MovieChat Forums > The Hours (2003) Discussion > The Fans of This Movie Need Help!

The Fans of This Movie Need Help!


I posted this on another board, but since I actually had to fight off the desire to not throw up as I wrote about this movie, I thought maybe I should repost it here to get a little more out the effort:

Everything about this movie is terrible:
-Could not go more than 30 seconds without some grandiloquent dialogue focused on the self obsession of each and every character.

-Hilariously bad attempt to be profound at showing depressed souls and instead over shoots by a mile by treating every single moment like it was the most unbearable thing for the characters. Joyless in every sense of the word.

-Characters with an extreme case of hatred of every single millisecond of the world that not even the extremely depressed could muster up the ability to do.

-A disgusting victimized portrayal of the truly self absorbed who couldn't go more than 1 second without thinking about themselves or about how someone else made *them* feel. Everybody else is just an afterthought or a meaningless caricatures put on this Earth for nothing more than their own pleasure or destruction.

-There is no point of the entire movie where you are supposed to feel a sense of hope for anything. It's depressing at the beginning, it's depressing in the middle, and it's very depressing at the end. It's like the movie was designed to be a reverse psychologist for people. Instead of trying to uplift, it really musters every single resource in literature and film and visual techniques, plot devices, dialogue, etc. to be precisely the most depressing movie ever made. I've never seen so much effort put into this in all the cinema and art I've ever had the fortune or misfortune to witness. I don't get how people can reward a movie that is bringing everything to bare to depress you. It doesn't seem like a noble thing to reward.

-A central part of its message revolves around making victims out of people living their lives and doing good, and heroine's out of people who stop. Even if they are presented with no choice it isn't something to be revered, but instead seen as something that is extremely unfortunate and for the sake of the ones around them given the dignity to the situation that it deserves.

-Then when it's had to rely upon all of this extreme over the top devices to sell it's unbelievable bull$hit it wallows in it's own sense of hopelessness and how for these people it will never get any better so you might as well just give up trying.

-But there is a sense of hope implied for the deluded and sick people of the world that one day in some future era the world will finally come to a point where you are responsible for no one, no one will be responsible for you, you will care for no one, and no one will care for you and people will finally be freed from this bondage to be for once happy, and this manufactured, hollow and false hope the movie has is by far the most depressing thing about it.

-If this is feminist art and truth than I feel sorry for anybody that believes this bull$hit and I can only hope that they receive help for their sickness since they clearly need it.

Worst Movie ever made and that includes Mars Attacks, Eight Crazy Nights, etc.

I've now thought about this movie enough to make me want to vomit so I'll sign off on the subject now.



P.S. Into the Wild(my #2 of all time) and Away We Go(my #8 of all time) destroyed the messages of this piece of $hit movie with such ease it's truly hilarious how much effort they had to put in to get people to believe it.

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I'd like to have a real discussion about your point of view regarding this movie, but I'm not sure you will be able to get over your personal dislike of it enough for that to happen.

It's just a movie. Movies that you don't like are not worth getting bent out of shape about. There's nothing and no one that says you have to like this movie. Like anything, it's subjective and the things that you thought about when you watched it and afterwards may not have even occurred to some people. Some people will have seen entirely different things to you when watching this movie, and those things will have appealed to some of those people very much.

I've seen some really bad films in my time, but nothing that has offended me even a tenth as much as you seem to be offended by this movie. I tend to be of the opinion that if your ire can be aroused so hysterically by watching a film (any film, doesn't matter if it's this one or some other), perhaps you should vet your film selection process more thoroughly to try to ensure that this doesn't happen.

The "messages" that you took from this film and the examples of them that you give are to a large degree informed by your own pre-existing outlook. Most of the people who like this film do not like it for the reasons you hate it, they like it for reasons that may not have occurred to you at all. That shouldn't matter to you, you have a right to an opinion and you have formed it. Does that give you the right to denigrate the opinions of others though? Does it give you the right to suggest that they "need help"? Or are you, in the way that you accuse the characters in this film, focussing on an aspect of your own self-obsession (in this case, your profoundly negative appraisal of this movie) and allowing that to inform your judgement calls about a product that is subjective , and even about people that you have never met and will never meet, who will have had experiences and outlooks that you may not have considered?

