, but I can enjoy a drama. Unbreakable just teased me for a while letting me think that I was watching a superhero movie but left me with the realization that I had wasted two hours trying to care about one man's pathetic loser life. And I never cared. Not for one minute.

  I hated it because there were so many places this movie could have gone that would have made it likable, but it chose to go none of those places.
  



• Star Wars III: Revenge of the Sith
  
  A wrote a complete discussion of why this movie is in my hate list here.
  


• A River Runs Through It
  
  This was the longest movie of my life. Every fly-fishing filled minute of it was a painful wasted hour of my life. Normally I don't feel too bad about wasting a couple of hours on a bad movie, but this was the kind of ordeal where I had to continually take myself to a happy place in my mind just so my autonomic nervous system wouldn't shut down completely.

  This was another movie where nothing happened. A lot of stuff almost happened, but nothing actually happened to any of the characters. If Brad Pitt's character had actually died in one of the many events that could have killed him, then something would have happened. But, alas, there it is ... a movie about nothing.
  



• Friday Night Lights
  
  I covered this movie already here.

  I watched this film because of movies like Miracle and Remember the Titans. I was expecting some kind of feel-good underdog turned champion sports film. Nope. Just crap.
  



• Forrest Gump
  
  Forrest Gump makes this list for two reasons: 1) I just didn't like this movie and 2) My expectations were overly high. Everybody I know loves this movie. I heard about it from everyone. "Have you seen Forrest Gump yet?" "You need to see Forrest Gump."

  So I went to see it and I hated it. Unfortunately I probably disliked it more because I was disappointed than that I actually thought it was bad. It was not fun to watch. I didn't like it. But most of all I was expecting to love it and it didn't even come close to that for me.

  For me, that box of chocolates contained only nasty lemon-flavored cream covered in white chocolate. Run away Forrest. Please.