Please to enjoy an anti-Valentine’s Day question:
Who are the worst movie couples ever?
Use whatever qualification you feel is appropriate. Does their relationship represent something really emotionally unhealthy? Do they lack even rudimentary screen chemistry? Are they 50 years apart in age? Do they make your skin crawl even more when they’re together than when they’re apart? Can you simply not see them as lovers at all?
Gosh, there’s so many! But I’m gonna go with Ralph Fiennes and Jennifer Lopez in the unendurable Maid in Manhattan. They are both so desperately miscast individually that watching him trying to embody a “playboy” and her trying to embody a down-on-her-luck working-class gal is excruciating enough… but when they’re together in scenes that are intended to be romantic, they grate like sandpaper against each other. It’s hard to imagine a casting director achieving a more total deficiency of onscreen chemistry if that was actually the intent.
Your turn…
(If you have a suggestion for a QOTD, feel free to email me. Responses to this QOTD sent by email will be ignored; please post your responses here.)
The silliest that comes immediately to mind is in Under Siege…
It’s not that I can’t visualise morbidly obese being in a relationship, or that I might have something against bondage, but for a longer time I used to think that Leia and Jabba were the most horribly mismatched, weirdly behaving, and generally unbelievable a couple.
But then came the prequels and I had to send that pair to the second place.
Um, Leia was Jabba’s captive…not actually a couple. He forced her to wear a skimpy outfit and placed a collar and leash around her neck. Bondage — as consenting adults participate in it, doesn’t come into play here. Leia did not consent to Jabba’s treatment of her.
Yeah, and Darth Annie was abusive to Big Matilda too. What’s your point?
Seriously, though, you might have missed the point.
Debra Messing and Dermot Mulroney from The Wedding Date. I was re-reading your review and almost choked. BTW: Did you come up with the term ‘gay face’? Cause that ranks right up there with “swish swish sizzle in the magic negro”.
I’m sure there are much, much worse…but because I actually sat through this movie in its entirety the worst couple in my estimation are Barbara Streisand and Yves Montand in On A Clear Day You Can See Forever. Both did their very best in the movie (I started watching it to feed my Yves Montand crush at the time but kept watching it cause Streisand was so much fun in it) but they just didn’t work together and it was a Vincent Minelli production, so it was as over the top as they could make it.
My wife and I just watched The Holiday last night, and I found that very little about the story of Cameron Diaz and Jude Law’s romance was believable at all. That part of the story was fairly contrived in the first place, but Cameron Diaz – both the actress and the horribly irritating character she played – brought nothing real or remotely convincing to that pairing. They might just as well have been aimlessly bonking their heads together as kissing, they had so little chemistry. By contrast, Kate Winslet pulls off completely honest, believable connections with both nonagenarian Eli Wallach and Jack Black in the same movie.
(Going back and reading MaryAnn’s review of the film, I see we came away with almost exactly the same evaluation.)
Is it the worst pairing ever? Probably not. But it’s the one freshest in my mind.
I’m pretty sure that it’s not the worst screen couple ever, but the first one that sprang to mind was Two Weeks’ Notice with Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock. Besides the fact that both leads were doing their usual schtick, there was the plot device that the tension stemmed from the fact that she’s an idealist activist lawyer and he’s a rich douche playboy. Why the two characters would be attracted to each other is beyond me: it’s not that I’m unwilling to concede that such a pairing could ever occur, but that the script not only gives the characters good reasons to despise one another (it would be especially understandable for Sandra Bullock’s character to develop deep seated resentment against Hugh Grant’s character) and, well no reason at all why they should like each other even on a friendly basis.
Mickey and Mallory Knox from Natural Born Killers.
In some ways they are the perfect movie couple with their mutual narcissism to the exclusion of every other living person on Earth. That actually fits most American romantic tropes.
However, one simply has to knock off points because they’re mass murdering psychopaths, rather than the usual romance-obsessed psychopaths that Hollywood likes to exalt.
OK, I am throwing this out there because it hasn’t been said already, but does anyone remember this little known movie where a rich guy hires an attractive prostitute from the streets of Los Angeles to be his escort for a week and then they fall in love. I can’t remember the name… um… I think it starred someone named Ricky Cog and Julie Ericsister or something like that… I am not sure really since nobody saw that movie since it was so obscure.
Yes! This was my first thought.
Although, since I’m a romantic shmuck, as long as the couple has some mutual audience going on, I’m rooting for them even if they together or individually hit some of my personal squicks.
Maybe not the worst – I really haven’t seen enough bad rom-coms to comment on the absolute worst – but the one that really torpedoes the whole film for me is Tom Hanks and Antonio Banderas in Philadelphia. You really feel for Banderas, who must have grown up in Franco’s Spain seeing America as a beacon of liberty, and yet here he is in Hollywood being asked to give a performance as a gay man that is approximately eight hundred times tamer and blander than anything he was asked to do back home.
I would nominate almost every couple in a Shakespeare play–especially Romeo and Juliet, who are ready to die for each other after a few brief conversations. Of course, that doesn’t stop me from watching the plays again and again.
I would nominate it as a lousy couple because Tom Hanks’s character was screwing around on him at adult movie theaters and through his own recklessness could have infected Banderas’s character with HIV. That’s negligence bordering on abuse. But, Banderas’s character takes it all in stride. *vomit*
Somewhere in London, the corner of MaryAnn’s right eye is twitching right now.
The problem with that movie is the woefully mis-cast Yves Montand. I’ve seen him be awesome in other movies, just not that one.
I hate that in a musical, women must always have wonderful singing voices, even to the point that it’s okay to hire a “real” singer to lip-sync to, but men can get away with speak-singing their songs. Why couldn’t Minelli find a great guy lead who worked with Streisand and could bloody SING? Such a waste of a fun musical.
Cracked posted a relevant After Hours video today about Romantic Comedies:
http://www.cracked.com/video_18533_why-romantic-comedies-are-secretly-bad-you.html
Woody Allen and Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan.
Oh my gosh yes – that was a totally cringe inducing pairing. Let the beautiful young thing who is madly in love with you down easy Woody! Yeah right!
Pretty Woman, aka rich man buys a prostitute
Oh, and pretty much any version of “My Fair Lady” which has Eliza Doolittle falling for Henry Higgins. The man was a douchecanoe of the lowest order. You know it. She knows it and George Bernard Shaw knew it.
Any Sabrina movie: pretty, talented, extremely young girl fancies a douche-nozzle of a playboy, then falls for his older and more responsible brother. Can you say “father figure”? Ick, no.
What a waste of some terrific actors.
George Peppard and Audrey Hepburn in BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S, only because they were a heterocentrist sellout of the book’s gay hustler and female gold digger and, by extension, Truman Capote and Marilyn Monroe. That story needs to be retold the “right” way, as does PRETTY IN PINK… which really ought to feature an interracial romance, being set in socially and racially segregated Evanston, IL.
Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis in “Hellcats of the Navy.”
I think you’re only half-right on this one, MaryAnn. I could believe Lopez as a maid, although you’re indisputably right about the lack of any believable spark between her and Fiennes, and Fiennes seems completely wrong in his part.. For my money, the worst screen couple was when Fiennes and Uma Thurman were in “The Avengers.” There was no spark there, either, and neither played a convincing human being.
Edward and Bella. I’m surprised no one’s put that one up. Absolutely fucking toxic relationship.
Everyone in Valentine’s Day. If I could dump that movie into a black hole and annihilate its existence, I would.
Channing Tatum + any leading lady
The man may be ripped, but he can’t generate any kind of sexual chemistry with actresses who are clearly out of his league acting-wise.