I'm not trying to change your mind about the movie at all. Your opinion is not important or even relevant to whether or not I enjoy this or any other film. Are other people's opinions so important to you?





Reality is the new fiction they say, truth is truer these days, truth is man-made

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Fair response!

Context: On other boards the subject of hated movies have come up in conversation and I bring up this one and really only this one. I kept on getting asked why and if I just said I found it depressing as hell, I'm sure you would predict they resorted to the typical 'you just didn't get it' and I would assure them that I did(and you usually get the standard back and forth from another person who has his go to 'you didn't get it line'). Well finally I got asked enough times and didn't want to go through the back and forth(and wanted to make clear that I did understand the movie and probably if anything better than they did) so I just took the time to write why the movie sucked.

Took some time and I didn't enjoy thinking about it and after I was done I was like "Well I might as well post this on it's main board" which comes with the benefit of any time anybody asks me again why I hate the movie I can easily hop on this ghost town of a board quickly find it and copy and paste it without ever having to think about it again.




Yay or nay? One of the more convincing negative posts you've ever seen of a movie you're fond of. ;)

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I like this movie. It's very touching. I fell in love with it the very first time I saw it.

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[deleted]

OP, it is your luck that we cannot give your advice back to you because stupidity cannot be helped.

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I cannot even comment on the OP's post. I think it would probably be deleted by the IMDB administrators.

"What, you don't like rice? Tell me Michael, how could a billion Chinese people be wrong?"

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You have a point that the people who love this movie may need help! Its my theory that the fans of this movie feel a connection to the movie based on an experience of either knowing someone with depression, neurosis, Agoraphobia or experiencing it themselves.

So in fact maybe they DO need help and find it in other avenues ;)

I just wonder about where you got that idea. "not even the extremely depressed could muster up the ability to do". I sincerely hope that's not just a blanket statement.

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Again, this is not a movie about depression. I wonder how much help somebody needs to come to these boards and judge the fans of this film and make conclusions about their mental states. From what I hear depression is so common that I believe those who never experienced it are either very shallow or not 'normal' / 'healthy' themselves. In other words, how about trying to understand this film before passing such judgements that prove that you are an idiot? Depression etc. can be helped, with medication and with therapy. Yet there is no cure for stupidity. Which is too bad for you.

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I think most of your issues with this film are issues you would also have with the book the movie is about. I think the film was an interesting way to update and expand on the ideas of the book. I cannot think of any other film that I have seen which is based on book, but not an adaptation of it. For that alone, I think it is a pretty cool movie, albeit a bit depressing, but I am not a fan of Woolf's stream of consciousness and exceedingly dark work. However, I thought Mars Attacks was a pretty fun take on the old pulp sci-fi genre. So, I feel like we watch films for different reasons. I don't think it's at all fair to say a person "needs help" because they got something from a film that you didn't.

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I cannot think of any other film that I have seen which is based on book, but not an adaptation of it.


This movie is an adaptation of a book, just not Mrs Dalloway.






Reality is the new fiction they say, truth is truer these days, truth is man-made

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How deep does this go? It's like riddle wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in an onion, served in a layer cake.
In all seriousness, I did not know that. I will have to check out the book. Thanks.

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The book is amazing, in my opinion much better than the film (although I do like the film a lot).







Reality is the new fiction they say, truth is truer these days, truth is man-made

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It's funny, I agree with almost everything the OP says, and still really love this movie. The characters in this movie are incredibly selfish. That's not the point, or a good reason to hate it.

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While I don`t agree with the OP`s sentiments (you know how it is - life`s a bitch and then you die, black hell... etc), I do firmly believe everything about this movie would have been this little tad better if it weren`t for this ridiculously sweeping, sprawling, faux-epic score by Philip Glass intruding way too often. Never liked that fake ivory tower aesthet and still he keeps finding ways to suck even worse than before.



"facts are stupid things" - Ronald Reagan

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