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Not even for my girlfriend: Movies I just can’t watch

One night last week, Gladiator was showing on TV. I used to love that movie — in fact, I think I owned it at one point — but I realized something this time around. I didn’t want to see the ending, Connie Nielsen

notwithstanding.

(Speaking of whom, watching Gladiator did make me wonder what she’s been up to, aside from guesting on Law and Order: SVU a while back. Turns out, she appears in Battle in Seattle with Michelle Rodriguez and Charlize Theron. Yet another reason to try to see that movie.)

Then, over the weekend, my girlfriend rented a few movies. One of them I haven’t exactly avoided, but haven’t been dying to see: 300. I know, I know, Lena Headey. Period costume works for her, but somehow I just couldn’t get worked up about a movie that could realistically be called More Than 300 Really Horrible, Bloody Awful Ways to Die.

So what did this make me realize? (Besides that my girlfriend really, really loves sword-and-sandal movies? To the point where we wrestled over the remote?) It’s not the violence (although I admit the over-the-top spraying blood of BloodRayne

made me queasy. Possibly that was the acting). No, it’s the fact that sometimes if I know the ending to a movie up front, I don’t see the point in sitting through it.

Case in point: Titanic. I had absolutely no desire to see that movie, because everybody knows that darn iceberg will show up eventually. The rest is just sad. My mom dragged me out to see it, though, and I was glad in the end, because it was my first experience with Kate Winslet.

But the thing I realized this weekend is I’ve had it with sad endings. If I know they’re coming, I’m quitting when everybody’s happy. A couple of years back, when I saw Cold Mountain, I stopped the movie after the love scene. And I never watch Moulin Rouge all the way to the end. (There are others that don’t star Nicole Kidman, I’m sure, but those are the big two I know I refuse to finish.)

But everybody has something they refuse to watch. For my girlfriend, it’s freaky lighting or animated effects (a by-product of growing up in the ’70s, she says). We also started Sunshine, a release from last year starring Michelle Yeoh and Rose Byrne that begins as a relatively clichéd but watchable sci-fi thriller.

But toward the end, it was my girlfriend’s turn to switch off the movie, because it reminded her of Event Horizon. Her take: Both movies have a multiple-personality disorder that turns decent sci-fi into really bad horror, complete with seizure-inducing quick-moving red-flashing blood-spewing sexually-depraved flashbacks.

So, what won’t you watch — even if your girlfriend tries to make you?

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